DISCUSSION: How Long Are Your Stories?

[lucarioknight56]

I just had a thought occur to me: how long are most fanfics? I mean, I know that without the restrictions placed on novels in publishing you could make them as long as you want, but is there a length that is usual?

I ask because I'm getting close to finishing my current story, yet I see few others currently active that are even close to that mark. Unequivocant is nearing 500 pages with my formatting in Word, and will be nearly 180,000 words by the time its finished. That's easily the length of an extended novel. Any longer than that and it seems to be drawn out for too long.

I guess it's all based on perspective. One could always split stories at major events and character developments and call it good, or you could combine them together and have an epic narrative. For me personally, I want to get ready for some day publishing my own stories, so I want to try and work in the confines of the industry standard. How many others share that sort of thinking? If you see fanfic length differently, then why?

 

[Iggy]

One of the greater, if not, greatest challenges lies in sticking to the story and not, to quote David Eddings, to wander off into the bushes. This requires a fair deal of discipline; to cull your work of excessive words and chapters, no matter how attached you are to them. "Kill your darlings," as they say. I would happen to know that my graveyard of darlings is humongous.
If you still end up with a 150.000+ word story then mayhap your story simply needs that amount of words to be told. A good test is this: leave a chapter, paragraph or just a sentence away. What changes? How bad is the omission? If damages are minimal then your story can do without. Adhering to a proper story structure, such as John Truby's "The Anatomy of Story" that I use, should be mandatory. Again I stress the importance of discipline. Choose a method and stick with it.
And if you're going to get your work published then I'm damn sure most will tell you about the strength of revisions. More than one great author has emphasized this (read Stephen King's "On writing" for an excellent demonstration about what revision can do to your story).

 

[Beth Pavell]

Too long, very arguably. The Long Walk is a typical journeyfic epic in terms of wordcount, although it's turned out to be much longer than I intended.

By the standards of published novels. even in fantasy where long series are normal, it would need some serious culling. But it occurs to me that different genres have different standards - look at manga, where some stories seem to have a momentum all of their own. I don't write and have never written with a view to publishing or emulating the standards of published novels, so I haven't seen it as a problem in that sense. I suppose it is a problem insofar as I have steadily less and less time to actually write the damn thing

 

[canisaries]

All of my multiparters so far have been longer than the previous. Dear Nemesis was 16 000 words, Agápe was 27 000 words and Hunter, Haunted was 72 000 words. The biggest reason for this has probably been the fact that the stories have also gotten more complex and serious in tone. I'm planning to rewrite Agápe with pretty big structural changes and more stuff added, but I doubt it'll reach H,H's length, as the conflict of the story isn't nearly as giving.

As a perfectionist, I don't think I could ever start writing something longer without planning it all the way through beforehand again. The pacing would just go all over the place and the story end up unbalanced with how I currently write stuff. If I had a more episodic approach, it could probably work, but uncertainty scares me too much and I don't deal well with having to think about multiple storylines at the same time.

For my oneshots, they range from a thousand to a few, though this current one seems like it's gonna be about five or six thousand, which is longer than usual.

 

[Misfit Angel]

I don't have a proper word count or even page count because I do all of my writing in a program that is effectively Notepad on steroids, but I can, with confidence, mirror Beth Pavell's statements: too long, at least for the format of fanfiction.

Storm Island, my first major story, ran for 51 chapters before I took it out back and shot it. With what I had planned, it easily would have ballooned into 100+ chapters by the time I reached the planned conclusion. Poor planning killed it, admittedly, as I wrapped up plot strings almost as quickly as they were introduced, which meant I need a lot of them to keep up with how the story was progressing: A murder cult. Team Rocket turning to domestic terrorism. An emo kid who hates everyone and everything but slowly turns around. A scientist who doesn't know what she's doing but succeeds anyways. Police corruption shenanigans. A 10/10 perfect angel who accomplishes everything she does. A shipwreck that leads to jungle survival in a strange new land. Sectarian strife and sexism in a foreign country. Spirituality and magic. Lesbian romance. That's the stuff I actually covered, and there was so much more to come. It got to be too ridiculous.

Land of the Roses is shaping up to be of a similar length, but much more focused I think. I know what I want to do, when I want to do it and how I want to accomplish it. Admittedly, things do meander a bit compared to what people probably expect out of fanfiction: a centralized plot that doesn't wander too much. But that's not what I want to write, I want multiple things going on at once that all eventually tie into each other at the end. Plot threads that weave their way through the entire story, while others are shorter and resolve themselves within a specific short arc. I currently have five plot threads that are being tugged at, two of which I plan to have finished by the end of season 2 (if not sooner), and they're really the only ones I plan to have. They might be finished and come back in new forms later on in the story, but as it stands, this is where I want things to be.

