Random Ramblings LI - A Pre-Rant · 11:25pm Apr 4th, 2016
IN WHICH I CASTIGATE MYSELF
Okay, good-news/bad-news time. Good News: Adagio Dazzle Wants A Burrito is completed. By that I mean that it contains a standard narrative structure, and I was able to actually conclude it in a way that is consistent with what I and my handful of readers expect from a "Burrito" story. Bad News: After revision, it's about a thousand words shorter than I'd hoped it would be.
See, I've taken to writing stories in a simple text-edit program so that I don't worry about frivolous things like formatting, text wrapping, page breaks, or word count. A fic will have as many or few words as it needs to be. However, doing this sometimes results in story lengths that I didn't intend – my currently-unsubmitted (but on the site) story about Spike being trapped in a YouTube Poop ended up clocking in at just over 3000 words despite my intention to keep it as close to 1000 as possible. Meanwhile, "Adagio" currently sits at 1,721 words – over 1000 words shorter than either "Sunset" or "Sonata", both of which clock in at around 2800 words. I'm honestly torn; I could submit it as-is, but I feel like I should go back to try and add stuff to "Adagio" to get it to that length… yet I'm concerned that doing so will make the story feel padded and draggy.
I'm going to sit on it for a couple more days and see if maybe some more ideas for internal monologue come to me. The fact that I've worked on this story off-and-on for well over a month and have less than 2000 words to show for it is what really hurts, though. I'm truly sorry for letting you down, and letting myself down.
I find that aiming at a specific word length is the surest way to end up not hitting that word length.
The one time I seriously padded-out a story just to hit an arbitrary word count, I ended up injecting a bunch of crap that bogged it down. Similarly, one of my better-received stories is a lot longer than I usually like things to be, but I couldn't really accommodate its narrative structure in any fewer words. I would say that similar things are true even for Writeoff stories, where you're often heavily constrained in terms of how long or short the story must be, and where you always have to keep an eye on length; you're better off just writing the story, seeing what you get, then adjusting as necessary.
Probably the only person who cares about length (as opposed to quality or completeness) is the author.