How man words is too many for one update?

[spark]

I have a 5k-word story that is close to being ready to update.  It's a good short story.   There are places that I can pull it away, but it is written as one full story.    But 5K is a lot of words, and might not be the best to post as one shot.

The plot is: the guy has a younger sister who becomes his mommy figure with the sister's BFF becoming his little sister.

[Personalias]

5k is fine.  Length determines length; not quality.  

[Babypants]

If the whole story is only 5 thousand words, I would generally recommend doing it as a one-off.  Short chapters work best in longer stories (60 thousand words, plus) where the narrative is moving quickly in scenes where the physical location of the action is also moving about.  

[LessThanSavory]

If it's all one story, I imagine 5k is fine since it's everything at once, which people probably like more than having a short story broken up anyway.

Even if it wasn't a whole story, as long as it has a starting and ending point that make sense as one unit and is well written, I don't think there's any problem with a 5k word chapter.

[WBDaddy]

On 2/15/2024 at 1:43 PM, LessThanSavory said:

If it's all one story, I imagine 5k is fine since it's everything at once, which people probably like more than having a short story broken up anyway.

Even if it wasn't a whole story, as long as it has a starting and ending point that make sense as one unit and is well written, I don't think there's any problem with a 5k word chapter.

Agree on the chapter. Disagree on the chopping up a vignette. I posted something here a while back that, had I given everything at once, it would have ruined the mood, and that particular piece was 100% mood, because it was a wistful tale of a beautiful relationship ended by one person passing.  

[spark]

Thanks for the input

I tend to look for the best stopping point around 2k words when I'm writing a novella, which also matches what I can edit in 6 hours. This story wouldn't work for that.

[LessThanSavory]

2 hours ago, WBDaddy said:

Agree on the chapter. Disagree on the chopping up a vignette. I posted something here a while back that, had I given everything at once, it would have ruined the mood, and that particular piece was 100% mood, because it was a wistful tale of a beautiful relationship ended by one person passing.  

That's fair, though I think that would be an exception to the general rule for something in the 5k range since most of the short stories here tend towards a different direction. 5K words is a lot of words, but in terms of more general length, it's like two chapters, or maybe three if you use webnovel standards, which just isn't a lot to work with, structure-wise.

[spark]

28 minutes ago, LessThanSavory said:

That's fair, though I think that would be an exception to the general rule for something in the 5k range since most of the short stories here tend towards a different direction. 5K words is a lot of words, but in terms of more general length, it's like two chapters, or maybe three if you use webnovel standards, which just isn't a lot to work with, structure-wise.

It's just my opinion, and it is something I see in a lot of literary fiction, but there is a lot of prose that uses far too many words to say nothing.  Especially if there a super long paragraphs that A: don't say anything, or B: ramble on two ideas

If this story was much longer than 5k, I would definitely break it up.

I'm writing a novel, and my idea was to have the guy go from Sacramento New York, and it took me almost 2k words to get him to the plane.  That's a full chapter in the way I'm planning to update the novel.

From a story standpoint- I think the one time shot is really good.  But there is desire for it to get views and comments.  If I post a one-shot, some will read it- but then it will leave page one and it will only get a few thousand views.  If I update it every day for a few days- more people will see it.

[Little Matt]

I've found two-thousand words to be a decent chapter length. More importantly, I'd like the reader to be able to say "This is the chapter where X happens." Feels a little more satisfying to read something that's some sort of cohesive whole rather than just an arbitrary snippet of a larger story. Sometimes that means a shorter chapter, sometimes that means a longer one. 

[ValentinesStuff]

It depends upon whether or not there is a good place to break the story into parts. It's possible that your 5000 word story just doesn't have a good break point in it.

 

But I have seen entire stories of 100s of thousands of words in a single post, and posts so short that they aren't worth reading until there's several posts out.