It's not suppose to "get any point across," and I do suppose that for most things, getting even close to the 150 K is ridicules. That's coming from me.
And yes, but that doesn't really apply to readers that crave these big chapters =p It's hard to imagine, but there are some people I know on the Base who wants me to do 20 000 Words + chapters every time, so those TL;DR people aren't exactly one of my problems...
Your walls of texts were beaten a long time ago Cali, just ask Sara, she can confirm it xP
On a serious note though, you strike a fair point. My point is that if it's possible without being a fuss (and since people rarely gets over that limit anyways, then a few threads in a year that would fit within a new extended limit wouldn't make much difference and be a problem, would they?), then why not?
Well for someone a book like TLoTR is way too long, while for others that's the wanted length. A work shouldn't be limited by letter limit if it's not extending just to extend which some people do This should especially not apply for a FanFic/Original Fic in most cases. I don't go around making these long threads that often, but I have indeed come across the limit a few times so I wouldn't have asked otherwise.
If there's one thing that's my priority, it's to categorize the chapters beforehand, meaning that I decide upon the scenes that the chapter will be about, and then I'll find out how big they get after I'm finished with those scenes. At times I do indeed split them up or move content, but when I have a lot of "transmission" work to do detailing a lot of explanation and different important meetings, things tend to get long some times. The reason I don't divide it up then is that it would not be justifiable to have 10 chapters with only dialogue (in an action-driven story). People would lose interest before the main action begun, so instead it's better to have all the talking in one chapter instead, even if it's bigger. That is why most of my long chapters to date are chapters that wraps up current storylines/arcs and such. I'm not writing an actual book. If I was, the structure would of course have been completely different.
Another example would be One-Shots. I did one two years ago and knew right away that I had to divide it into different post, so that wasn't a problem. Same thing could be said about the Series Finale I wrote for my Series last year, which was suppose to be a One-Time release, but there was no way I could split up a 130 000 words into one thread, so I had to divide it into parts and different threads instead, which worked both ways.
If you think about it, 20-30 000 words for a chapter/thread/work isn't that much, not from what I hear about certain writers on other forums who writes 30 000 words regularly, granted that they do mostly One-Time works.
As for chapters in the past, you are with no doubt right, but at the same time, people had to release countless more threads. I prefer to write bigger chapters and have fewer threads, which also means less frequent releases and better time for a chapter to shine. It's not like I don't know how to write short chapters, but some times longer chapters justifies the thread rather than releasing tons of threads to increase posts and reps. If I can do a story in 15 chapters rather than 50 on the Base, I'll obviously go for the first. Some people would do the other way to increase said posts, rep, chances of contesting, and so forth, but that feels cheap to me and many others too.
I have a feeling that you think my latest chapter was one of few though, but I can assure you that it's only 1 of 16 of the complete story.
The problem for me isn't writing within the limit itself, because everything I've written has fitted the limit except for the two earlier mentioned works. The problem is that the NB coding and such often times adds ridicules amounts of letters. Just adding a picture to your thread grants you 200 letters in itself most of the times. 10 pics and your already passed 2000 of those 150 K. Also, adding direct dialogues into Italic alone for a chapter that is fairly big makes things crazy. The codes adds about 20-30 000 letters each time when a thread of mine passes 100 K. Fair enough, I could make the visual look crappy, but considering that I've actually gone away from the much used "Dialogue" style, as I'm now writing in Narration" style, which means a lot by itself in decreasing letters, I would like to at least add something to spice things up. This is the first and only time in Narration style that I've ever come close to the limit. It was a whole other deal with my Dialogue Styled chapters back in the days due to all the codes...
To top things off, if you had indeed written that thesis and posted it on NB with Italic and such, you probably would have had a fair chance of exceeded the limit too. Also to be noted, Word counts differently than NB. Word counted my Chapter to have 147 000 Letters, while NB counted it to have 152 000, which by all means makes things complicated.
Also, the chapter wasn't 200 000 K letters, it simply happened to pass the limit with edits to grammar and such. If I had been 50 k letters over, I would of course have found a way to split it without doubt. I'm trying to be reasonable here despite what it may seem.
Yeah, let's hear what Zise has to say. Like I said, a no isn't that much of a deal
So it can be done?
If it doesn't make a difference to the work rate of the Base like taking up bandwidth, then it could be done, right?
It's not really needed, but it's not like it's something that would make things bad in a sense? If it doesn't make a difference for those in question regardless, it could indeed be a beneficial perk to others.
