In response to someone's opinion regarding how to write · 3:52pm Jul 30th, 2018
So, Mykan has done another blog post. Now I would act like this is a riff of his opinion. But lets be honest: It is not. A riff or msting would actually be funny and less preachy. This is more like making a shitty response video for youtube, but lacking the mic and stupid avatar.
So anyway, here is my response to Mykan’s defense for his style of writing. Or lack thereof, depending on who you ask.
My Style of Writing (Word limit Rule is LEGIT)
My experiment is complete,
Maniak: Are you going to write a scientifically accurate paper about your experiment?
and the results are still the same, but now I have every right to do things the way I do them more than ever... (This is intended as a TAKE THAT to my haters, and an eye-opener for non-haters)
Mykan: Open up your eyes! See the world from where I stand. Me whinning about Twilight! You believing I write in bad intend…
People have been complaining to me about the way I use WORD LIMIT:
when I write my Starfleet fics, I don't like to portray them as reading a book, but more like watching the ACTUAL THINGS ITSELF ON TV. What that means is, even though you are READING a story, you still have imagine as if you were WATCHING it on TV.
Maniak: And that is a problem because TV and books are two different mediums. See, TV is a visual medium. Meaning that a lot of things people want to convey through the story are given to us by visual or audible clues. Like the design of a character or the outlay of a city. In a more complex example, many technical aspects that compose a scene, such as set design, sound, stage lightning, ankle from which a scene is shot and of course the actor’s emotional range in voice and body language, can convey an emotion and have an impact on us, the audience.
In books, you don’t have these cues. As a result, something gets lost in translation and needs to be compensated for, to get the emotional impact the writer aims for across for the readers. And how does an author compensate for it? By using words of course.
Allegories, metaphors, puns, descriptions and so on, to paint the picture in detail. Vice versa, when people attempt to adapt a book into a movie, some of the magic of a book can get lost. Many books e.g. use paragraphes that have little to do with the plot as such to give a description of who a character is and what goes in a certain situation through their head. Those insightful lines need to be compensated in movie e.g. by body language or get lost on the cutting floor, cause getting the plot across is in movies of higher importance.
This means of course, that the chapter/episodes have a word limit to how long they should be to equal the correct timing of a normal episode, and I've done things many times before in spare time. I took WHOLE EPISODES from TV shows I watch and written them exactly as they were in story style to help determine their word limits and length.
Maniak: Kinda sad if you think about it. I mean, I am willing to say that “watching a movie and then try and see how you turn it into a written story” is at least some sort of writing exercise a beginner can do. Like, someone who really starts off with the basics of writing and just wants first to see if he can convey the raw emotions he saw on TV within words.
But doing that as someone who has written fanfics for over 15 years and could also use the time to do something more “entertaining” than focus on episodes he hates? I mean, think of the time wasted on watching multiple episodes of MLP, then turning them into fanfic chapters which subconsciously were most likely already trimmed to the word limit anyway so that you get your desired results.
Mykan could have used the time to do anything more enjoyable. Like take a nap. Go for a walk with the dog. Listen to some good music. Play a videogame. Build a homeless shelter. Or beat up his dad.
Just now, I took Sisterhooves Social, and wrote out the ENTIRE EPISODE in fanfic style, exactly as it practically was..
Maniak: Must have been hard on you, considering you needed to delete every third line the words “I hate Rarity” when you subconsciously wrote them.
Sisterhooves Social is (according to Dailymotion) 22 minutes long, borrowing a few seconds. Then again, intro and end credits don't actually count, so that's one minute off... 21 minutes of actual episode time.
Maniak: I find it kinda weird he goes for Dailymotion of all places to watch episodes of MLP, seeing how you can easily get them also on youtube.
and what do you know, the total word count is nearly 4700 words.
Maniak: Okay, that is great and all. But a few questions:
1. How detailed have you been in describing what you saw in the episode? Did you describe the characters and what they looked like? Did you go for detailed description of scenery and atmosphere? Did you reintroduce the readers to the basic personalities of the characters? Did you write more detailed descriptions of what characters went through physically but also in their head? Or did you just write “Rarity saw the picture Sweetie Bell made and cried” when at the scene of her realizing how she treated Sweetie not the best? Cause that affects the word count and also how “fleshed out” your story is. One of the best Loud House stories I ever read for example is around 30k words long. The same story, if I would compare it to an episode, felt like a 15 minute long episode at best. So that was around 2000 words just for “one minute” of animation. How would you explain that?
2. Was that the only episode you did? You said you watched multiple episodes and tried to turn them into chapters, just a few lines earlier. But you only name one.
