Leaderboard

On the practical side, I’d suggest against super long chapters too. I’ve tried that on my potter fanfic years ago, reorganized/rewrote thinking it was a “good thing” with my highest being like 107k… nope! Not only did I lose some details in that consolidation, I also lost focus to the chapter too. Small details/scenes were now one/two sentences in basically a wall of text. (Which it became as FFN.net somehow seemingly lost all my carriage returns, so it was one big “blob”; and a fast re-insert of them is how I uncovered FFN’s new 65k max per chapter limit.) I’m still pulling that 107k old chapter apart right now with my “rewrite” … though I’ve now got at least 121 in its place, which is probably close to 1M words itself as I now hover around the 6-7k words per chapter average, and if the chapter nears the 10kword mark, I seek to break it up. Even in my Jefferey episodic story, I’ll effectively do “part 1” and “part 2”.

The technical limit would be a @manta2g or @DemonGoddess type of question, and it’d be in bytes, not words. I know we’ve had some of the annual halloween/holiday round-robin submissions where it’s 50k max for the rules, but that’s more of a reader tolerance limit IMO. In comparison, AO3 limits it to 500k characters, and FFN limits your documents to 5MB (and will stop adding to the word count at 65k words).

I’ve been writing probably the longest chapter I’ve written so far. It’s up into 40 pages and over 20k words. So I’m worried that I have a chapter that’s too long for the archive and I should break the chapter up into smaller chapters. There’s a bunch of breaks I could put in but I am curious if I should. Suggestions?

As far as I know there is not a limit, at least not a low or mid range one. However, if you do have transition points as you mentioned, I expect those would make good chapter breaks.

Well my story is not getting that close at the moment. Right now it’s about 25k words for this chapter and probably won’t top 30k words at most based on where I’m at in the story structure. But it’s the same story I was asking about regarding “Character driven non-linear” stories. Because it’s all one character’s journey, it feels right to create the story in a single chapter. I’m noticing though that I could probably break it up into about 10 pages a chapter. It’s going to make the story have a lot more. Almost every 10-15 pages there’s a transition of sorts into something new. That wasn’t necessarily intentional on my part but it seems to have worked out that way.

That makes a certain amount of sense. Especially the moderators reactions. This is definitely not that. The story is each chapter represents for the most part a single night experience. A bunch of stuff happens in that one night so I’m writing it as a single chapter. I thought it would be a much shorter chapter but I’m having too much fun with the story. I’m on the last part of the evening but it’s looking like at least 45 pages long if not closer to 50. Which is why I asked.

I think most of the very long “chapters” in the archive are actually entire multi-chapter stories posted on AFF after another site changed its policies regarding certain types of content (think Hentai Foundry and FFN here). The posters uploaded entire stories as one chapter, and moderators who had to review the new postings for ToS issues were heard to whimper in the corners.

Yeah, that’s where I’m leaning especially as it got much longer. I couldn’t really do that with my gangbang series one shots. At least not the individual chapters. Do you know how long some of the longest chapters are? I’m just trying to get a sense of how this one compares.

I have seen some extremely long chapters in the archive. I don’t know if we do have a size limit, though. However, and there’s always a however with me lately, my personal recommendation is to break it up. It’s not possible to bookmark where you are in a chapter, and that’s an awful lot to read at one sitting for many people. But that might just be my personal taste speaking, and other people might love the idea of a novella length chapter.

Indeed, and I’m curious to know how people react.

Fanfiction *is* a spot to experiment with writing, so try it out, and see if it works!