Subject: Re: Hm....
Author:
Posted on: 2013-05-29 17:42:00 UTC
Personally I think there's a golden ratio of content to words in there somewhere. It's uncommon, but I have seen a fic that went far in the other direction; IIRC it had a couple hundred thousand words across about 30 chapters, and nothing much really ever happened.
I was looking through Lucky Star fanfics (which mostly consisted of Konata x Kagami slash) when I came across this little thing, complete with a cheesy name:
Love is Hard
The canon characters are so consistently flat and OOC that they would break a CAD instantly, the AU is... weird (why the hell is Konata a spy, without explanation?), the writing is painful to read... and he's done 2k words over the course of over a year. ._.
...Something else appeared just today.
Konata goes to college season 1 part 1
133 words, and I think he's taking it seriously. We don't even know who's saying the two lines of dialog. ._.
Oh, and he's oblivious to the fact that the canon goes further than high school, but that can be excused as it's where the anime ends.
I write 2K in an HOUR.
This guy/gal is just lazy if he/she is still writing the fic...
And all I really remember about Lucky Star, having never been a fan, is that Konata being a pro gamer. So... I guess somebody's been playing Splinter Cell too much lately?
Speaking of word counts.
Which is better, more content in a few words, or a longer story?
Personally I find more content to be better, since I tend to write like that and expect people to be able to read between the lines and not have to be spoonfed every last detail.
Personally I think there's a golden ratio of content to words in there somewhere. It's uncommon, but I have seen a fic that went far in the other direction; IIRC it had a couple hundred thousand words across about 30 chapters, and nothing much really ever happened.
Of a Lost Odyssey fic that's 20,000 words and one chapter.
Or so you would think, until you read the story and discover that, aside from an Evil God!Stu, the whole cast dying in the first part of the story, one of I assume a few Mary Sue OCs and a pretty stupid plot, the whole story is written in a single page.
You know how ff.net has a separate page for each chapter that you can select from a drop-down menu, right?
The guy posted the whole story in a single document. Multiple chapters. Each badly labled, but there.
And it's supposed to be a suspenseful comedy, but i've pretty much only been laughing at how easy it's been for me to debunk the plot so often, and there's no suspense when you can accurately guess after TWO PARAGRAPHS what the villain will do next.
My heart doth weep.
I can pull 2K in an hour if I can explain my story easily beforehand. If I'm still working out the details, it usually takes me a bit longer, because I like to leave my readers with a sense that they know what's going in.
But it never takes me a year to do that, good grief. If I'm spending a year or more on a single chapter's worth of content, then odds are it's a huge project that I'm working on and I want to make sure everything is top notch and polished for my quality of writing.
From the sounds of it, this guy/gal is just scrapping words together when they feel like it.
However, beware: it's one thing to expect your readers to pay attention and keep up, and another thing entirely to expect them to read your mind. Striking that balance of giving just enough information is tricky. There's always going to be someone who sees right through you and someone who just doesn't get it, so you sort of have to guess where the majority of your audience falls and write to them, all the while trying not to come off holier-than-thou on the one hand or condescending on the other.
I bring this up because I also expect people to keep up, and finding that balance has been a struggle for me, so I know what I'm talking about. {= P My rule of thumb these days is that if I want people to know something, I have to tell them. If I don't, then I shouldn't.
~Neshomeh
It almost turns into an infodump at times for me; none of my huge stories are published yet in any form, but the mental and physical notes I've been keeping are either encyclopedia-esque or rather vague, depending on what the notes are about.