@Darkwood,
??? Ohhh, I would wish to exchange tips with you then! I would gladly stop writing such intense long-ass word counts! I always had this problem, and before, in my previous writing workshop when I came over with my chapter lengths of 30k words, people were like... "Dude. NO." I was so proud when I finally learned to write 5k words chapters, and then later when they became 4-5k words chapters -)). Now I am slowly adapting to an even shorter length...
In case you need pointers for long chapter lengths, what always made it so hard for me to write shorter was adherence to themes. I am a sucker for thematic storytelling and when a chapter corresponds to a full exploration of a given theme rather than plot or character. That way, I kind of stop only when I feel I have nothing else to add to a discussion that the chapter "promises".
For example, one such 30k chapter from a novel of several years ago was about a revolution in a very tight, gradually constricting city (its walls were literally squeezing narrower and narrower around my characters as they tried to escape to the outside while the city was burning and fights and police violence were erupting everywhere). So I just wrote several fight scenes and several horror-scenes and the plans these characters made on how to escape it all -- and I never stopped writing that "chapter" until the entirety of this whole episode was over.
Later I realized that I can call it an "arc" instead and artificially divide every fight scene into its own small chapter. But it took me a lot of time to learn to separate those. I had no idea about what arcs even were before I started reading manga. So I feel like many people who write longer chapters don't know well what constitutes a good cutting point to a scene or an episode. And we don't want the chapter to feel like a filler, so we write and write and write until it feels
truly complete. But by that point, it's a word monster -- not a chapter +_+.
Just to share how frustrating this can be for us, long-chapter-writing people -). Even my posts are long-winded. See? It's a diseeease.
forum.scribblehub.com
Yet at the same time -- knowing some obvious things beforehand and actually experiencing them are quite a different thing. I never expected myself to not be able to put two and two together like this, but... here we go ^^. Hence the existence of this thread.
