Writer's Workshop: The Long and the Short of It

This'll be a companion piece to my other workshop I put out today. When you set out on a new story, do you plan ahead of time how long it's going to be? By this, I don't necessarily mean the number of chapters or the order of the plot points. I literally mean, how many words is your story going to be? When you eventually put pen to paper, you'll need to know how much you intend to write. If you don't do this, have you considered that you might be writing too much or too little? There's a tempo to writing that you may not have considered; I'm here to get you to consider it.

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Wikipedia uses the following word lengths as its approximate measurements for stories: if it's less than 7.5K, it's a short story. If it's up to 17.5K, then it's a novelette. At 40K, we hit novella length. Anything longer than that is a novel. While these numbers aren't set in stone (The National Novel Writing Month calls 50K a novel, for example), they'll work for our purposes.

You'll notice these are very different measurements. A 6K-word short story would require a very different plan than a 60K-novel, and a vastly different one than a 600K-word doorstopper. It's kind of interesting, then, that sites like this one or FanFiction.net toss all of them together under the name of "fanfiction." I think this might be why a lot of fanfiction writers don't worry about things like pacing or flow. They just write whatever comes to mind, and whatever length it hits, it hits.

If that's the idea, how long should your story be? Let's break it down, shall we? If you recall, stories are composed of acts, sequences, and scenes. Every good story should have four acts, no question. Acts represent the different methods the characters take to resolve the problem, so if you don't have four, you might not cover everything. (The traditional three-act structure is similar, but you'll still need to figure out how to subdivide them properly.) Once we move into sequences and scenes, then we start asking interesting questions. The longer your story, the more sequences and scenes you should have per act.

Suppose you're writing a short story. Here on FiMFiction, we'd call it a "one-shot," since it'll only take up one chapter. If we have four acts, each act will probably only have one sequence and one or two scenes. That means we won't be able to explore each individual act very closely. Suppose each act has two scenes--that's eight scenes total. To keep it within our 7K word limit, that means we have to have less than 1000 words per scene. (875, if you're counting.) How will you write each scene if you only have 1000 words to set the scene, propose the character arguments, let them debate a little, and describe how it resolves? You'll have to be very brusque and hit each moment carefully.

Now let's jump to the other side of the equation. Let's say you're eager to write that big old epic. Worm is 1.68 million words, so you want to shoot for that. With four acts in your story, that's still 420K words per act. If we break that into ten sequences on average per act, that gives us 42K words per sequence (you know, the length of a short novel). Even if we envision each sequence as having ten scenes on average, that's still 4K words per scene! Four times as much time as the short story, and that's being extremely generous with the number of scenes and sequences you'll probably have. (For the record, Worm has 30 "arcs" and approximately 8 chapters per arc. Each chapter has... let's say 2 scenes, since I'm making numbers up, so each scene has... 3500 words.)

(Ah, speaking of which. Before I get much farther: a chapter is a group partially in between a sequence and a scene. Usually a chapter is two or three scenes, and about two or three chapters make up a sequence. It really depends on how you like to structure your chapters, honestly.)

So here's an exercise for you to do when you've got the time. Come up with a scene for a story you'd like to tell, whether it's part of a story you're working on or something just buzzing in your brain. (If you can't think of something, here's a prompt for you, free of charge: "Flash Sentry asks Twilight on a date, but she turns him down.") First, try to write that scene with however many words is comfortable to you. Then, go back and rewrite it, making sure it's less than 500 words. Do it again, but make it around 1,500 words. Now do it one more time, but try to make it 5,000 words. It's pretty tough, isn't it? When you have so few words, you can't spend a lot of time describing everything and explaining arguments. But when you get to 5,000, suddenly you have to add a lot of detail, have the characters bandy back and forth a bit, follow rabbit trails and red herrings... you get the idea.

This is my hint to you for how long your story should be. Before you set a word to page, come up with how much you want to talk about. Do you have a lot of different places you want to explore, lots of characters to flesh out and lots of actions to include? Then you should have more sequences and longer scenes. Do you have one point you want to discuss, and no more? Then maybe you don't need more than a few, with just a bit of text each. Let's say I want six sequences total, with four or five scenes each to flesh out my characters. This is probably gonna be short novel-length, let's say 60K words (for simplicity of math's sake). That means 2K-2.5K words per scene. That might be a bit long for my taste, but I can tinker with it as I write.

The more you write, the more you'll grow accustomed to the length your writing ends up being. You can figure out places to shorten or lengthen if need be. Even as I write this, I'm thinking about my own stories and how long they should be. Like, Mother and Child, I always meant to be pretty long, probably about 100K or so. It has 18 chapters, so each chapter should be about 5K words or so. But none of them are longer than half that! I've always known my writing style is pretty simplistic, but when I'm only at half the length I want, I really need to step back and think about what I'm doing. I should probably go back, look at each chapter, and see where I can flesh out the characters a little more. Pinkie's really too much for a blank slate for my liking, and Coming Dawn should probably have more screentime, considering [SPOILERS]

Anyways! See how thinking about the story length has gotten me digging into my plan for the characters and the plot? If you're working on your own story, maybe doing the same will help you. Getting it the right length may fix more than you realize. At the very least, you'll start to realize just how malleable scene length really is.

(...No, before you ask, I didn't plan the length of this post before writing it. Probably should have, huh? )