Story etiquette - best place to pause between multipart stories?

[Inkent]

Looking for some guidence from authors and readers alike. I'm starting to put together more complex stories that I'm building to release on a chapter by chapter basis and I've a lil' dilemma.

Where's considered the best place to draw a line? Do readers prefer to see the cut at a logical point in the story or does the overall length have some bearing before findi g thst breakpoint?

Asking as I'm at a point where it seems logical to halt the chapter regarding the storyline I'm working through but looks somewhat cumbersome from a physical size perspective. If I look for a point to cut into it and call it a chapter earlier in the storyline nowhere seems a good place to stop so to speak.

Thoughts on this one anyone?

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I try to have a chapter break where it is natural to the flow of the story.
If you are setting some goal "10k words, time to end the chapter" I think it will destroy your narrative flow.
Maybe some are going to be really long and some are going to be really short. If the readers are invested they won't care.
Terry Pratchett didn't use chapters because he said life doesn't have them.

 

[MrPixel]

I always break at a logical point in the story, regardless of the resulting chapter length. The one time I violated that rule was to break in the middle of a scene purely for dramatic effect, creating a cliffhanger.

 

[Jay142]

You're going to get a variety of answers here. I don't do many stories that go more than a couple of chapters and I've even included multiple chapters in one submission mostly because I didn't feel like doing two submissions. I find that I get less motivated to write a lot of chapters because of the decline in readership from chapter to chapter.

That being said, each chapter seems to have a natural cutoff point. I wouldn't go beyond 3-4 pages per chapter. When I found that my story was getting long, I'd break it up into chapters, even in the same submission, so a reader could go back to it later if they wanted to read the rest.

I honestly don't know how people can write 30-40, or more, chapters in each story and I'm sure they will have differing advice than I just gave you.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Once the entire story is finished, it will be much easier to identify the best spots for breaks.

I am currently writing the fourth chapter in my latest novel and I am relatively certain that I will eventually alter some of the breaks already established. Since the story won't be published until it is complete, I have that flexibility.

All of that being said, natural breaks are typically points where scenes, situations, or key thematic elements change in the story. I try to position these approximately 5,000 to 8,000 characters apart to maintain a consistent "flow" for the readers.

 

[BobbyLaker]

Looking for some guidence from authors and readers alike. I'm starting to put together more complex stories that I'm building to release on a chapter by chapter basis and I've a lil' dilemma.

Where's considered the best place to draw a line? Do readers prefer to see the cut at a logical point in the story or does the overall length have some bearing before findi g thst breakpoint?

Asking as I'm at a point where it seems logical to halt the chapter regarding the storyline I'm working through but looks somewhat cumbersome from a physical size perspective. If I look for a point to cut into it and call it a chapter earlier in the storyline nowhere seems a good place to stop so to speak.

Thoughts on this one anyone?

Never break off just before the guy* cums... he won't thank you for it

*Other genders are available

 

[SimonDoom]

It depends on what kind of story you are writing.

If you are writing in categories like Novels or Romance, then I think it makes sense to have the break at a logical point in the narrative.

But if you're writing in kink-based categories, then you should try to make sure that each and every separately published chapter offers that kink in some satisfying way.

If I'm publishing a multi-chaptered incest story over time, for example, I'm going to make sure that each chapter is however long it needs to be to provide an erotically satisfying incestuous encounter.

 

[PennameWombat]

My personal guidance is that every posted part (in my case, a numbered chapter) needs a beginning, middle and end, while at the same time contributing to advance whatever major plot arc or arcs require it to have multiple parts. I've posted a couple of single stories that are over 70,000 words, because they didn't offer this sort of structure to make them viable to split into separately posted chapters.

So the chapter needs to cover one or more minor- or sub-plots that are resolved in that posted chapter.

This is orthogonal to length. A chapter is as long as it needs to be to achieve this, but I tend to have long (around 15,000 word) chapters. For me, a multi-part story requires the reader to start at the beginning (chapter 1), to really make sense of it.

In contrast, I also have serials, where multiple stories focus on the same characters but they're not so deeply tied to be a single, multi-part story. These are meant to be readable stand-alone, although naturally you'd get more depth if you read all of them.

 

[KeithD]

A side issue is that it isn't really good to have a 70,000-word work with no internal places for breaks. This will exhaust the reader. You really need to build periodic breaks/changes/day changes pauses in the work. Those will be places for chapter breaks as well.

 

[YDB95]

If you want to keep the readers' attention, end on a note that hints at what the next story will be about. It doesn't have to be a cliffhanger, although that certainly works too.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Firstly, I'd draw a distinction between 'chapters' in the traditional book sense and 'submissions' as one chunk of content that Literotica publishes. Book chapters probably work best at around 2-4k words, whereas (IMHO) that is way to short for a Lit submission and will just muck around your readers as they have to find each subsequent submission to keep reading. 10-20k submissions made of several chapters would be my ideal.

The important point would be to try and end at 'the right point', not necessarily at a 'cliffhanger' though if you happen to have one of those in your story naturally great. But each submission needs to have sufficient progress along the story path to feel worthwhile and generally the moment when something changes or is resolved is the best part to break - the reader needs to be able to predict what they think is going to happen next and be excited for it so they want to continue reading even with the break.