How Many Words Do I have to Write? · 8:12pm Sep 16th, 2014
Figuring out how long or short a story is, and therefore how long it would take to write, would seem like it would depend on how much happens in it. And of course that does have a lot to do with it. But I’ve got a theory about something else I noticed, and I’m going to toss it out there. But first, I need you guys to know a little about narrative mode, specifically narrative point of view (or, POV) and even more specifically, different kinds of third person POVs.
So, in short, story POVs are:
First person: A story told as if a character was telling it to you. All of the narration should be in the characters voice, and the narration is limited to things that character knows about and how that character would think or talk about them. At the same time, you can really show what a character thinks and feels through the narration and information given to the reader; how the character narrates becomes another aspect of characterization.
Second person: A story being told by a narrator about “you.” It can treat “your” character as anything from a blank slate to a developed character you’re expected to identify with. That… rarely works well. Outside of fanfiction about sleeping with Vinyl Scratch, second person is used mainly as a gimmick, or by pretentious young writers who were just told not to write in second person.
Third person: Here’s where things get tricky. Third person is a narrator telling the reader a story about other characters. So, most of written literature. The narrator can have a unique way of telling things, called the authorial voice, but it isn’t actually a character.
What’s tricky here is how much the narrator knows. This works on two spectrums:
How much the narrator knows about the world makes something either limited or omnisicent. When it’s limited, the focus is on one POV character at a time (though they can switch out), and the narrator only gives information the current POV character would know. If it’s omniscient, the narrator can relay information about other characters and the world that no one character has.
How much the narrator tells about the characters is known as subjectivity or objectivity. Subjectivity is when the narrator knows the characters thoughts and feelings, and narration both reveals and is flavored by those. Objectivity is where the narrator only tells the story as it might be seen through a camera, just the actions and obvious emotions that can be observed.
I would go into tenses, but they’re pretty self explanatory: Past, present, and second person future. The only thing tricky about those can be remembering what forms of the verbs you’re using. (Also, seriously, don’t use future tense either. Even more so than second person, the only use for future tense in fiction is to prove you can write a story in future tense. And we trust you, promise.)
There’s so much more to talk about here, but I really did have another blog post to get to, so one last important guideline: Generally, you pick one mode per story. You can change POV characters, and modes if you absolutely must, at scene or chapter breaks. There’s almost never a good reason to change ponies in mid-scene.
Sorry, had to do that.
Moving on! What I’m actually here to talk to you about today are two things I noticed affecting the length of my stories, and the stories of other people. And as with most things that affect writing , if you recognize them you can control them to a degree, and being able to control what you’re writing is a Good Thing. It leads to writing the story you actually wanted and not going crazy when the story gets out of hand and tries to buck you off.
Since this is something I just noticed, the terms I’m going to use to talk about it are not exactly, but I’m defining them for you as well as I can as I go along.
We start with scope.
Scope basically refers to how much of the world the events of your story directly affects. On one end of the spectrum you have epics about wars and world spanning events, and on the other side you have stories about one character facing a small, day to day problem. This is obviously a continuum-- there’s a lot of story between “affects everypony, everywhere” and “affects Apple Bloom and absolutely nopony else.”
Important to keep in mind here is that we’re talking about the direct effects of the events. A story could have potentially world altering stakes in the end, but almost all of the action in the story only affects a small group of characters (Magical Mystery Cure, for example.) Or, a story could have intimate stakes that only affect one or two characters, but the action in the story is on a grand scale (Equestria Games comes to mind.) Magical Mystery Cure is more of an intimate story, because it’s about Twilight messing up a spell in Ponyville; Equestria Games is more towards the epic side, because the action is set on a global stage.
The larger the scope, the longer your story probably will be, because it takes a long time to move the pieces around. If your story is about events taking place that affect the world, that’s usually going to involve world building or background information that the audience needs to understand. After a certain point, trying to do that in a short story risks falling into a massive exposition dump.
So, logically, a more intimate story about a relationship between two characters (unless there’s a larger subplot or framing plot) will probably be smaller in scope and shorter than a story about a war-- if you’re getting two hundred thousand words out of it, and you consider it one story (rather than a serial or episodic fic), you’re probably messed up somewhere.
