#i just prefer this way of doing things at the moment sdalkfjads

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia. Not sure if this has been asked before but what makes you decide how long a chapter is going to be? I noticed that the chapters in your stories like FFS and TIP have really long chapters whilst stories like the current UtB have shorter chapters, and I was wondering why that was.

Hi anon,

So... it's mostly down to two things:

First -> Engagement. People just generally comment a lot less on longer chapters. The longer the chapter, the less comments it gets. I don't know if it's reading fatigue or what, but The Ice Plague taught me a lot of hard lessons and longer chapters do not get the engagement to justify that level of effort (I love love love the comments I get, don't get me wrong, but I also make money off this writing to live, I do have to think 'longer chapters mean I eat less and can't see all my medical specialists' - that's not nothing). People might say they love them, but they don't show the authors love for them in the same way, and that's the only way I can justify doing them.

Second -> From a labour perspective, I can release more chapters for different stories if the chapters are shorter. There was a time when the average length of my chapters was around 6-8k per chapter. That works out to maybe five chapters for like, possible one or two stories at once per month. The editing took longer and was harder to do, and it was also more laboursome for my beta as well. Shorter chapters are easier to edit, even if you're doing two and a half in the same amount of time. Stories like Palmarosa, A Stain that Won't Dissolve, probably most of the Underline stories like Gold and Red and Blue would not exist at all if I was still writing longer chapters. Because I could never justify the time it took simply to write a single chapter, and it would be - like so many of my story ideas - just a pipe dream that I sometimes talked about.

So if you like some of those stories, they are literally in existence in part because I went to shorter chapter lengths, which allows me to be more experimental with different story ideas to see what ones I really enjoy, without impacting my monthly wordcount and schedule too severely.

There's other factors too. But engagement was a huge, huge part of it. These days my chapter length ranges from around 2.5-4.5k which seems to be the sweet spot (it's also still about 2-3 times as long as what's recommended in serials, which sadly is like 500 words to 2k, which to me is like, damn, I can't live like that). And a lot of later FFS chapters are actually around this length as well. In fact I think at least one chapter in FFS is 2500 words. So I was already experimenting then with shorter chapters and was already finding that the shorter chapters had more engagement. I think one of the chapters that had the most comments of all of them, was actually one of the shortest chapters.

There's a time and place for really short chapters so I don't like to do them too much, so instead I'm around the 3-4k mark.

There's also the fact that when it really suits, I will write longer chapters. Though I don't ever want to write chapters over 6-7k again outside of epilogues, simply because of the sheer amount of labour that goes into them, and the fact that they seem to fatigue readers a lot more overall.

The other thing is, anon, I used to be very ashamed of how long my stories were, so I used to prefer - out of shame - shorter chapter numbers but longer chapters so it 'felt' like the story was shorter to me even though it wasn't. Realistically, Game Theory should - pacing wise - have 100 shorter chapters. But this embarrassed me so much I shoved a lot of different things into chapters that would have made more sense broken up. When I gave up that shame, I could pace the stories better in a way that made more sense to me. In longer chapters, you'll see a lot more chapter breaks (the asterisks), and some of those are where many writers would logically just have started a new chapter.