Have you ever clicked the link of a random story (complete or incomplete, doesn't necessarily matter) and then you almost immediately "x" out of the page because you see that there's like 50+ chapters or so? Perhaps it's just the disadvantange of AFF that it does not tell you the word count of the entire story and all you have to rely on to guesstimate the length of a story is the number of chapters.

I accept the fact that most authors write their stories practically impromptu, and thus, the amount of chapters is rather arbitrary if the story is still incomplete, depending on where the author ends up with that particular storyline. However, this is not exactly a practice I would recommend or encourage for not only does this mean that the story becomes horribly convoluted over 50% because the author can't decide where the story ends up, but also because of the lack of proofreading.

And, as a result, most of the time, the story ends up having a billion chapters which makes new incoming readers less likely to read on.

This is not to say that the amount of chapters should matter in a particular story because it's totally up to the author to use as many chapters as they wish, but we need to clear up some things on how to use these chapters wisely. We need to start thinking about where to end chapters at specific points, and not just where our thought processes end (for those impromptu writers).

So here's a little bit of math. A friend (who's not exactly a major writer, but writes enough to know the ins and outs of this type of ordeal) once told me that a good chapter length for the average writer would be between 2000-6000 words. Taking the bare minimum of 2000 words as our guideline, let's set up some values.

decent chapter length = 2000 words

Sadly, I will admit that most stories I see on this site, just eyeballing each chapter, the average amount of words per chapter is 400 ± 200 words. We'll use the average of 400.

average AFF story chapter length = 400 words

Let's just assume that that story with an average of 400 words had 100 chapters (I've seen more though...)

average AFF story chapter amount = 100 chapters

So now, we'll do the simple calculations. We'll find the amount of words in that 100 chapter story, and then divide by the amount of words for a decent chapter length, so find out how many chapters the story would really have if it were planned out. Of course, this is also rather arbitrary.

( 400 words x 100 chapters )  /  2000 words
. = 20 chapters .

So the 100 chapter story could have been condensed down to a mere 20 chapters with a little planning. Pretty cool, no? Makes new readers less overwhelmed and more likely to read your story, but perhaps this is just based on my personal bias on how I view things.

Oh, and using the professional text-editting programs installed on your computer is a much better decision than saving your chapters here on AFF.