A good example here is how the writers were trying to deal with Twilight becoming a princess. When they only had a half hour for Magical Mystery Cure, they kept the scope intimate, making that story just about Twilight as much as they could. But since the story was ongoing, they had to show how the new princess affected things on a larger scale. Princess Twilight Sparkle moved the scope to include Twilight’s friends and how it affected them. In this case, they had an hour to tell the story but they had some spare time to throw in some flashbacks that probably weren’t all strictly necessary to the story (let’s face it, we don’t really learn anything from Celestia banishing Luna). And eventually, they did deal with Twilight’s princesshood on an epic scale in Twilight’s Kingdom, which didn’t have time for a damn thing that wasn’t directly related to the plot in the whole hour.
However, while it’s usually true that intimate stories will be shorter and epic stories will be longer, no matter where on the scope spectrum it sits you could tell the same story, with the same number of scenes, with very different word counts. And that often comes down to focus.
With the term focus, here I’m talking about how many characters you’re asking your reader to be interested in. Not just the POV characters, though the broader the focus the more POV characters you probably need, but any of them who would be described as “main characters.” For example, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry is the POV character, but the focus is on Harry, Ron and Hermione; we want to know what they’re doing in a scene, and we care about their thoughts and feelings.
This is different from narrative mode, but it goes hand in hand. Often, in writing, a tight focus on a small group of characters works well with first person and third person limited POV with a very high level of subjectivity. A broader focus on dozens of characters will often use third person limited with more POV characters, or omniscient, and it could be either subjective or objective. You could write an third person omniscient, highly objective story with a very tight focus on just one character… but it would be a weird choice.
Now this in itself won’t really affect the length; the level of subjectivity in a tight focus is usually balanced out by the amount of information that comes from an omniscient narrator, or the size of the cast in something with a broader focus. What changes the size of your story is how focus combines with scope.
And this might be complicated.
As a story get closer to an epic scope, a broader focus will make it longer and a tighter focus will make it shorter. More characters means more different situations they’re in, which means more words to keep track of them. Plus, your exposition in a tight focus will probably be about what’s relevant to your few focus characters, while in a broader scope you’ll need to explain things happening to more characters. Simple, right?
Here’s where it gets weird. I’ve found that as a story gets more intimate, a tighter focus makes it longer. It comes down to who has relevant information for the plot; in a story that only affects one or two characters, those characters are going to have all the information. As you add more characters, and especially more POV characters, the new characters will have less information to offer the reader than if the whole focus was on the characters directly involved.
Basically, in a story about Rainbow Dash and Rarity falling in love, a scene from Mrs. Cake’s POV isn’t going to add much relevant information-- what she sees is relevant, but not much of how she feels about it would be. That scene would be shorter than the same scene from Rainbow’s POV, which would have a lot more relevant information. If you broaden the scope, and make the story about how the ponies in Ponyville react to Rarity and Rainbow Dash falling in love, Mrs. Cake’s thoughts and feelings on the matter become part of the plot, but Princess Celestia would still just be reporting on how she saw Ponyville ponies acting. If you make the story about how Rarity and Rainbow Dash falling in love alters the fate of Equestria, anypony’s POV could be relevant. At that point the story will be longer than your usual slice of life ship fic, but limiting the focus to Rainbow and Rarity is going to be shorter than getting a bunch of other ponies involved.
Another example: Say you have a fic about Twilight running for mayor of Ponyville, and you want two or three POV characters (so they can witness events when Twilight isn’t around.) You also have a subplot about Lyra and Bon Bon stealing campaign posters to wallpaper their house, and you’re concerned about how many words this subplot is going to add to your fic. If you want that subplot to stay in the background (and not add a bunch of words to your fic) then don’t make Lyra or Bon Bon POV characters. That way you can’t focus on it, your POV characters can’t go into their motivations or what they think about the color scheme. If you want to milk the subplot for all it’s worth, make one of them a POV character, and when you’re in their POV their subplot will share the focus with the main plot.
The point of all of this is to help you figure out how long a fic your story idea will be or should be or could be. If you have an epic story with a tight focus and it’s getting very long, you’re probably adding a lot of information that isn’t relevant to your one or two POV characters. If you have an idea for an epic story and you want it to be long, add more POV characters and show the readers what they do and think and feel. If you have an intimate story about one character, and you want to keep it short, consider writing it from the POV of a character who’s outside your focus. If you want it to be longer, either make another character’s POV relevant and switch between them, or keep the focus on the main character.
So, that was probably hopelessly complicated and useless to everyone. But now I can cross it off my list of things to explain. And if you take nothing else from this blog, remember that if you’re thinking about writing a second person future tense story, you will be wrong.
