How do I Increase Word Count Without Useless Bloat?

[Yirash]

So I've been cooking up a fanfic I may or may not publish here, and while I think the prologue and first chapter I have are adequate, finding out that my current draft of the first chapter of my fic has exactly 1.6k words while some fics I follow consistently print 2k+ word chapters, with some even printing 5k+ word chapters every now and then makes me feel somewhat inadequate. I've been thinking on continuing to write and expand on the first chapter of my fic, but I don't know exactly how to expand my chapter in a meaningful way. Should I begin to write more for the chapter or should I just trust myself when I feel that a chapter is "finished"?

 

[mizzet]

1.6k is a perfectly decent amount. Can usually increase word count a bit by being a bit more descriptive, but if you feel it's finished, go with it.

 

[Winchester]

Think about whether you've summarized anything too much.

"Harry Dresden got in his car and drove to the bar to meet the client" is fifteen words.

"Harry Dresden told Bob the Skull to mind the fort, grabbed his trench coat and hat off the hanger, and locked the door behind him, before getting into the ancient alleged automobile (which was neither auto nor very mobile) and coaxed it to life, before driving off to the bar where the client said to meet. Being mid-afternoon, traffic was light-ish, being between the lunch rush and the evening commute hours, but there was still some. Still the worst problem of the day was finding a parking space that didn't involve walking half the distance. The bar itself wasn't one of Harry's usual kind of places, being much too upscale, and Harry in his trenchcoat thought he stuck out like a sore thumb, though it didn't matter much because the place was empty except the bartender".

That's almost 150 words, and conveys the same incident, but with more information. And I haven't even added any dialogue (banter between Harry and Bob). And, I forgot to mention what other apparel Harry brought with him (his gun, his staff, his rings, etc) and I didn't describe the neighborhood he drove through... I could probably double this bit and it wouldn't be *padding*.

With some structure and attention, an actually *good* author could probably write fifteen hundred words of just getting to the bar.

Then there's thinking about the structure of events - are you at a natural stopping point? A cliffhanger moment? If your're worried about chapter length, does it make sense to keep going until you get to the *next* natural stopping point? Etc.

Anyway, I don't write myself because I can't keep my plots straight in my head and can't plan worth a damn, but I can at least paint a picture in words, I think.

 

[SmokeRichards]

The length of any given text is heavily dependent on your prose style, genre, and the nature of the story you are trying to tell.

Some of the most beautiful prose I have ever seen told a story using about 40k words that I, using my own style, would probably tell in 400k. Teen-lit, for example, tends to be far shorter, less complex, and lighter on the description than a typical adult novel, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. With proper word choice, a fifty word paragraph can convey just as much rich detail as a 150 word paragraph.

Bloat, on the other hand, is actually dangerous. Bloat takes away the punch of important things you are trying to convey, drowning out what makes the story special by showering the reader in a lot of little things that ultimately don't matter. In addition, it harms reader immersion, and destroys pacing.

It's not just about detail; It needs to be the right kind of detail.

My best advice I can give you; Don't worry about it. Think about it, but don't stress about it. First stories are special things, but they are also flawed things, and that's okay. Write your story, don't be afraid to experiment, and don't sweat it if something doesn't turn out the way it should. I've written well over 3 million words at this point when I count all the drafts, rewrites, cut scenes, stripped text, etc. that I've written over the course of making my current story, and even something as fundamental as my prose is still seeing minor tweaks here and there.

There are so many caveats when it comes to things like chapter-length that getting some practice in viewing stories through the lens of writing one can only help, and at the end of the day, it's still going to be a very personal choice that is uniquely you unless you are trying to imitate another writer instead of developing your own distinct style.

My two cents; Figure out what you like first before you worry about someone else is doing something.

 

[Soupervan]

Word count does not correlate with quality. H.G. Wells' stories within his "Twelve Stories and a Dream" are some of my favorites of all science fiction despite being all very short.

That said if you truly wish to expand upon it and nothing will change your mind there are some ways to go about it.

Writing more short stories and plopping them all together connected by a central theme, fandom or some such thing.

You could set what you have written a prequel, epilogue or a chapter somewhere in the middle of the rest of the story and try to fill in the rest.

Alternatively you could try to include POVs from other characters.

If you really feel the need to pad your story and want to go the extra mile you could amp up the descriptions going into more detail about the characters looks, facial expressions, body language and with the scenery and such things.

If you really want more words and don't care how you could even include a relevant quote at the start of the story, author's notes about your inspiration for the story, explanations of anything your readers might find confusing, a thanks for reading the thing, warnings that you don't own the fandom you're writing, a dedication to who you're writing it for and so on.

Oh and instead of standard line breaks you could even use ASCII art or text emoticons of some sort.

Still, if you do everything I said and make your short story into a novel full of nothing and a short story I can't see it being met with approval so try not to overdo it.

 

[f0Ri5]

There's no way to forcefully increase wordcount without it being artificial. Just write more story.