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Hi, @DemonGoddess All of them, or at least the Harry Potter and the Originals archives. The image below is what I get. Thanks in advance.

As a follow on, yes, I did manage to finally write past that 105k/107k (depends on using FFN vs the libreoffice’s word counter) old chapter on the rewrite… became like 126 chapters or something like that. Now tackling that 91k old chapter and wondering how long that’ll end up For Repair Guy, I did experiment, overall successfully with deliberately keeping them short (around 2k) … though it’s rewrite has stalled.

Hi, Deadman and all. I’m a little bit late to the game here. Just the same, I agree with everyone else here that 20k words in a multi-chapter story is a bit excessive. Sometimes, the story flow just won’t let you cut it any shorter. However, if that’s the case, then you had better have some very exciting and readable stuff. An alternative is to put more content in to the chapter, allowing you to split the now 24k chunk of prose into two 9k chapters and a 6k chapter while maintaining both story pacing and reader interest. When looking at stories as a reader, I tend to look for longer, but not “too long” chapters. As a rule of thumb, a 2k chapter is a “Reader’s Digest story of a story,” and more than 20k has me wondering if the writer has any clue about what they’re writing. In “published life,” Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy has a chapter that’s barely two pages, plus multiple chapters that are practically novellas or at least novella length in their own right. Cheers!

Did you know New York actually has 12 seasons? https://12seasons.nyc/

For the most part, yes. There are a few places where things transition from one room to another or other things. So in theory it works as a transition point.

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.

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”.

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.

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).