This post was sponsored by Jake R, Kiro Talon,Maskedferret, Singularity Dream, bats, Merc the Jerk, nemopemba, Everhopeful, DbzOrDie, Diremane, First_Down, and stormgnome. Thanks, you guys. If anyone else wants to help me out, get mentioned, and get other vaguely cool things from me, check out this post for details!
This was actually very helpful especially considering the fic I'm working on now!
Second person future tense: "You plan on choosing your own adventure some day."
Second person future tense done well...
Many thanks for posting this. Very much useful and uncomplicated. A nice refresher for those who enjoy writing but could stand to improve *raises non-injured hand*
I already posted this in your previous blog, Bookplayer, but I feel like I should post it here too, so that I can tell my opinion to the other people who people reading this blog post as well:
I disagree with how you divide the narrator's knowledge into two spectrum, "Subjective vs Objective" and "Limited vs Omniscient". A single spectrum with three values, "Objective vs Subjective vs Omniscient" is sufficient, and also makes more sense.
your 2-dimensional setup gives us the following perspectives:
limited subjective view
omniscient subjective view
limited objective view
omniscient objective view
Simply put, "omniscient subjective" and "omniscient objective" don't make much sense, since an omniscient narrator in all cases has all the knowledge: that is what "omniscient" means. If the narrator is objective, and does not tell us the thoughts and feelings of the characters, it is no longer omniscient.
If you put it into the single spectrum, you get the following knowledge viewpoints:
Objective - The narrator has access to nobody's perspectives, thoughts or feelings.
Subjective - The narrator has access to limited amount of people's perspectives, thoughts and feelings(most commonly one person)
Omniscient - The narrator has access to everybody's perspectives, thoughts and feelings.
Which at least I personally find to be a much better, and simpler, way of thinking of it.
~Sind
Never write a second-person future-tense story? Can't work?
I disagree, dearest Bookplayer, and I have the words to prove it.
No, not mine, but of an author of impeachable reputation. Behold:
Okay, it's a prose poem, but still.
I still don't get it
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You know, the most common complaint I hear about 2nd person is that it's immersion-breaking, something along the lines of "The story said I did or said this, but I would never think of doing that," which makes me think future tense 2nd person has the chance to blow the door off its hinges in true immersion by tapping into that deep undercurrent of laziness in everyone. "You will think about reaching for the remote when you can't stand another second of the infomercial, but you won't actually reach for it."
The eternal battle of precision and communication. The more precise you are, the more difficult it is to communicate many things.
You do realize someone is going to do this now just to spite you, right?
I'm not sure who the designated spiter is this week, though. I haven't looked at the list.
Though, thinking about it, one could actually write a story like this - it would be a prophecy, or perhaps a curse.
There are a couple other uses of the second person perspective.
The primary use of it - and indeed, by far the most common use for it in the "real world" - is games and choose your own adventure type stuff. A huge number of games use the second-person perspective because "you" are actually in control of someone, and choose your own adventure type stories are frequently written in this manner. While the former is probably largely irrelevant to folks here, the latter is somewhat relevant as such stories pop up from time to time.
It mostly works because in these cases the person in control - i.e. "you" - have actual agency, and therefore, referring to the player as "you" feels less weird because they really are being addressed.
It is also occaisionally used when a character is talking to themselves, frequently for a short bit of story written in a different perspective, but it is possible to write an entire story in this manner - I've seen a few stories written in this way, here and there. In that case, though, it is more or less a first-person perspective, but it is written very differently from how most first-person perspective stories are written.
When I think about scope, I think about scope as in "how much material is this story actually going to cover" rather than "how many people does it effect". In other words, if the scope of my story is "Rarity and Applejack have their first date", that is a very different scope from "Rarity and Applejack fall in love and get married". The former story is going to be a lot shorter than the latter story, all other things being equal. Scope can also tell you when you need to start your story and when you need to end it. Your definition of scope seems to be the same as your definition of focus, as both seem to be about "how many characters does this affect".
I think another important point to make is the question of "what defines a character". People usually think of characters as individual people, but sometimes it is useful to think of groups of people as a single character - sometimes, even entire countries, races, or peoples. A character, after all, is someone who does something in the story, and a group of people may fill the same role as a single person, where the individual person doesn't really matter as much.
Take The Twelfth Fleet, a short story about a war between humans and aliens:
i.imgur.com/b7UK6JV.png
It is pretty epic in scale, but ultimately, the story is about two characters - the humans, and the aliens. The individual people there don't matter; we care about what is going on with the movement of worlds. As such, despite the story having an "epic" scope, it really doesn't, because we're really only dealing with two characters. At the end, it brings it down to a much more personal level, but that is to deliver the ending.
