Thread: short story question

About how many chapters and pages within the chapters do I need in my short story?

Mine vary from about 250 words to 3,000 words, I guess they could be longer, I can't think of any short stories with chapters off hand, but why not? I think the real criteria is what length tells the story clearly and effectively, unless you are writing to order for a magazine or something and then they tell you the length they are looking for.

Originally Posted by Olly Buckle

Mine vary.

Me too! I don't think there's any steadfast rule, except to say that if you're pushing 50 or 100 pages you might want to start calling it a novella. My shorts tend to be 10-20 pages (3000-9000 words), and I usually do cut them into "chapters." I'll divide them into sections, sometimes numbered, sometimes just separated with a symbol. I usually end up with anywhere from 4 to 10 "chapter" segments.

I think it all comes down to personal taste. Although, it's probably good to target your writing to specific lengths (1000 words, 3000 words, 10,000 words) so that you get comfortable with estimating size. There's a large number of audiences that will expect exact lengths (like magazines, as Olly said), so it's probably a good skill to be able to choose how low long you need to make a project.

on wiki, you can find a sort of guide to length of writings ranging from short story to a novel. As follows:

Wiki Reference

Classification Word count Novel over 40,000 words Novella 17,500 to 40,000 words Novelette 7,500 to 17,500 words Short story under 7,500 words

Lol, why can't people do a search before starting a new thread.

Short stories are between 1000 and 15,000 words, though most publishers tend to prefer between 1500, and 10000, with the average being between 4000 and 7000. The differences between the various lengths of fiction are defined strictly by wordcount. You can have as many pages and chapters as the formatting allows. In general, though, short stories are not broken up into chapters.