Some numbers · 2:18am May 6th, 2013
2376 The Star (Arthur Clarke)
2500 spoken words in a typical My Little Pony episode
3789 The Sentinel (Arthur Clarke)
6845 Neutron Star (Larry Niven)
8093 We Can Remember it For You Wholesale (Philip K Dick)
14205 The Roads Must Roll (Heinlein)
29026 The Stranger (Spanish translation)
29698 Of Mice and Men
30141 Animal Farm
30273 Apocalypse Now (screenplay)
30644 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
32807 The Time Machine
33069 Star Wars: A New Hope (screenplay)
36363 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
46118 Fahrenheit 451
46938 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
47180 The Red Badge of Courage
47094 The Great Gatsby
48523 The Outsiders
49459 Slaughterhouse Five
56695 As I Lay Dying
56787 A Separate Peace
59900 Lord of the Flies
61922 All Quiet on the Western Front
64196 Brave New World
66556 The Color Purple
77325 Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone
95022 The Hobbit
103491 Ringworld
109571 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Are these rankings of some sort?
Ah, Interesting. Some of those numbers are surprising.
I remember at least 5 of these from highschool O_o
1057767>>1057774>>1057773
They're word counts.
Is that number of words?
I stopped reading a very popular ship fic when I realized that it topped most of those when the characters got together, and there was no outside conflict. That was the length it took for one to work up the courage to tell the other under completely normal circumstances.
Like I said before, likely-return-on-investment shut off. I need a lot of story in there, if you're going over 200k by the time you're done.
1057793 Yep. I didn't want to give away the big secret.
surprising how short some of them are at first. except Huck Finn, that one just dragged on and on.
I meant to show that great stories can be short, but it might show that depressing stories are shorter than upbeat stories.
1057795 Yes.
1057841
Looking at the ones I am familiar with it seems the longer ones are those that gave a greater focus on worldbuilding/drama/slice of life than pure concept and plot.
I didn't realize Neutron Star was so short. But then, I think I was 13 when I read it. Seven-thousand words is a lot when you're 13.
Huh, I never realized The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was so short. It definitely felt longer than, say, Harry Potter & the Alchemist’s Stone.
Well, dang. That means my story's longer than The Hobbit, and it isn't even done yet. It doesn't feel that long. . . .
1057858
Most of the early Known Universe stories were pretty short, or at least, the ones I have read were. I have an old copy of Neutron Star around here somewhere, which includes the titular short story, and several others.
I am actually surprised Ringworld is that long. I thought it was shorter than The Hobbit.
Also, Ender's Game is quite close to 100k, which makes it a convenient unit of measure, for me personally.
Wait, what? In Britain it was the Philosopher's Stone, in America it was the Sorcerer's Stone. A quick mobile Google doesn't return any results for Alchemist's Stone. Where was it called that?
1058053
I meant Philosopher's Stone.
1058039 But the Ender is already the standard measure of Mary Sue-ness.
1058053
This raises an interesting point.
Given that alchemists were the driving force behind the idea, why wasn't it called the alchemist's stone? Why don't we go ask Wikipedia?
[Later]
Oh. Okay. I guess that makes sense.
Wait...
[TFW you realize that Final Fantasy VII was all about the Philosopher's Stone]
Lord of the Rings (Fellowship, Towers, Return) 525,405
Fallout: Equestria 607, 282
Now I feel really bad that I've read FoE three times but haven't read LotR since middle school...
1058196
War and Peace: 561,000 (more in some translations)
Atlas Shrugged: 645,000
Every single Harry Potter book put together: 1,084,170 [1]
whatmustido's Diaries of a Madman: 1,073,518
… sweet celestia
-----
[1] Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, to date: 505,040
Fanfics, at least among the pony community, are often weightier than published novels.
I believe this is because fanfic writers don't know how to structure their fanfics. As such, the stories kudzu out of control with things that must be resolved, leading to unending fics.
1058084
Oh, ha. I thought you copy/pasted your list from somewhere.
1058179
And you'd think they'd have included Star Trek in the TV/film section, for what is a replicator if not an alchemist's wet dream?
169,481 The Grapes of Wrath
It amazes me how many good fanfic story's on here break 200,000. I have tons in my to read list that just destroy the word count of classic novels.
One of my finished stories has more words than The Hobbit.
1058196
Fallout Equestria: Murky Number Seven - 662,652
Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons - 1,116,859
1057857 But I look at the list, and see:
30273 Apocalypse Now (screenplay)
30644 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
32807 The Time Machine
33069 Star Wars: A New Hope (screenplay)
36363 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
46118 Fahrenheit 451
46938 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
so the short end is heavy on world-building. (You could add A Clockwork Orange and Wind in the Willows somewhere in there.) Hobbit, Ringworld, Huck Finn, Harry Potter are heavy on plot.
