Short stories vs longer ones

[EmilyMiller]

Short stories vs longer ones​

I write everything from 750 words to 87,000 words. I guess I lack focus like you said. But if also strikes me reading this thread that we don’t have a shared lexicon. May I therfore present the Miller Scale:

< 10,000 words - short story

10,000 - 19,999 - novelette

20,000 - 49,999 - novella

50,000 - 79,999 - short novel

≥ 80,000 words - novel

 

[BobbyBrandt]

You might not like the answer, but it depends on what I am writing how long I want it to be.

A "How-To" doesn't inspire me to write more than what is needed to provide the details.

A "FanFic/Celebrity story will typically have little conflict and be under 20K words.

A novel, where I flesh out several characters and sub plots can range between 50K and 180K

My 32 published stories here average 42K and I think each one is the ideal length for what I had intended to write.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My shortest piece here is 1500 words; I have a couple at 7-8k, three around 16k, one 24k and my two longest stories are both about 100k. I guess that makes me more of a "long story" writer. I enjoy reading a good punchy short story but it's not where my writing inclinations lie.

I like writing stories about how relationships change over time, with complicated protagonists, and that takes me time to do.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Replies similar to, “The story will take as long to tell as it needs,” are not really addressing the question. You could choose to tell the same story in 10,000 words or 100,000 words. Which do you normally choose and why?

Being a pantser with no preconceived notions of a story, its plot, or even who the leading characters might be (a third character often appears unexpectedly, saying, "Okay, I'm here now, you'd better go ahead and write me"), I never choose a story length ahead of time. That's simply not possible, the way I write.

As a consequence, my longest is a 104,000 word novel (the most deliberate thing I've written), a bunch of 750 worders and one Lit pagers, and several novella length pieces, where the unexpected arrival meant there was more to the story than I thought.

I've ended up with a fair number stories in the 15k - 30k band. Mostly it depends on the leading female character, how much she's put her hooks in me, discovering who she is, wanting to know her better.

 

[NotWise]

I prefer to write shorter. I want to get a lot of work done without a lot of words.

When I first started publishing on Lit, my goal was to write traditional short stories--like 2K words. That's how I was taught to write at a time when short stories needed to fit the common magazine format. I learned fairly quickly that the readers here don't care for stories that short, and that the magazine format was irrelevant.

I still want to get a lot of work done in few words. I also want to avoid redundancy and repetition. That meant conceiving stories with more depth and detail. It also meant I had to put more work into each story. It's an evolving style, and it isn't fixed yet.

Not every reader wants that, but there's a half million other stories here for them to read.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

4 of mine all totaled together might have made 20K

 

[XerXesXu]

The first stories I wrote were in the 100 to 150k range and I still do. The choice was unconscious; it seemed a comfortable length to tell a story set in the real word. I only do real world. I wrote a 10k story as a way of 'paying dues' to Lit; that felt cramped.

I've enjoyed the 750-word challenge. I take it as a challenge to write a number of scenes over a number of years with dialogue between a number of persons. There's also the challenge of tricking Lit into believing one's story is only 750 words; the less said about that the better.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

I write everything from 750 words to 87,000 words. I guess I lack focus like you said. But if also strikes me reading this thread that we don’t have a shared lexicon. May I therfore present the Miller Scale:

< 10,000 words - short story

10,000 - 19,999 - novelette

20,000 - 49,999 - novella

50,000 - 79,999 - short novel

≥ 80,000 words - novel

I use my own pulp meter based on JSB's scale:

≤ 1000 words = Flash Fiction

1000 to 7500 words = Short Story

7500 to 20000 words = Novelette

20000 to 49999 words = Novella

≥ 50000 words = Pulp Novel

≥ 85000 words = Novel according to the industry standard

As for nanonovels, well, they don't rely on a total amount of words. As long as it doesn't go over 25K, and it has 20 chapters only, and has EVERYTHING that makes up a novel, you're fine. Hence I write upwards, not outwards.

It keeps me sane to have this scale, because again, no one here agrees on anything, so screw everyone, I'll do my own thing with blackjack and hoes, wait what?

 

[sister jenny]

I like short stories, and that is what I write.
I am a very restless and impatient person and I think my writing is the same way. High pace, and get to the point fast.

I can sometimes feel that slow burn stories are slow just for the sake of it and not because it serves the story.
And having said that, there are of course tons of exceptions.

 

[SimonDoom]

I like stories of different lengths, but my favorite to write is a standalone story of between 8000 and 20,000 words.

 

[Britva415]

What you are saying is you don’t have any real focus in your writing. That’s not meant to be pejorative

Well, it makes it sound like you're saying that because one story is not like another story, neither of them had any focus at all.

Someone doesn't have to make all their stories the same to "have focus."

 

[FrancesScott]

Well, it makes it sound like you're saying that because one story is not like another story, neither of them had any focus at all.

Someone doesn't have to make all their stories the same to "have focus."

I meant focus in the sense that I then went on to use it in later in the same paragraph, not in a general sense. A focus on a particular length of story.

 

[theWriterInTheNude]

I prefer to write longer stories. I usually aim for something like 30,000 words, but everything I write lately seems to be getting longer. I like to create characters and explore them for a while before moving on to the next idea. I used to try writing shorter stories in a series, but I always had trouble coming back and finishing the series.

 

[Djmac1031]

Im a short story writer.

I still remember thinking my very first story was too long and wound up only being two LE pages.

While I think I have a vivid enough imagination for a full length story, I simply dont have the talent to write it.

