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bettsfic · 5 years

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first of all, congrats on all of your successes! I'm as happy for you as an internet stranger can be (which is honestly pretty happy). I have a quick writing question for you, if you're in the mood to answer one. how do you control the length of your stories? I keep coming up with plot ideas that I think are good for short stories but then I get 4k in and am still setting up the premise. is there a trick to cutting down your plot so it can be resolved in ~5k words? or is it trial and error? thx!

this is such a mood. did you know training wheels was supposed to be 10k? it capped out at 125k.

personally length is something i really struggle with because it’s also a function of interest. if i start writing anything that i know in advance will be over 10k, i get intimidated and set it aside. so, for me, it’s almost a necessity to disillusion myself into believing “it’s almost done!!” because otherwise i’d never write anything at all.

how to control the length of a story

sometimes you can’t know how long something will be, and if you’re a pantser like me, you have to let stories drag you along until they let you go. it’s part of the joy of writing. but sometimes you’ve got to know how long something will be, or control it to be the length you need it to be, for the sake of your own sanity.

because length is a number, i see it in very mathy terms

length = style x conflict

style is the way in which a piece is written. if you have thick, textured prose, or you’re in a character’s mind who has elaborate internality, it may take 20k just to take a single sip of coffee. flannery o’connor’s “a stroke of good fortune” is a long short story in which all that happens is a woman climbs a set of stairs. james joyce, virginia woolf, henry james, donna tartt – these authors are all known for slow prose styles.

conversely, you can have entire kingdoms rise and fall in the span of a handful of words, if you’re concise enough. if you want to practice brevity, write poetry. practice condensing major themes in lines and phrases and images one after another.

by style i also mean reality. if all of your characters are real, rational people functioning in real, rational worlds, it’s going to take a lot longer to, say, get character A, who is shy and lacks self-confidence, into bed with character B, who has been recently broken-hearted. if your story does not concern itself with reality, then you can speed the process along. maybe B decides A is the love of their life and they live happily ever after. you can do that; it’s your story.

which brings me to conflict.

if you can decide the

premise,

climax, and

resolution

ahead of time (which, sometimes you can’t and that’s okay), and you know your writing style and your relationship to reality, then you can figure out how long a work will be in advance. i’ll give you an example.

a couple summers ago, i was having this exact problem. i’d dipped into my summer depression, which meant i wanted to write, needed to write, but i lacked the attention and motivation to finish anything i started, which was more frustrating than not writing anything at all. so i did the opposite of what i normally do – instead of coming up with a story idea and writing it out, i decided very firmly i wanted to write a story under 20 pages. i needed a good story under 20 pages to send in as a writing sample to future programs, to get published in a good mag. because i knew i could make it to good magazines, but my stories were all too long and it’s a big risk for lit mags to take on long stories when they can promote 2 new authors with shorter stories instead.

so i asked myself, “what can i get done in 20 pages?”

and then, naturally, because i’m an asshole, my brain replied, “i can make a woman come.”

SURELY, i thought, surely the goal of a woman in search of an orgasm would not take more than 20 pages.

i was wrong, at first. the first draft was 22 pages, and subsequent drafts got it down to 16. i started the story in a sex shop because i liked the image of a middle-aged woman buying a dildo for the first time because she’d never had an orgasm. then i slowly started building the world around this woman – she had two sons, she was a comic book collector, her husband was mysteriously missing from the present narrative – and unveiled this greater world. that’s where style comes in. my writing style is minimal in exposition but packed in character details and internal narration. my curiosity always gets the best of me in that regard. i need to know everything about my characters, and i learn it by letting them show their lives to me, which is why my stuff always runs long.

many times, my fatal error is that i only come up with an initial scene to start a story, and with only that in mind, things get away from me. but if i hold off on that initial scene and force myself to consider “what is the culminating moment?” or “what ground do i intend to cover?” then i can keep things reasonably short.

here are some additional tips/tricks:

scaffolding – sometimes you have to write it all out first to learn the story yourself, and you can go back and gut it. i call this scaffolding because you have to build all this extra stuff to find the information you need, and then you take it down. this happens because, despite popular belief, we write to think, not as the result of thought. so sometimes you’ve got to write things down to see the truth of them, but it’s not integral for your readers to know. maybe, to you, it’s very important that you know that your main character was once in a devastating car accident, but your reader has no need or want to know that fact. every story has some scaffolding in the first draft. skill in writing involves finding the scaffolding and deleting it without feeling bad.

structure – if your story is ambitious in terms of the ground it needs to cover, you can alter the structure to be more conducive to your length goals. consider vignettes, non-chronological timelines, starting the story later in the narrative, ending it earlier, zooming in/out in your narration. sometimes the shortest works travel the farthest because the narrative style sounds like an oral story, something told over a beer, and the longest works are such because they are so deeply embedded in the mind.

think like a poet – one thing i admire about poets is their ability to understand the placement and purpose of every word in a poem. once, someone defined poetry to me as “a piece of writing in which every single element adds to the meaning.” conversely, prose can be in any font with any margins and spacing and it doesn’t usually impact the story. but with poetry, a poet has to go through every word and figure out its purpose, if it should be there, if there’s a better way to say what they’re trying to say, if it belongs somewhere else. the white space around poems add just as much meaning to a poem as the words themselves. that patience is extremely valuable to apply to prose, the constant question of “does this need to be here? is there a better, more concise way i can say this?”

read authors in your opposite length camp – if you write long, read short. if you write short, read long. as a long-form writer, i am always amazed at the distance some extremely short stories can travel. the first things that come to mind for me are my friend kyle’s “the serial shitter” and barthelme’s “some of us had been threatening our friend colby.” tons of lit mags publish flash fiction now (hobart, linked above, is my favorite), so i highly recommend seeking them out. conversely, if you write short, pick up a novel that resembles a brick. in both, consider the style the work is written in, and how much ground the story covers.

tl;dr length is a process of understanding and controlling your narrative style, and knowing the height of your stakes/conflict before you get started.

thanks for the great question! i hope this helps.

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#writing advice #dow19 #Anonymous #story length

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