The giant books, like War and Peace and Proust, have lots of slice-of-life. Maybe there's a trend in the upper end. But I suspect any trend that we can find is going to be one imposed by publishers rather than by words themselves. Nowadays, you can't sell a book under 70,000 words, which would be most of the ones on this list.
Hmm...maybe the depressing ones are shorter because happy endings are harder? Not necessarily harder to write, I guess, but to have a happy ending you have to resolve most of the problems. If it's a depressing ending, like "Of Mice and Men" or "Brave New World", the biggest issues in the novel aren't really resolved, or are resolved with a lack of change.
This is pretty interesting.
1058371
Yeah, that's definitely something I've noticed. I think a big contributing factor is how distribution works. If you see an incomplete story that's 7k words long, you don't know whether the finished product will be 25k or 250k. In a traditional publishing environment, an editor can refuse to publish bloated stories. On fimfic, it's easy to start reading the equivalent of an epic fantasy trilogy without even realizing it until you're halfway through book two.
A smaller contributing factor is how the distribution model makes it harder for authors to control bloat. Fanfics are usually written and published a chapter at a time. This makes it harder to go back and delete two thousand words that didn't lead anywhere, but that's a vital thing to do. You see this problem sometimes in other formats that start publishing before the whole story is finished, like TV shows or anything that's seven books long.
(Also I just realized I've been reading your name wrong for a while. I guess this makes more sense; you never seemed particularly casual to me.)
1067855 1058371 Yes to bloat from publishing a chapter at a time. OTOH, are Dickens novels bloated? Maybe, but not the the extent that fan-fiction is. Novelists use the novel as the unit of editing. A story may be several books, but each book is self-contained enough to edit on its own. Maybe fanfic writers need a unit of editing longer than a chapter, but shorter than a book. Maybe the economics of web publishing make it possible to do that--to release things in units of 30,000 words, instead of 100,000. I'd like to see that happen more. Pay $1 per 10,000 words and read until you stop.
1059621 I was thinking the same thing. I used to feel tragic endings were deep, but there's also a certain laziness to them.
1069049
Tragic endings can be not-lazy, but it requires more effort. A fulfilling tragic end is harder to write than a fulfilling happy end. You have to do all the work of offering resolutions, plus convince people that this is the way things have to end. Readers who see any other solution to the problems posed by the story will be annoyed. Your tragedies must end with the finality of fate itself, lest your readers roll their eyes.
Happy endings require the same work at resolving the issues raised by the story, but stripping things down to a single possible outcome isn't part of making a happy ending. Whether a "good" ending or a "bad" ending is easier depends on how perfectionistic the author is.
It also depends on how much of your audience you're willing to alienate. There's always going to be someone who sees a different possible outcome to a sad story, even if it's just Alondro. It is easier to persuade a cynic to accept a happy ending than it is to persuade an optimist to accept a sad ending.
1057858 Wikipedia says the short story "Neutron Star" was re-published in a collection of stories called Neutron Star.
1069049
People are experimenting with that sort of thing and I think it's really cool.
1069077 That's brilliant. I mean, I knew I had to convince the reader that the tragic ending is inevitable, but I wasn't making the connection here WRT word count.
And please don't single people out for ridicule on my blog. I think Alondro has potential.
1069576
Erh, brilliant? I feel like I'm being rebuked. Perhaps I should've tried harder to tie the concept to word count.
When I link people to things, it means I think they'll be happier if they follow the links than if they don't. I was singling him out for praise. Alondro is creative, upbeat, and he always makes me laugh.
One thing I'd like to point out is something that came up in a blog I recently made.
So I think word counts on fanfictions are a bit misleading. They don't have to be split into multiple books for publication purposes. They can be published under one name as one story. So, yes, it is interesting to see those word counts, but it should be taken with a grain of salt, I think.
1058371 1067855
The serialized format may be an offender here, but let's also not forget that the really long fics are released basically with no edit cycle (or a vastly abbreviated one compared to books in print). The whole Harry Potter series was, what, a year per book? The authors who wrote FO:E stories of that length did it in approximately a year. Two at the outside, because pony only started in 2011.
For another example, I know Eakin — and this isn't to rag on him, because he writes remarkably enjoyable work — said in his Vault interview he doesn't even use prereaders. Write, re-read, release. Some part of me wishes I could do that. After all, you don't get a million words published by rewriting 100,000 words ten times.
1057919
Yeah, that. Hobbit was so hard to read I gave up, and I've only ever given up on two authors -- Tolkien and Michener. I can't handle either one.