I think the main problem is that I grew up in the 90s, when long running television series were the done thing and that formed my perfect ideal of media content. Not all of them had consistent stories that lasted the entire series run, but they usually stuck together in some way. That seems to happen less and less these days (the only really notable exception I can name off the top of my head is Game of Thrones), but it's something I strive to continue. At the end of the day, I'm really just writing a series that doesn't have traditional break points like season finales, though I'm trying to bring that idea into the fold. Whether I'll be successful comes down to whether I finish a story for once.

 

[diamondpearl876]

Well, if I remember right, Survival Project was 180,000 words or so. That kinda sounds wrong, not because a novel shouldn't be that long, but because I felt the writing was bare bones compared to what I write now. I won't be surprised if the sequel surpasses 300,000 words at this rate.

Anyway, when I look at chapter by chapter word counts for my fics and see that they're 2-3k words more than I expected, I just remind myself the longest Harry Potter book (Order of the Phoenix) was 257,045 words. Plus The Stormlight Archive and Mistborn... NONE of the books in both series are less than 200,000 words. The Way of Kings specifically hit 380,000 words. All of the above are damn popular and, as a reader and from what I've heard from others, are not considered "too long" or have glaring issues due to the length such as dragging on events too long and the like.

Basically, there's precedent for stories of tremendous length in the publishing world, particular for the fantasy genre. And I mean, Pokémon is essentially fantasy, so... Congrats, we're all writing just as much as Brandon Sanderson and J.K. Rowling. Possibly even more.

 

[Ambyssin]

I'm in the same boat as Misfit Angel, in that I kind of took a long-running TV show/anime approach to making me one story. Yeah, it's probably gonna end up being multiple novel lengths. 59 chapters have been drafted and I'm probably at, like, 400k words or so. I can easily see the chapter number reaching triple digits and I will still be posting updates on BMGf by 2020 at this rate. But I have no reason to split it up into different "volumes" and give each volume a topic. That'd just be weird and inconvenient for a reader. Am I being too overzealous? I'd imagine so, yeah. But I wanted to have to fun with it, so I didn't exactly factor length into this.

 

[Misfit Angel]

But I have no reason to split it up into different "volumes" and give each volume a topic. That'd just be weird and inconvenient for a reader.

The way I look at it, I see it as convenient. Personally, when I look at a 100+ chapter story (I've tried a few across the internet), I very quickly nope out if they aren't visually split into smaller pieces. It feels so daunting when I don't have a natural break point provided for me, even though I know at the end of the day that I have all the time in the world to read it.

A favorite quote of mine (which I desperately need to remember more often in my personal life) by Henry Ford applies well to this idea: "Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs."

 

[Ambyssin]

I mean, I already cluster chapters into episodes, so dividing those up as well feels really redundant.

 

[lucarioknight56]

I just notice that Pokemon fanfic writers in particular make extremely long stories...and I haven't really seen anyone take the approach of my stories, actually. Most of the stories I've seen are continually updating, seemingly never approaching their ending, while my writing periods tend to be around half a year or so. Unequivocant has gone on for longer, but that's because I'm taking the effort to be editing my chapters and keeping a slow, consistent update schedule.

Point is, most writers here take over a year to write their works, while there's the few like me that project into writing a single story for several months. Does that strike as strange?

 

[diamondpearl876]

I just notice that Pokemon fanfic writers in particular make extremely long stories...and I haven't really seen anyone take the approach of my stories, actually. Most of the stories I've seen are continually updating, seemingly never approaching their ending, while my writing periods tend to be around half a year or so. Unequivocant has gone on for longer, but that's because I'm taking the effort to be editing my chapters and keeping a slow, consistent update schedule.

Point is, most writers here take over a year to write their works, while there's the few like me that project into writing a single story for several months. Does that strike as strange?

Even if those stories were split up into a series, they'd still be updating and not nearing an end. You're far, far more prolific of a writer than most I've seen in the fandom over the years, which isn't a bad thing by any means. Nor is it a bad thing to be... not as prolific, for want of a better word. XD It is a shame that people get too busy to write if they want to or if they struggle to get words down most of the time to the point where progress is super slow, and it's a shame that stories easily get abandoned that way, but it says a lot, too, that quite a few of our long standing members have stayed dedicated to their work for darn near a decade. It just depends on the writer and their circumstances. ^^

 

[Arkadelphiak]

I can offer a different perspective: the thought of writing (aaaand sometimes reading) a mega-sized fic pains me. The thought of long/wandering plotlines with fifty or more chapters simply isn't something I could produce (at least, for free). And I can happily admit that! On the contrary, a writer like me works very well with tight restrictions. I can't get off my ass and produce anything without proper restrictions in place. My story, called The Deprogramming, was pre-set for 30 chapters ever since I envisioned it. Everything will be solved (or will it?) within those 30 chapters. No more, no less. And that's been a great service to the story because (as I've learned from subsequent reviews), tightening up the plot makes a hu-u-u-uge difference. I've always admired works that can get their point across succinctly (e.g. Flowers for Algernon).

