I was wondering about writing styles. My fics tend to be not that long, usually 5k to 35k. When I read longer works, however, I have an impression that if I were to write the same plot I would somehow end up writing shorter story. (Never did this though.) I don’t mean that the longer works are somehow overinflated, although there are some that I believe are, just that the way I write tends to be more succinct. Is this actually a thing? The long works I read don’t have flowery language or long descriptions, so I have trouble actually putting my finger on what makes them, well, longer. On another note, I have started reading Scum Villain because of your posts and my god. It’s completely ridiculous. I adore it
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Isn’t it fun?
And yes, both certain types of plots and a given writer tend to default to certain word counts.
My natural word count (assuming I can force myself to finish something) is right around 50k. I can revise to add a little more scene description or take a little out, but it’s not going to be radically longer or shorter. Above 60 is just not happening unless it’s two plots grafted together.
Pulp novels are short. Mystery novels of the 1940s are short. This “A novel is 100k” thing is a product of the finances of printing paper copies in recent decades. If you compare your average mystery novel plot now to a Golden Age one, they do play out somewhat differently, and that difference is about 40k of material.
I’m a longwinded writer. A short fic, for me, is 15k-25k. A “full size” work turns out 75-100k and longer. I try to write shorter stories, but the kind of stuff I enjoy often… does not feel right, if it’s cut short?
My analysis of the phenomenon might interest you, anon.
I don’t really write a lot of *plot*. Plot defined as externally driven events and complications -quests for macguffins, mysteries to resolve, nefarious intrigues, antagonists with plans and goals in active opposition to the protagonists, etc. The sort of stuff that you can summarise in a concise “plot summary”.
My stories tend to be about people and feelings, and I often struggle to summarise “what happens” in them. I try to let developments breathe and feel *real*, like natural consequences of the characters’ choices and personality, rather than responses to external plot drivers.
That makes for very long and slow stories. (Not everyone’s piece of cake, I know!)
I think the more your story revolves around “plot”, the more you can squish it in a shorter wordcount, and the more it revolves around internal/emotional development, the more it lends itself to a big wordcount. Not to say one is better than the other -but I think each story has something of an “ideal” word count in which to accomplish what it’s trying to do.
Plotty stories that stretch on and on (see: a lot of long-running fanfics, but also most longrunning soap operas and series) tend to suffer from narrative overstretch and diminished impact of their plot events.
At the same time, stories that expect a big emotional payoff to happen in a couple thousand words often fall flat and short of their premise. (see: a lot of fanfic trying to redeem a villain in a oneshot or wrap up to a happy ending in the final chapter… but tradpub is certainly not innocent of this)
Slow-paced character studies where “nothing happens” can be boring. Fast-paced action adventures may feel lacking in substance. But most stories are a balance between emotion-driven and event-driven, and that balance determines their “natural” word count.
Yeah, agreed. Many 100k feels epics in fandom do feel horribly bloated and padded, but some are just the natural length that author writes and you can tell.
Usually, the padded-feeling ones repeat the same emotional beat multiple times in similar ways and the unpadded ones do not (and yes, it’s always a god damn Big Misunderstanding plot or the same “I have no self esteem and will self-sabotage in a 100% identical way after promising to go to therapy” thing).
It’s the same issue as soap operas: we’re seeing the same thing again and again instead of progressing to a new status quo for the next phase of the story. It’s not really a word count issue but one of repetition. As long as the status quo is changing over time, long and slow is no problem.
There are plotty plots that do call for 100k+. They tend to be the epic macguffin quests of high fantasy rather than single macguffin hunts of hardboiled detective fiction. Political intrigue or conspiracy done properly usually also needs several whole separate phases of plot and thus feels rushed if it isn’t like 100k. The structure is often like Mystery Novel 1, Mystery Novel 2, Mystery Novel 3 because the characters need to progress through whole separate segments where they think the conspiracy is one thing, but it’s really another. Maybe the plot is trying to cover the entire fall of a dynasty or something. That takes length.
Agatha Christie-ish plots are more like Red Herring 1, Red Herring 2, Bad Guy at the same house party on the same weekend. They’re intricate in their way, but they don’t need major phases like political intrigue does. To get to 100k, they often need very significant side plots about the characters’ personal lives or multiple totally separate cases for the same detective to solve (and those should really go in separate works, IMO).
I think some people can do slow burn, feels-based fic in 40k, but that’s pushing it. Any shorter, and I’ve rarely seen it fully hit home no matter how concise a writer you are. It depends how many serious emotional obstacles there are at the start too. If a character is battling internal demons and their attraction to the other character, that needs space to breathe. Maybe not 100k in every author’s style, but definitely a significant length.
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