Writing: Short-shorts and the word-count donut hole · 10:40pm Jul 4th, 2012
I've said before that the story length between short-short, and 10,000 words, is very hard. Short shorts, under 1500 words, have just one or two scenes and jump directly into the action. Stories over 12,000 words are long enough that I can rearrange the order of presentation to put something catchy at the front. But 2,000-8,000 words is hell – there aren’t enough scenes to rearrange them, yet there’s too much setup necessary to start at the beginning.
I put this to the test - I plotted thumbs-per-view vs. word count for 4300 fimfiction stories. I used only stories with at least 20 views, and only stories from authors with more than one story, because many authors write only one story, which is often both short and bad. thumbs-per-view = (thumbs-up - 9.03*(thumbs-down+1)) / views.
The black dots are stories. The green line is a linear regression line, which shows the linear trend over the entire dataset. The orange line shows the average rating for each group of 100 stories, going from left to right. (I broke up 16 short-story collections, found by searching for "short", into their individual stories.) The graph shows that the “donut hole” where stories are noticeably worse is 1000 – 7000 words. That little bit at the very left end of the orange line is not noise; the 250 shortest stories were rated much, much better on average than the next 250 shortest stories. The orange line continues staying close to the green line all the way out to 70,000 words, so I clipped that out of the graph.
So the ban on stories under 1000 words is exactly wrong! Under 1000 words is the sweet spot, where stories have significantly higher quality on average. If anything, we should ban stories between 1000 and 7000 words. (Which we shouldn't, of course.)
There may be some contamination in this data, from stories that were expanded to just over 1000 words to reach the fimfiction minimum, or just over 2500 words for the EqD minimum, and made worse.
yeah, I've had a total of One idea so far, but getting it above the wordcount mark simply fills it with drivel. I'm currently trying to make that drivel shine, but,.. you know. keeps me from brainstorming other concepts.
Clever! And I see this, amazingly, just as I contemplate rewriting my 9000 word story so that there's something nice in the front, this very rewrite threatening to push it to about 15 000.
However, may I offer two additional source for this phenomenon:
1. To write something over 10 000 you need perseverance and to keep your story at under 1000 requires discipline. Both are traits that correlate positively with quality of writing.
2. There's also a question of reader psychology. If I see a story that looks fun and is a thousand words or so I'll almost certainly read it -- the investment is trivial. If I see a story that looks fun and has a great many words I am less likely to read it on a whim, but vastly more likely to thumb it up if I stick with it. A story stuck between those two extremes suffers from being too long to impulse read and too short to make sure I click the thumb-up button because I feel invested.
Why didn't you work Favorites into it?
212519
Now that 'favorite' also means 'track', we should see multi-chapter stories favorited more than short one-shots.
212530
Did you look into different genres? Comedies tend to be shorter and are more readily liked than other stories, or at least that's what I have observed.
212559
Same graph, but all stories with 'comedy' tag excluded:
img208.imageshack.us/img208/9213/tpvvswords.png
Less dramatic than I would have thought, but I wasn't completely wrong.
Cheers
Could you please fix your images, even if the new versions are both links rathe than in-line?