Welcome to Gaia! ::

A lot of people get grand ideas for epic novels and then never finish them cause "their too long." I never write a long story unless I really love them idea, otherwise I find ways to trim down the idea or perhaps separate it into different stories. I love writing long stories because I like reading them. They have way, way more depth and characterization than some 1k word oneshot.

When it comes to sentences and chapters, I think that they should be as long as they need to be and should only be cut when it feels right. A lot of people worry about that, "is my chapter too long?" But really they shouldn't care what anyone else thinks and should end it when the story feels it should end.

I think when a story is good, we all prefer to read long chapters, no? And as many of them as possible, hehe... But I also believe that length plays an important part in more than just the storytelling. It can influence a person into reading/not reading a story online.

The great thing about long chapters is that they give the reader more time to accomodate and "get into" that other universe, but is that any different from reading a series of short chapters in succession? The issue here comes from the fact that chapters are posted online one at a time and it's much harder to hook readers when all they're fed are frustrating little crumbs every now and then. At this point, you have to ask yourself: why am I posting and how important is it to me that other people are reading? On the other hand, it also depends on where the fic is posted. There are users on some places (*coughgaiacough*) whose only response to a long chapter would be tl;dr no matter how masterful the writing. I guess it's kind of like marketing, haha...

That said, I have a hard time writing long chapters too. I like to think that I've gotten better ever since I realised that it's all right for chapters to contain more than one scene, but getting past the 2500 word mark is still a load of trouble.

Power of synthesis is a wonderful thing, but I'm still envious of people who can write and write and write! I once read this memorable fic where every chapter was around 15k words. Funny thing was that not much happened during those chapters (and they did not feel like they were dragging!). For example, one of them was entirely about two characters wandering in an underground maze and worrying about each other and whether or not their supplies would last the whole trip. It was amazing.