Stretching out chapters

[georgelee5786]

I've noticed that many authors, professional and amateur, can stretch out their chapters to several thousand words. I, however, have been unable to reach the same feats. The longest chapter I've written was 3.3k words, which is not long enough if I were to try to publish a book irl. How can I make my chapters longer?

 

[Representing_Tromba]

Don't know. I had 800 to 1200-word chapters for a good while. Then I moved up to 2k-3k word chapters with another story. I guess you should write more. Stretching chapters isn't good as it can throw off the pacing.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

If you want to publish a book IRL, you should change the way you write.

 

[georgelee5786]

If you want to publish a book IRL, you should change the way you write.

Ow. But true.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

Ow. But true.

I didn't mean it that way. I meant that you have a strictly regulated number of words. You need to plan the whole book and think hard about what and where you should write. 90000 words aren't that much.

 

[Cipiteca396]

Write the story before planning out the chapter length. Once it's done, you can edit it to fit a desired length- usually by combining 'smaller' chapters together to create 'arcs'.

For example, the first five or six chapters of a story I've been working on (but will never publish) are all about diplomacy with different fantasy races. It would be simple to combine them together to get a 10k word chapter.

 

[RepresentingCaution]

If you want to publish a book IRL, you should change the way you write.

Don't bother. We don't care about chapter length. We care about the quality of the writing, and if you turn it purple by adding too many words, that's no good.

 

[Cipiteca396]

Don't bother. We don't care about chapter length. We care about the quality of the writing, and if you turn it purple by adding too many words, that's no good.

I think the intention was the opposite. A webnovel has room for floundering around, but a book needs to be concise to meet the word limit that can be physically printed.

 

[MollyMaclachlan]

The longest chapter I've written was 3.3k words, which is not long enough if I were to try to publish a book irl.

Au contraire. For a single chapter that's a perfectly fine length. Chapters can be several thousands of words, or they can be just a couple hundred. Chapter breaks happen when they need to, and sometimes they need to quickly. Some books have lots of short chapters, some books have fewer long chapters (and many big books have lots of long chapters).

One of my favourite books, The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud, has a chapter that's about a page and a half, and probably less than 400 words, and it works really well.

Many times in the past I've tried to draw things out longer than what naturally came because I thought my writing had to be longer, and I've almost always found that it produced worse writing.

 

[J_Chemist]

Words should have meaning and should promote the progression of your story. I have 20k chapters. I have 3k chapters. Different things happen in the two chapters, eliciting different lengths.

Write what is necessary to fulfill the objective of the chapter.

 

[P00H]

Although I haven't published a novel, I have read quite a few books in my time. Chapters there can be very long and very short. Books can be long or short, published or self-published. What matters is the story and the characters, pacing, style, etc. Not word count. I read your first chapter and it's not bad. It's a good start, what you can do is read all kinds of authors with different writing styles, I read Tolkien, Hemingway, Lovecraft, Dickens, + a few more. That will make your brain see things differently and you start thinking about sentences and word order differently and better. All in all, your writing wasn't bad. It was short, yes, but not bad. I'd say keep on going, as coming from personal experiences, start it out as a hobby so you don't have the pressure of getting paid on your, because that will sap much enthusiasm. If you got more questions, go ahead.