▼ On Chapter
Length: In short, “Don’t be too long.”
▼On Foreshadowing: Especially important in Harry Potter
ficdom, where fanon and disagreements of interpretation of canon are common, and your reader may therefore have
a very different understanding than you of what is possible.
▼On Writing Descriptions: My personal techniques for
writing visual descriptions (which may be helpful for aphantasic writers in particular), considering
point-of-view when you decide what and how to describe, and avoiding overly-generic words like “it” when you can
be specific.
Click the arrows (▼ and ▲) in order to quickly navigate between sections.
Telling somebody to write is sort of like telling somehow how to cook. There are a number of universal principles – e.g. try not to serve literal poison – but different cuisines call for different approaches, to say nothing of tailoring your dish for readers who hate dairy, cooks who are allergic to pepper, et cetera. If a suggestion doesn't seem to work for you, then it probably doesn't work for you. The only hard-and-fast rule that I will recommend is that you try lots of things in order to find out what does work.
Besides what's here, you may want to read “The Fic Writer's Guide to Writing,” by AnisaAnisa, and check out the Fanwork Research & Reference Guides tag
.I recommend that your chapters be between 3,000 and 10,000 words, but there are plenty of reasons to ignore this recommendation (and sometimes there isn't a good reason but you'll do it anyway, which I'll admit to being guilty of). Good examples of short exceptions include “The Apprentice and the Necromancer,” by satismagic, is composed of chapters around 1,000 words long. You might also want to include an unusually short chapter for effect: “Animorphs: The Reckoning,” “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” and “Worm” each have a single-sentence chapter at some point.
It's much easier for a chapter to be too long than too short, because the reader might lose their place (especially if the chapter is too long to read in a single sitting). One of the worst examples of a too-long chapter is “Evil Be Thou My Good,” by Ruskbyte, which is a 40,000 word oneshot. It's a monster to read and there are plenty of places where a chapter break would be easy to insert, so there's really no excuse, unless Ruskbyte was trying to give their readers some sympathy for the characters that he sends to Hell. Just because you've written a dragon's hoard of words in one go, that's no reason to post them all at once — and if you do, you can still post multiple chapters at once.
Also, the longer your chapter is, the harder it'll be for readers to address everything that they want to talk about when they comment on your fic. It's a lot easier to write one paragraph each for eight 5,000 word chapters than to write eight paragraphs for one 80,000 word chapter, not least because the reader might forget some of their thoughts by the time they're done!
Was Voldemort driven insane by making too many Horcruxes? Will a transfigured armchair remain an armchair indefinitely? Do people die if they are killed? These questions, and many like them, do not have universally-accepted answers in the fandom. As a general rule, you should consider which characteristics of magic or the world in general will be Important to your story and then make sure to broadcast those characteristics ahead of time.
For example, if the permanency of transfigurations will play a crucial role in your story, then you should make sure that it's discussed in class, or that your POV character thinks about this, or something . Likewise, if, when you're considering potential reader objections to an important scene, you think that somebody might ask why Luna Lovegood didn't simply Apparate across the Channel in order to save her beloved Roonil Wazlib, then you should make it clear at some earlier point that a large enough body of water will impede Apparition.
If the matter is very important, then you may want to establish the relevant facts twice or even thrice (the Three Clue Rule is that if you want the audience to notice something, then you'll probably need to mention it at least three times; its corollary is that a lone act of foreshadowing will often go unnoticed until the time is right).
From time to time, I am told that I have written a very beautiful visual description of something, but I can hardly imagine what they see. I write in the way that Portia, the brilliant jumping spider, calculates a hunting path: methodically, a single piece at a time, without ever holding the whole thing in my head at once. Sometimes I'll assemble a bunch of these pieces together; and other times I will, like a Chinese room, output a string of text that is mostly without meaning to me but appears to make sense to my readers.
I rely on my beta readers to tell me whether the finally product makes sense to people who have two fully-functioning mental eyes. Occasionally, one of them will ask what was going on with a certain scene or how something is supposed to “look,” and I have to stop and think and be Portia again in order to decode it, because I just wrote a string of text that “felt right,” sort of like how ChatGPT tries to write passages which fit previously-trained data.
One thing that helps me is to collect descriptions ahead of time. Sometimes these will be specific snippets, generated while I'm thinking about the story or the scene and sometimes the sort of thing that just occurs to you while you're trying to sleep. Other times they're more general: I have a Google doc with flavors of beer, the shapes of leaves, the smells of mushrooms… I collect everything and anything, because precision and detail make the scene stand out. Once you've finished writing, reread the passage and take note of places where you've been vague and said “it” or “something,” and at least consider whether it's possible to be more specific. For a gold star, make sure that every scene hits each of the five senses at least one time.
Something else to consider is your point-of-view character, and specifically how their point of view differs from yours. In the Worm fandom, it's common for people to say that the narrating character, Taylor Hebert, is gay (or maybe bisexual), because she's written by a straight dude who describes women like a person who is attracted to women. On the same principle, have you ever realized that an author was white because you noticed that every time a character's skin color was mentioned, that character wasn't white? When you're writing a scene, think about what's normal to your narrator or viewpoint character, and don't mention it so much; and think about what's unusual to them, and make sure to mention that.
But if there's just one takeaway, it's this: Be particular! Avoid “it” and “ones” and other vagaries wherever possible.