Likewise, in a story about Twilight getting used to being a Princess, "the nobles" may more or less be a single character, even though there are many of them, because they act in opposition to her but they may not be important as individuals. Or it may be a drama about the royal court where the individual players are all important (or at least the major ones are, with the various hangers on being effectively a single "character" who acts as a sidekick for some important one).
Usually, when people do this, it is in order to make the protagonist inscruitible, and thus set us up for some sort of plot twist or reveal, or simply make us wonder about what the character's true motivations were. It seems to be common in certain kinds of mood pieces which are about capturing a moment in time.
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I knew someone would have beaten me to it.
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I knew someone would have beaten me to it.
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(Edited to fix quote.)
The distinction I was trying to make was between how many characters these events affect, and how many characters the story focuses on. So, for example, in an episode like Winter Wrap-Up the scope is Ponyville, because the action directly affects most of Ponyville in some way, and the focus is one character (Twilight.)
Another example: In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the scope is Hogwarts (various actions affect everyone in the school); the focus is on Harry, Ron, and Hermione; and Harry is the POV character. So those are three different things.
I once had an idea for a second person fic that I think would work because it's really a first person fic in disguise. The storyteller is really Luna and she's basically telling you about her downfall and the reasons behind her actions, but here's the thing, she's trying to persuade you that you would think the same thoughts and do the same deeds if only you were expose to the same circumstances. "You would do this, you would do that [right?]" She's trying to justify herself. The reader doesn't have to empathise but they could chose to.
Although I was about to leave without commenting, I must say, that the actual reason literature is never written in the future tense is: there is NO future tense!
It may surpirse, but knowledge of linguistics is not required to understand, that, while able to talk about what happened and what happens, we can never know for certain, what's about to happen. This is the reason we use the present tense to refer to future events. For example: I am about to do stuff, I am going to do stuff, and even I shall/will (surprisingly it is not the future-tense, but rather just modal verb!).
(This comment is also to reply these people:)
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This is a slight misunderstanding of how the future tense works in English. It's true that English doesn't have a conjugated future tense the same way that a number of other languages do, and thus relies on an auxiliary verb to express the idea, but that doesn't make it not a tense. Lots of tenses in English require auxiliary verbs. You need "to have" to form the present and past perfect: I have eaten, I had eaten, you need "to be" to form the present progressive to distinguish a lot of actions from the simple present, as "I eat" and "I am eating" mean totally different things. You can even double stuff up for things like the future progressive, like "the plane will be boarding soon." The lack of a conjugated future tense is notable about English, but it gets morphed somehow into this idea that it means English doesn't have the tense at all, and the reason that seems "surprising" to people is because it's an obviously incorrect statement. Obviously English has a future tense, because everybody can comfortably talk about things that will happen in the future without confusion. People conflate the absence of a type of grammar with the absence of a language feature entirely, when those are different things.
I am amused a bit about your explanation of why English doesn't have a conjugated future tense, because there are a number of languages that do have a conjugated future tense. I wonder what that explanation says about those languages.
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I see. However there is a reason for future tense's not being (well, at least grammatically), let us repeat: one may know about the current epoch or the past epoch -- but what is known about the future? I can know what I did and what I do, but how can I know about what happens in the future (note using "happens", not "shall/will happen")? I can only know about my present intentions; I might want to speculate about the future; but I could never predict it.
This is the difference I pointed out. The grammar only supports me by leaving room only for two tenses (yes, some, yet not all languages are just so tiny only two tenses are allowed in their budget
).
For that matter the very idea of the future does exist independently of grammar. However I have already pointed out the future's specialty -- this is why some languages' grammars have no future tense, after all.
Do you think it a tense? But you've talked about different tenses, while they are actually a combination of a tense, an aspect and a mood. Tenses are to tell, if it is the present or the past (or, I'll allow that for now, the future), aspects are to describe the event (point in case -- I eat food, a fact about the present; I am eating [insert specific food], a contiguous action that's been going on uninterrupted and is going on right now in the same present, not past or expected future), and moods are for something else (if such names, as "indicative", "imperative" and "subjunctive" are meaningful to you -- and I assume you've heard them).
Again, we do describe future, when in such need, but use the present tenses. This is why one can't do a future-tense story: one would end up using the present tense anyway.
So, yeah
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