LJ has just given us another icon slot (145!) and I can't decide what to upload. I am having that itch where I want to weed out the keywords and icons I don't use anymore, delete everything and reupload, in some kind of organized fashion. Maybe this weekend, while I am procrastinating on writing.
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kestrelsan has an interesting post
about story length, and I tend to think that most really long fan-written stories could be cut down by at least 30%, if not 50%. I mean, I tend to write short, and I tend to get betas back that make me add a few hundred words, but even I, in the longest thing I've written (46K words), probably should have cut 6000-8000 words out (even though I can totally rationalize the existence of those scenes, I can also see, especially with some distance, how they do slow the story down).
So while the complaint that short stories often feel like sketches or broad outlines rather than full
stories is not unfounded, I am more likely to complain that a lot of longer stories feel like 4K words of story drawn out over 40K words. And there are a lot of reasons for that – people who post wsip when they don't know where they're going and end up meandering; the proliferation of big bang challenges with large minimum word counts; the inability of a great number of fan writers – me included – who have a shaky grasp of pacing (to put it kindly). And because of the greater time invested in a longer story, to me, the disappointment is more memorable.
I will say that I have gone back to writing a little longer - and I say "gone back to" because in XMM I did write a number of 10-20K word stories, though I think my comfort zone back then was in the 5K-8K zone, though I don't have the word count on most of those stories.
The thing is, back when I was writing Logan/Rogue, I needed that length to get them together (not that that is
long by most standards). I needed to build that relationship up so it was believable; I had to take the pairing through its paces to make it work. And I enjoyed messing around with all the old romance novel tropes.
When I got into HP and started writing Sirius/Remus, I didn't feel like I needed to do that. I still occasionally wrote a story that hit 10K words (usually for remix. heh.) but I did a lot of 1200 word PWPs and schmoopy vignettes, because the pairing was SO OBVIOUS and so ROCK SOLIDLY near canon that I didn't feel a need to do a lot of leading the reader or making it believable, because I felt (still feel, later books notwithstanding) that Remus/Sirius lives in the interstices of PoA and OotP (and even GoF), so there was no need for me to do that much work.
The thing is, before I soured on XMM entirely, I was pretty OTP about Logan/Rogue. So I'm not sure it's the degree of OTP-ness that made me feel like one pairing required a shitload of work and the other didn't, so much as my own feeling of how close to canon the pairing was (or how easily you could get to the pairing by extrapolating from canon - I know in HP circles there was a lot of semantic confusion about near-canon ships because some people thought that meant we expected to see it in canon, while I and other people like me, thought of it as a logical extrapolation from canon, but not necessarily anything that was ever going to show up in the books
though, god help me, I kinda sorta hoped it would).
Obviously, a lot depends on the characters, as well. Much like Logan/Rogue, it takes a lot of work to get Mal and Kaylee, or Mal and River, into a sexual or romantic relationship. So again in Firefly, I was hitting 6K and 9K words (15K in one memorable instance) in order to get them where I wanted them to be. I was still writing occasional 1200 word character pieces and PWPs, but also more gen, which also seemed to require more words.
Now, in SPN, I tend to write either short episode codas (that may or may not involve Wincest, depending); Dean/girl stories, which take a little bit of set up but don't generally require a lot of words; and more casefile-ish types of things, which do seem to require 3K-8K words a pop from me (I am sure other writers could make them work over a larger amount of words, but plot and I tend to be unmixy and like our associations to be as short as humanly possible). (Oddly, since I can't always predict whether there will be Wincest in my stories - even when I set out with the intention that there will or won't be for a given story - I can't really generalize on how that affects things.)
So I definitely feel like I am writing longer stories now, and I think I am reading longer stories now – still not the 100K word behemoths that so many people bemoan the lack of these days – but things that go for 8K or 15K or 20K words, and those I do find really satisfying, when they don't feel like there is only 2K words of story amid the 20K words.
I am not sure all this rambling had a point, but obviously, I can still write a 1000 word LJ post with ease. *snerk*
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Great day in the morning!
I have to agree with Sasha Frere-Jones on this one:
Earliest Christmas Ever!As if Obama winning wasn’t enough good news, Coldplay have announced that they are breaking up next year. Chris Martin says that they will "go for it in every sense" until they disband, though, and I fear this going for it will involve another Coldplay album. As a result, my own going for it is going to be severely curtailed. Trips into the outside world will be planned carefully, so that I avoid retail outlets likely to play "The Last Whinge" or "Coconut Diaper" or whatever it ends up being called. This means I will be eating at Mars 2112.
Perhaps it's time to add "hating coldplay" back to my LJ interests.
the last time I talked about hating coldplay, something like 12 people defriended me over the course of the next few hours. It was quite traumatic. *braces for impact****
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