Separate stories by chapter vs. embedded chapters

[D_Lynn]

Hi! I've been an anonymous literotica reader for a couple of years and just started posting stories. I, myself, will choose a story to read based on length, much of the time. This is mainly because I operate on a tight schedule and may only have a short timeframe in which to read. I like longer stories with more deeply woven plots and rich characters, don't get me wrong. Because you can't tell how long a story is going to be until you open it, this is a bit tedious. Stories that cover a single chapter are typically (not always) shorter by definition, but they are only part of a whole story. Not sure it solves my problem but brings up a question...

I was wondering if other readers prefer to see stories separated out by chapter or prefer a single longer story with embedded chapters. I've separated both of my stories out into multiple chapters but was wondering if this was annoying to readers.

Any thoughts/preferences?

Thanks,

-Dakota Lynn

 

[sr71plt]

I usually try to separate long stories in no more than two Literotica-page (i.e., 7,500-words or shorter) chunks for the reason you mention.

 

[soflabbwlvr]

The first question I have to ask is, how long is the finished piece? A closely related second question is, is the entire piece finished?

I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but if I am looking through the index and spot a story that sounds interesting, the first thing I check after pulling it up is the page count. If it is 3 pages or less, I'll start reading it immediately. If it is 3-5 pages, I might read it immediately, or I might save it for later, depending upon my time constraints. If it is longer than 5 pages, I will probably click away and never get back to it unless something extraordinary piqued my interest before I clicked.

I also will not start reading a story in the middle. If I catch chapter 1, 2, or 3, I might start reading it from the beginning. But if the first chapter I encounter is 4 or higher, it is unlikely that I will read any of it. I do not enjoy reading from the middle of a story, and a backlog of more than 3 chapters is probably more than I am willing to read at one time.

That being said, I don't necessarily follow my own "reading rules" when I write. I break my stories where appropriate, without undue consideration of chapter length. Usually I will write the entire story, and then break it into chapters where the logical breaks occur. But that is not always the case. There have been stories where I wrote one chapter at a time and posted each chapter as completed.

You really should do what works best for you. This thread may generate a dozen or three different opinions, but that is all they will be--opinions. In the end, they will constitute a very small sample of the overall readership, and will hardly be representative of the whole.

 

[Auden James]

Source Of Annoyance

To me it's annoying if the author goes on and on about his/her tale in a multitude of chapters—whether embedded or separated (most often in nibbles of 2 LIT pages) makes no difference—that ultimately converge towards the point at which the analogy of beating a dead horse becomes a truism in describing the story. And I think, I can even come up with an argument why this situation is apparently as wide-spread a phenomenon as there is one:

1) I basically assume that all the authors here are more or less amateurs. Even if they're published in some way, e.g. book on demand or romance publisher or whatever (of which I may not know in the first place anyway), I don't consider them to be accomplished or good writers at the outset, i.e. before I start reading their stories on LIT, for being published isn't sufficient to ensure the inference that all writings of the published author (and certainly not the author's writings available for free) are of any reasonable quality.

2) Hence, there's only a bare possibility to come across an author on LIT who is neither inexperienced, unaccomplished, (ambitionlessly) writing just for fun, or seeing a plain contradiction in the notion of "good erotica/porn", nor flinging around (dispensable) stuff rejected by his/her mainstream publisher.

3) Thus I'm not (primarily) interested in reading through (multi-chaptered) texts of a novel's magnitude on Lit, for there's the highest probability for such texts to turn out either as the first tentative steps of some inexperienced author in the field of erotica inflated to epic proportions or the (less qualitative) left-overs of mainstream publishers. Either way, J.W. von Goethe is right: "Dirt that we tread isn't hardened, but spread." (in German: "Getretener Quark wird breit, nicht stark.")

Or do you read through a novel, or buy it at all in the first place, if you don't believe, at least at the outset, that it'll be worthwhile?

And since the same is true for LIT, I usually do the same here I do at my bookstore: I read through the first chapter (if it isn't 9 LIT pages long or the like), and then I know whether my 2nd premise holds true in that given case or not. If it does, the text's remaining webspace is negligible. If it does not, then I'm interested in reading through the next chapter which is reviewed again on its own, for in most cases amateur writers simply aren't accomplished enough to pull off full-fledged novelistic erotica. Sooner or later they lose their breath and the story deflates (which is already evident after the third chapter in most cases).

Lastly, I wished more amateurs opted for terse prose that's of high intensity.

From my point of view your statement that you don't find "deeply woven plots and rich characters" in shorter prose, which is why you like "longer stories", is already a symptom of the misconception that one had to ramble on for 10k words or so (which roughly equals 3-4 LIT pages) if one wanted to go beyond dopey plots (or no plot at all) and one-dimensional characters. In fact, the exact opposite is true. One first needs to be able to write evolving plots and conscious characters in less than 10k words if one wants to avert the negative outcome that one's attempt at the novelistic scope falls short of intensity, tension, substance, etc.

Therefore terse prose, which is not to be confused with short prose, for texts of 1k words may just as easily be of low-intensity as random ramblings of 100k words, is the essential condition for powerful writing.

Considering the above mentioned peculiarities of the novelistic scope and that only a very few amateur authors (as well as published authors) are able of terse prose, it's perfectly clear that the fewest chapters of multi-chaptered works on LIT are worthwhile to read (through).

–AJ

 

[PacoFear]

Lastly, I wished more amateurs opted for terse prose that's of high intensity.

I wish some posters did too.

 

[D_Lynn]

I couldn't agree more with the notion that more is not better. In fact, I JUST finished reading a novel of about 60k words (not on this site) where I found myself thinking 'I get it already' as the author made it a practice of describing the exact same point three ways to Sunday. Substance over volume. I mean, no one is paying by the word.

What I'm coming to realize from the posts here so far is that others approach the exercise of choosing stories much the way I do. I wondered if this was a common practice.

I have, thus far, been doing what felt right for the story that I had written. I think it's good advice to consider those needs over what I believe or assume might be the general preference.

Great comments; good advice!

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

-D

 

[roomfor1more]

From my experience, I do not feel the format on Literotica works well for long stories that have embedded chapters. This means, at least for me, unless the story is extremely well written and is able to hold my attention then I prefer that the story is broken down in parts that does not exceed 2 - 3 pages on Literotica. Otherwise, I find that somewhere before page 3 my interest in the story begins to decrease and I tend to vote lower on the story because it was not able to keep my interest.