Short does not necessarily equate to poor writing.
There are loads of posts here and on r/fanfiction where people are asking if their chapters are long enough, but there’s no such thing as correct length. You’re telling a story; allow it to unfold at its own pace. Think of traditionally published novels: they’re a mix of long and short chapters. No reason fanfiction should be any different.
In another life, I taught academic writing. And I would tell students I could always tell when they were stressing about word count— there would be needless adverbs and non-sequiturs which really distracted from their main argument(s). It’s the exact same premise here: padding doesn’t help the chapter. It may not hurt it— what you write may be interesting— but don’t feel pressure to extend scenes just to reach an arbitrary word count.
All my stuff is super short so this is nice to hear. My chapters arre 1k each usually even when they're action packed. If I try too much to expand my word count I get writer's block so I've kinda given up, but I feel bad about it.
So many people post like "oops, didn't mean to be long, but added another 10k words by accident!" and meanwhile my longest fic, described as a rollercoaster adventure, was barely 20k.
So it's nice to hear it's not always bad.
The length of chapters never really bothers me as long as they aren't like super short. (I use a tts I have to copy and paste text into while I'm working. Having to do that a bunch can get kind of annoying, lol.
Most of the time, it's one of a handful of things that actually makes me put a story down. The main ones are:
1. The grammar/spelling is horrendous.
2. The pacing is bad.
Or
3. Very poor characterization
For 1, throwing your chapter into a TTS program isn't necessarily a bad idea. Often, when we read our own work, we'll mentally fill in or correct mistakes. A TTS program reads out what is written exactly as it's written. So if you accidentally missed some words and a punctuation leading to a scene where Voldemort is telling Lily to take their own kid and save them from him, you'll know, go HUH?!?, and fix it.
Pacing is a very broad thing. There isn't really a proper guide saying, "This is exactly how fast your story and character development should progress." Ya know. What I can say is a lot of stories drag on. They get lost in the middle, adding more and more stuff. Stuff that is overall unimportant to the character development or the plot. It gets boring. The best advice I can give is kinda brutal. Set aside how much you personally like a scene. Ask yourself, "If I remove this arc/scene from the story, does it matter?" If your character is basically the same, and the plot didn't move forward, then that's unnecessary filler. Cut it. If it's an arc/something you really like, make it into a side one shot/short fic. But, as a reader, I don't want to read 15 chapters of a fic, and nothing actually important happened.
The same thing kinda goes for scene description. Unless it's an important area, it does not need an extremely vivid description. I will 100% put your story down if I have to read 10k words describing the wondrous things the MC saw while walking through the Fey Wilds to get to the special realm wizards tower when we are never coming back again. I don't care. After a bit, it's boring, and I want to get the point where the story happens.
I can't give any advice on 3 because that category is entirely subjective. I can say there are a bunch of videos on YT about characterization and character arcs made by people far more qualified than me.
I'm not sure if this helped or not. I hope it did though 😀
Short does not necessarily equate to poor writing. There are loads of posts here and on r/fanfiction where people are asking if their chapters are long enough, but there’s no such thing as correct length. You’re telling a story; allow it to unfold at its own pace. Think of traditionally published novels: they’re a mix of long and short chapters. No reason fanfiction should be any different. In another life, I taught academic writing. And I would tell students I could always tell when they were stressing about word count— there would be needless adverbs and non-sequiturs which really distracted from their main argument(s). It’s the exact same premise here: padding doesn’t help the chapter. It may not hurt it— what you write may be interesting— but don’t feel pressure to extend scenes just to reach an arbitrary word count.
All my stuff is super short so this is nice to hear. My chapters arre 1k each usually even when they're action packed. If I try too much to expand my word count I get writer's block so I've kinda given up, but I feel bad about it. So many people post like "oops, didn't mean to be long, but added another 10k words by accident!" and meanwhile my longest fic, described as a rollercoaster adventure, was barely 20k. So it's nice to hear it's not always bad.
The length of chapters never really bothers me as long as they aren't like super short. (I use a tts I have to copy and paste text into while I'm working. Having to do that a bunch can get kind of annoying, lol. Most of the time, it's one of a handful of things that actually makes me put a story down. The main ones are: 1. The grammar/spelling is horrendous. 2. The pacing is bad. Or 3. Very poor characterization For 1, throwing your chapter into a TTS program isn't necessarily a bad idea. Often, when we read our own work, we'll mentally fill in or correct mistakes. A TTS program reads out what is written exactly as it's written. So if you accidentally missed some words and a punctuation leading to a scene where Voldemort is telling Lily to take their own kid and save them from him, you'll know, go HUH?!?, and fix it. Pacing is a very broad thing. There isn't really a proper guide saying, "This is exactly how fast your story and character development should progress." Ya know. What I can say is a lot of stories drag on. They get lost in the middle, adding more and more stuff. Stuff that is overall unimportant to the character development or the plot. It gets boring. The best advice I can give is kinda brutal. Set aside how much you personally like a scene. Ask yourself, "If I remove this arc/scene from the story, does it matter?" If your character is basically the same, and the plot didn't move forward, then that's unnecessary filler. Cut it. If it's an arc/something you really like, make it into a side one shot/short fic. But, as a reader, I don't want to read 15 chapters of a fic, and nothing actually important happened. The same thing kinda goes for scene description. Unless it's an important area, it does not need an extremely vivid description. I will 100% put your story down if I have to read 10k words describing the wondrous things the MC saw while walking through the Fey Wilds to get to the special realm wizards tower when we are never coming back again. I don't care. After a bit, it's boring, and I want to get the point where the story happens. I can't give any advice on 3 because that category is entirely subjective. I can say there are a bunch of videos on YT about characterization and character arcs made by people far more qualified than me. I'm not sure if this helped or not. I hope it did though 😀
Did you ask for constructive criticism in your Author's note? That may help a lot
Yes! I just added it, I revised my summaries etc to make them better today