How long are your chapters?

[mrpotty]

I'm just curious:
How many pages are the single chapters for your stories long?
Mine are between 3 and 7 pages, mostly 5 pages. I remember that I once wrote a 10 pages long chapter, but this doesn't happen very often.
And when I translate them from Nacospeak into english, they are mostly around a half page shorter. Don't ask me why (I think English is a much shorter language than Nacospeak )

[taechunsa]

mrpotty said:

How many pages are the single chapters for your stories long?
Mine are between 3 and 7 pages, mostly 5 pages. I remember that I once wrote a 10 pages long chapter, but this doesn't happen very often.

I have been shooting for about 30,000 to 35,000 characters. However long that ends up being in pages tends to vary.

mrpotty said:

And when I translate them from Nacospeak into english, they are mostly around a half page shorter. Don't ask me why (I think English is a much shorter language than Nacospeak )

In my life I have met and worked with a lot of international people. My advice to them about understanding American speech is to think ‘time is money’. A lot of American speech is about saving time. It is one of the reasons that we use so many colloquialisms in our speech. A few words let us convey a lot of meaning by referencing cultural events.

[FLiP]

I don't aim for a page count, I aim to get the point across that I set out to do for that chapter, it might end up being 3 pages, or it might end up being 12.

[drakkenfan]

Mine are about 2 pages each. Which is pretty common on fanfiction.net .

[mrpotty]

flip said:

I don't aim for a page count, I aim to get the point across that I set out to do for that chapter, it might end up being 3 pages, or it might end up being 12.

Same here, but for any reason 99% of my chapters are between 3 and 7 pages long

[Scoutcraft Piratess]

Generally, at least five, though at times I will be as low as two pages and other times I will write forever. I like to have certain things happen in my chapters, and if I have only a few pages after such-and-such goal has been obtained, sometimes I will keep going on to next goal. Unless I'm busy, and then I will stop.

[apoptosis]

For Road Not Taken, my chapters are about 20 or so pages in Word. I had on that was 30-something, but thought was a taaaad long. But, whatever gets the job done works.

[Scoutcraft Piratess]

I've never cared for super-long chapters. Frankly, I don't have the attention span to force events to pan out that long, nor do I have the attention span to read them.

[Ezbok58a]

I usually try to shoot for 10 pages in word, usually coming right on or really close to that.

Character wise its about 2500 words (14500 Characters w spaces)

Enough to get my points across, without being uber long.

[Eddie Butler III]

Mines have been between 2,000 and 7,000 words per chapter. (Even though I havnt quite updated in awhile my story, but i have it partially written)

But acutally when I first started my KP/ST story, I had about 25,000 for 2 chapters, (that wasnt even a 24 hour period of time that these events occured in the story that it was that long.)(I had scrapped it because how I had charaters were a slightly bit OOC I feel at the time, but I still have that part around)

I'm trying to keep things that happen to occur in the story where each chapter basically follows a particular point of view of certain events. Unless a major event is to occur/occured.

[surforst]

2500 - 4500 words per chapter. In terms of pages 6-9. No where near what I see some people write mind you.

[The Marvelous Me]

In my first story my chapters were about eight pages long I believe. I really have no set limit but I try to keep all chapters the same length throughout a story.

[thelastsonof84]

Honestly, as this may be quite sad in its own right, I've never actually bothered to see how long my chapters are. Generally, I just call a stop to a chapter if I hit spot that would make for a good cliffhanger. Granted, that has sadly left some chapters of mine that could do with being combined into one as far as length goes.

[captainkodak1]

Depending on the story I may write about 6 to 10 pages. An average Bloom chapter is 14 pages. It also depends on how much dialogue is in the story. Since I single space my dialogue from my narrative it tends to take up space. I also write till I have told the story I wanted to tell for that part of the story. If I do it in the short time fine if not I keep going. If a point comes that leads to a good cliffhanger I will end it there. It really depends on what I wanted to say in the story and chapter.

[cloudmonet]

I think I'm writing something somewhere in between a series of stories and chapters from a longer work. My model was the show itself, where all the episodes are the same length, and so I made my stories what felt like the same length, which in my prose style is about 5500 words, or 31,000 characters, plus or minus a couple hundred words. I see making the episodes the correct length as part of the art form, like 14 lines for a sonnet.

[Sorsha]

Sounds like I'm the only one prone to do and be okay with short chapters. Come on, in the real publishing world, you rarely see 20-30 typed pages make into a single chapter in a book--that's just not how people read.

[RavenStar]

Because I'm so used to writing scripts instead of fics, most of my chapters are around 4-7 pages, which is roughly the equivalent of 7 pages, or one Act, in a script. However, when there's a hell of a lot of stuff to be dispensed within a chapter, or it contains a really big action scene, I've had chapters go much longer. So far, the longest chapter I've had in a fic was Chapter 9 of Replacement, which ran for somewhere around 20-22 pages.

[Deleted]

Since I don't type my stories in a program that uses pages, a rough estimate of the amount of words per chapter I have is about 3500-5000. I assume that's about average, but is a huge step up from one of my old-old stories where I would struggle to write over 1000 words.

[apoptosis]

sorshab said:

Come on, in the real publishing world, you rarely see 20-30 typed pages make into a single chapter in a book--that's just not how people read.

Wow. What books are you reading?

(clarification: not meant to be sarcastic at all; most of the books I read seem to just have bloody long chapters)

[Sorsha]

apoptosis said:

sorshab said:

Come on, in the real publishing world, you rarely see 20-30 typed pages make into a single chapter in a book--that's just not how people read.

Wow. What books are you reading?

(clarification: not meant to be sarcastic at all; most of the books I read seem to just have bloody long chapters)

They may seem bloody long, I will admit... but are you aware of how an 8 x 11.5 typed page translates to novel-sized pages? A big thick manuscript doesn't necessarily been a big thick book.