My advice for everyone, I guess, would be to take a step back from what you're writing and ask yourself if you REALLY need 50+ chapters to properly tell your story. In the case of The Long Walk or Land of the Lemons Roses, <50 wouldn't be enough. In my case (and many others), it just isn't feasible to reach those numbers without diluting the plot. I think we tend to laud stories that are long AF because it reinforces the idea that you're reading an epic; that term conjures up mental imagery like Tolkien/etc, so I get why people aspire toward that designation. There ought to be a better way to enter the 'epic' category without producing n number of chapters-- but I think that defeats the very definition of 'epic', so it's possible that I'm rambling at this point, ayyyyy.

 

[Ghostsoul]

The only thing I really need to say is: 'Long enough so that I'll never finish them'.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

The last time I finished a fanfic was over a decade ago. That one was 120,000 words, which is novel-sized. My actual novel is currently sitting at roughly 100,000. Different Eyes could easily be that long, or even longer.

 

[KrspaceT]

Hmm, my fanfic Pokemon Reset Bloodlines is 36 chapters right now and over 468,000 words long, with a 15,000 chapter in the oven right now for beta.

 

[Gama]

I have for a long time thought that comparing fanfiction to novels is a bit of an inaccurate and unhelpful one to make.

Fanfiction and novels are quite fundamentally different things because of how they are consumed. Novels are published all at once with the finite size, beginning, and end already defined from the moment a reader picks them up. Fanfiction is posted in parts with regular chapters, more like a TV series. A reader can pick up the first few chapters, enjoy them, then get turned off by later stuff. A reader might like the idea but be turned off by how far in the fic (or TV show!) already is by the time they're at a point where they can get involved.

I think this difference is worth keeping in mind when considering the question posed by this thread. Fundamentally, I think overall length of fan fics matters a lot less than it does with novels. If people are already following what you're posting, it going on for ages is probably not going to be that much of a problem as long as it isn't being artificially dragged out and there really is that much to tell. Something that might be worth more closely considering with fanfics is length of individual chapters and frequency of publishing them.

Also, I think what @Misfit Angel said about splitting larger fics up into smaller, more digestible sections is great advice that I am henceforth going to attempt to follow.

 

[Iggy]

Plenty of fantasy novel series were/are published across many years, just look at the Harry Potter series (across a decade) or the Songs of Ice and Fire (still ongoing), while us fan-fic writers (usually) publish each chapter, so how much of a difference is that?

The actual difference, I think, is that a publisher has an editor reviewing the material send by the writer and either make corrections when needed or has the work return to the writer. Also, and not entirely unimportant, the writer is paid for the work while us amateurs do it for fun.

 

[lucarioknight56]

I approach writing fanfiction as preparing to write original, publishable material, so I write fairly quickly and format my stories in the confines of an average novel length to eventually get myself to that point. I just don't know if I can ever work in an episodic format, as I like to have the end in sight and everything fully planned out; with an episodic format, I'm not sure I could actually do that. I guess, sometime in the future, I could make a series about my PMD universe, but I couldn't format it like I currently do.

Really, the big thing for me is I want to have the entire novel planned out, especially when I plan on finishing it. I have plenty of ideas I still want to write, and if I spend too long on one, I won't end up getting to the others. I try not to let that affect me too much, but it's something I have to keep in the back of my mind...for the short term, at least.

 

[Revenge of the Boyega]

I usually lose interest in my stories by the twenty-fifth or thirtieth page. My record is sixty, or perhaps a little over - it's been such a long time that I can't remember. But I always set out to do a major project. I can never commit myself to short stories, whether I'm reading them or writing them. So ideally my narrative would be a 300+ page story.

That's my problem, I guess. I want to create something extraordinarily massive, so I have to spread my events rather thinly. That makes for slow-pacing, which screws me up utterly. And character building! How the hell am I suppose to pace it? But I've gotten so much better since late 2016. Back then my characters would be jerks, meet someone halfway nice, and then have this major revelation and change completely. It was hysterically bad.

 

[Iggy]

I usually lose interest in my stories by the twenty-fifth or thirtieth page. My record is sixty, or perhaps a little over - it's been such a long time that I can't remember. But I always set out to do a major project. I can never commit myself to short stories, whether I'm reading them or writing them. So ideally my narrative would be a 300+ page story.

That's my problem, I guess. I want to create something extraordinarily massive, so I have to spread my events rather thinly. That makes for slow-pacing, which screws me up utterly. And character building! How the hell am I suppose to pace it? But I've gotten so much better since late 2016. Back then my characters would be jerks, meet someone halfway nice, and then have this major revelation and change completely. It was hysterically bad.

Have you tried writing summaries? Or listing important events for each chapter? It could allow you plan ahead and make certain each chapter has enough plot twist to keep the reader hooked but not to overload the reader. You could also try to limit yourself, saying you're gonna write a novel in no more than thirty chapters, each no more than 4500 words, come hell or high water.