I don't get it

[simplyn2deep]

can someone tell me why certain authors seems to have aversions to posting 2,000-3,000 word chapters? I wouldn't mind a 5,000 or 6,000 word chapter, but anything more than that is kind of pushing it.

or if a story is...idk...139k words and only has 2 chapters on AO3. There's a slim to no chance I'm going to read that.

my brain can't process that much at one sitting or there's a very high probability I'll lose interest and not bother to come back to it.




In other news, I got my amazon order. I didn't even know it shipped but it arrived this morning. I've now got season 2 of Doctor Who and the complete Nero Wolfe series. still trying to decide on what to watch first. probably Nero Wolfe.

Comments

[kristen999.livejournal.com]

My two cents.

Are you talking completed stories? If I have a 25k word story I want as few chapters as possible, LJ allows up to 10k words a post if you use hmtl and that usually equates to three chapters. I don't want my f-list subjected to a ton of chapters all of a sudden when I post something.

I'm quite the opposite of you :D. If I see a 30k word fic and it's ten chapters I'm absolutely boggled by that. I think a single chapter should be min 2k if not 3k (I prefer 5k myself) because at 2k you're just starting to sink your teeth into what is going on.

We all have our quirks :D

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

yes. completed. 139,775 words completed. in 2 parts. I can't wrap my mind around that.

[kristen999.livejournal.com]

Okay, I misread that, I thought you meant short chapters on LJ.

Two chapters on Ao3 that is over 100k is a bit long and hard to bookmark your place. I'd do five or six chapters for ease.

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

Yes it is.

[tailoredshirt.livejournal.com]

I have the complete opposite reaction. I'd rather read something that is posted all at once (or broken into a couple of very long chapters) than something with a million short chapters. If something is posted all at once, then I can treat it like a published book: read it all in one sitting, or read it in smaller chunks at my leisure. I don't really see the point in posting a bunch of short chapters unless the author is looking for more feedback. Often the chapters are so short that there's not enough story there to make it worth my while to sit there and get invested in the story all over again. Those are usually the kind of stories I get frustrated with and never finish.

I guess it depends on the kind of story you're telling, though, because some fics work better when they're divided into chunks and some don't. So I don't think it's always about having a set number of words as a goal, but feeling where the scene/chapter should end naturally, which is going to be different for every story. I'd still rather have all of those chapters posted at once or in a couple of installments, as they make sense for the story. (Unless it's just scenes or ficlets set in the same universe, that don't have to be read all together as one story.)

[kristen999.livejournal.com]

*Points up*

What she said but more articulated that my response :-P

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

in the example I gave, the completed fic is 139,775 word completed. It's posted on AO3 in 2 parts. "chapter 1" has 21 chapters that the writer identified. That's a lot to read with no way of bookmarking where you left off at if you're not able to finish in 1 sitting.

[sgflutegirl.livejournal.com]

That aggravates the hell out of me. I've actually had discussions with a few friends about this same thing. I like long fics, but posting them as 1 chapter is a little ridiculous.

I also don't mind if the chapters are around 10k each, but anything over that I feel should be split.

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

yes. even more annoying, if in the uber long "chapter" there are sub parts labeled chapters. why not break them up that way?

[alba17.livejournal.com]

Yay for Doctor Who! I love S2. Ten!

I could never read something that long in one sitting. It would probably take me most of a week since I don't usually have big chunks of time to read. I always download long fics though, even ones as short as 8k. So it's no problem for something to be long for me, I just read it on my Kindle. I'm with the others, I prefer it posted all at once. If something's posted in chapters, I tend to slack off and not finish it until the whole thing's posted.

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

by posting chapters, I simply mean breaking the fic into more manageable reading parts. the fic I put in my example is on AO3 and is 139,775 words completed. In "chapter 1" there was 21 chapters as marked by the author. there's no way to "bookmark" where you left off at and as a reader, that's a turn off for me.

[alba17.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you basically have to leave it open in a tab until you finish reading. That is one long fic. I'm not sure I've read any that long. Maybe one, in another fandom.

[t-verano.livejournal.com]

Huh. This is interesting.

I have to say I've always preferred a "no-chapters, just one long story" approach both as a reader and as a writer. I'm glad to get this other viewpoint from you and sgflutegirl.

As a reader, AO3 seems like the best of both worlds, since you can display a story chapter by chapter or do the "view entire work" thing (which I always do). I occasionally read something on fanfiction.net, but it drives me nuts to have to read chapter-chapter-chapter... It's not that I don't want the divisions between chapters; I do want those marked some way (with some kind of line or something between the chapters/sections, or the word "chapter" or whatever). My main thing is that I might want to look back in a fic at something I read previously (somewhere near the beginning, for example), or if I like a fic a lot I might want to save it to my hard drive -- it's a lot easier to do both those things when I've got the whole fic in front of me in one "place" instead of in a bunch of much smaller separate "places".

As a writer, I rarely write stuff that I think of as being divided into traditional "chapters". Most of my fic, though, unless it's really really short, does have at least several sections separated by lines. None of those sections are more important than the others, though, and some might be really, really short -- even just a few paragraphs. Dividing a fic up by making each section a separate chapter might therefore be strange. But lumping sections arbitrarily together into a "chapter" to end up with chunks of 5000 words or so might also be strange.

Hmmm. I don't know where I'll end up, if I'll end up changing the way I post longer fic or not, but this is definitely something to think about that's never even occurred to me before.

(edited because I used the word "paragraph" once when I meant "chapter". Geez... :-))

[simplyn2deep.livejournal.com]

On LJ I don't too much mind the long chapters. there's the built in character limit so longer fics have to be broken up in some sort of way.

My issue is mainly with longer fics that are posted on AO3. The example I gave of the fic that is 139,775 words broken into 2 parts. within "chapter 1" there 21 chapters, as specified by the writer. That's a lot to read with no way of marking where you left off.

[lou-c.livejournal.com]

I like it all together :) I just do something else and leave the tab where it is and come back later. I also read in safari rather than the lj app because the lj app isn't so great...
From a writing perspective, I only write short things so rarely do chapters.

[lostandalone22.livejournal.com]

I usually just save those fics. They're all pretty good.