That's not modesty or self depreciation; its just an honest statement of fact. If I were a naturally talented writer I'd have started decades ago.

So I write what I'm capable of - short, generally simple stories that I hope people find entertaining.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

I like to write "by the seat of my pants" as the saying goes. I've found I can do this coherently up to about 10k words, So a lot of my stories are short ones. But, I can write something longer if I map it out. I'll have notes that describe how each chapter starts and ends, and what purpose it serves to move the overall story forward. But not every detail, just a few sentences. I then write each chapter "by the seat of my pants," knowing where I need to start and where I need to end. It satisfies my "inner pantser" while mitigating endless revisions of early chapters. If you're trying to write longer tales, it might work for you.

 

[anthrodisiac]

That’s interesting to me. I’m normally very much a bare bones author. Boil it down to the essentials. I leave gaps. Some people say they wished I’d filled them, others appreciate a swift shot of espresso rather than a more leisurely latte.

It's funny, outside of Lit I'm actually very much the same, but nature of the beast in writing non-human anthro stories is I have to be fairly descriptive since it's not something most readers experience. Normally, I'd just keep description minimal and focus on the story, kinda pushing myself to get more descriptive with my works here.

I think my range is kind of, uh... It's 500 - 574,000 words. That's outside Lit, though. It's horrifying to think that 574k word behemoth is me not being very descriptive, and I still need to expand the first 25k words, and when I tried to expand the last 25k of the rough draft it turned into 550k words somehow. Very fugue state for most of that book to be honest. To be fair, it's not great, one person has ever read it, and probably ever will. But she liked it.

I try to write shorter stories here, targeting 10k-15k, though most of them inevitably end up 20k-25k due to pantsing. Lit range is 750-30k so far, though the series I'm working on will probably end up 150k-200k.

My ideal story length outside Lit is probably 5k-10k range. Here, it seems to be 15k-30k range. But I also don't have 3k-word sex scenes* in my normal work, so that might skew it a bit. Descriptive aspect might tack on another 10%? Eh, maybe closer to 5%. The rest is just the story taking shape as it needs to, then trimming as needed for flow.

*Yes, I know it's excessive.

 

[RejectReality]

Not counting micros, I've got stuff that's less than 1k words, and stuff that's in excess of 450k. I've typically got both kinds of story in the WIP at any given time. I don't have a normal length. It may sort of look that way from the prevalence of 2-3 Lit page stories, ( especially in this pen name ) but that's just because those finish faster than the 9x10k chapter stuff, and a lot of my shorter stuff either doesn't get posted here, or gets put into an anthology of multiple stories per submission.

May not be helpful, but it's truthfully whatever the the story I want to tell requires.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

I choose to write short stories here because I'm doing it for free. I can and do write longer stuff.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

It satisfies my "inner pantser" while mitigating endless revisions of early chapters

Editing is writing. It's an essential part of it.

 

[OddLove]

I try to stick to less than 30k words, but for my newest stuff I challenged myself to stay under 10k. It was difficult because I love writing dialog to flesh out personalities, but it was a fun challenge. And I might even try going down to 5k at some point. But for the most part, I'll probably be sticking around 30k. That just feels like enough space for me to character build and get to discover what the characters like, love, hate, how they think, what they believe, values, etc.

 

[Erozetta]

For erotica I prefer the 5-15k range for stories.

Outside of erotica, I write novels of 75k+ (I think my longest is 120k-ish? But it's part of a four novel series that spans well over 300k with the first and last being the shortest at around 75-80k each.)

 

[pink_silk_glove]

But for the most part, I'll probably be sticking around 30k. That just feels like enough space for me to character build and get to discover what the characters like, love, hate, how they think, what they believe, values, etc.

That's important because how is the reader supposed to understand the characters if the the writer doesn't?

 

[t_challa]

I have just finished writing a follow up chapter to the first story I published on here (first story I published anywhere) 11 years ago. I didn't / don't have a word limit in mind when I write. I'm too busy focussing on making sure everything works and flows together, makes sense and captures what I am striving to achieve without repetitive use of language or terms.

Can't remember exactly how long the first story was, but I think it was somewhere between 2000-2500 words.

Please bear in mind that I am a novice beginner amateur!

The latest story is about the same (it's currently pending so hopefully will be published soon for everyone to read).

 

[Statius]

Never had a length or word count in mind. What does it take to convey what I want to say? I've written stories where something occurs to me to throw in just because I think it'll be fun to add in, doesn't matter. I did a few exercises where I challenged myself to tell a story as quickly as I could, as bare bones as I could, just to make myself do it, add a new tool to my limited abilities, but it was never about word count really. More like I have this idea, let's see how short I can get it; maybe they were more about discipline in my writing than anything else? But I think worrying about story length is wasted (usually- not always- never always about anything) time and effort and probably creates too much pressure and stress on ones self, unless there is a specific reason for that kind of goal.

 

[redgarters]

For me, slow-burn isn’t primarily about how long the relationship takes for the characters, it’s about how it feels for the reader. The reader needs time to sit with the tension, the almost-moments, the gradual shifts in trust and intimacy. You can get to know characters in 10k words, but letting a relationship unfold slowly while the reader experiences each step tends to demand more space.

Yes, this

My slow burns tend to run over 20k words at least, they just need the time to simmer a bit.

I tried writing a 7k words club dancefloor quickie story once... it turned into 43k words of Of Grace and Courage

I started a 750 word story two weeks back. It's now at 15k words and no ending in sight. I guess I'll just have to accept my fate.