Word count

[PandaLover00]

Ok, simple question that will have many different answers, but I figure I can test the average response.

What general word count would you consider a proper average story length? What would be a short story and where does it start getting considered long?

My feelings:
I've seen a lot of 750 words or less contests, but I feel anything around 1K words is a short.
Most of my stories seem to hit around 2k to 2.5k words, but even then, I feel like I should be able to get to 3k.
Anything hitting 6k+ feels like maybe it could be broken up into chapters.

Thoughts?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Ok, simple question that will have many different answers, but I figure I can test the average response.

What general word count would you consider a proper average story length? What would be a short story and where does it start getting considered long?
My feelings:
I've seen a lot of 750 words or less contests, but I feel anything around 1K words is a short.
Most of my stories seem to hit around 2k to 2.5k words, but even then, I feel like I should be able to get to 3k.

3k easily fits on one Lit page, which is considered short (3750 words to a page, roughly).

The 750 Anthologies are essentially writers' exercises, driven by the minimum word count for a story (750 words).

Anything hitting 6k+ feels like maybe it could be broken up into chapters.

Every time this comes up in the Authors Hangout (which it does, often) there's a consensus that an ideal chapter or single story length is 2 - 4 Lit pages (7500 - 15000 words). So you're undershooting by a fair margin.

Lit stories tend to be long: 30k - 50k is very common, and there are a bunch of novel length stories as well as very long multi-chaptered works.