3. Can we actually see the chapter as it is? Like as a word document so that we see how “detailed” you actually wrote the story. This way we the readers and not just you, the opinionated author, can judge for ourselves how well of a job you did in conveying Sisterhoof Social as a “fanfic”. Furthermore, it is just common courtesy and necessity to provide the evidence of such an “experiment” to a third party for review. In science, if we just took your word for it, you would be considered a laughing stock in research.
So I wasn't really wrong after all...
Maniak: You may have not been wrong, but you are also not validated as “completely right” in writing fanfic chapters like that. Just because you do it this way, does not mean you are doing it in a way that is appealing to a majority of other writers and readers out there, nor the “absolutely right way” to do.If you think your way is “right” or at least not wrong, what is the way of people who e.g. use 5000 words for what would in their opinion only amount to a few “minutes” of screentime at best? Are they inferior to your work? If that is the case, tell me why other fanfic writers are way more popular than you, someone who supposedly has “cracked” the code?
to portray a 22 minute ep or so, the episode must be at least 4000 but not over 6000 words.
Maniak: So by that logic, a movie adaptation of a book with a length of lets say 110 minutes equals 20.000 to 30.000 words. That would not sit well with most fans of Harry Potter.
If I exceed 6000 words by a vast majority (7000 or higher) then the ep will be cut in half and posted as a two-parter episode. If however I cannot cut the ep in half, then SHAVE IT DOWN... get rid of some f the paragraphs that aren't really needed and summarize others to wither it down a little.
Maniak: Now I have to admit, cutting stuff from your writing down is actually something necessary from time to time. I have done some editing for the stories of friends and down the line I had to remove certain lines or paragraphes which, for a lack of a better word, were just repeating the message the author wanted to get across earlier. However, writing also sometimes makes it necessary to actually ADD stuff to a certain chapter or scene, to flesh it out further and give it a final polish.
Furthermore, while summarization of stuff is a necessity in writing, you should always be careful how you handle it. Cause when you summarize too much stuff instead of letting also play a scene out simply by dialogue between characters, you are going to break the rule of “show, don’t tell”. Always remember, people want to read a story and get invested in the characters too by being given dialogue of the characters that conveys their emotions. If they only want a summarization of stuff happening, they can also go and read a Wikipedia article/watch some internet reviewer give a stupid recap.
If I STILL can't, then the next episode is to be a tad shorter in words than the last one to maintain the order of balance.
Maniak: I think your idea of balance is even more off than what Thanos believes counts as “perfect balance”. Also, wouldn’t you say this is just very limiting? Like, I have read some of your “stories” in chapters, particularly in Starfleet. Quite a lot of final battle chapters could easily be just thrown together to create “one episode”, leaving room for more episodes to write that are set before the battle and help to set up a situation better. Sure, it would extend your word limit, but considering how fast these battles would play out if adapted on tv, multiple of your “chapters/episodes” would be easily condensed into fewer parts than what you deliver.
I think the reason Mykan believes that some battles need to be outstretched over multiple chapters and therefore “episodes” is because he has been exposed to certain anime and how they will stretch some of the most minor things out pointlessly instead of just getting on with it. I mean, remember how freaking long the battle of Goku vs Freezer on Namek was? But the battle lasted as long as it did for multiple reasons. First, the actual source material (the manga) focused quite a few chapters on it. Second, the animators used still shots and long lingering moments to artificially pad scenes out for run time. Not because of some reason that enhanced the experience, but because they were trying to get as many episodes out of it as possible, as more episodes equaled more money for them and time to breath till Toriyama had produced more chapters to adapt.
Makes me also wonder how long Mykan would ever write on a Starfleet battle, if he decided to go full Dragon Ball Z length on certain battles. Like, can you imagine a 15 chapter long final battle against Tirek?
And don't even think about giving me that old "I can read that many words faster, in 15 minutes Big Deal.
Maniak: the fact Mykan gets always offended about that makes me wonder if he himself is slightly dyslexic. I mean, he has admitted that he barely reads anything, aside of subtitles on DVDs. He made a post on deviantart mentioning books he read over his life and that list was rather short and simplistic compared to what a person at the age of 31 reads on average. Lastly, it is known that as a result of his autism (and lack of overall basic knowledge) he has quite some difficulties when it comes to reading comprehension.
So yeah, perhaps Mykan is just pissed at others stating they can read that fast, because he himself needs double the time.
Like I told you before, you need to think of it as if you were WATCHING it on TV.
Maniak: But I am not watching it on TV. I am reading it as a story put on a screen in form of words with no pictures to accompany what I am absorbing through my eyes. The “picture” provided by TV is something I need to paint for myself in my imagination by reading words that help me get the details. And even then, the picture I paint is something completely different than what someone else may get out of it, because of how a reader may interpret the text in their head.
You need to understand, you are not giving people their entertainment by showing a badly executed tv show episode to watch. You are giving them literature. If you want to convey a story exactly the way you want, stop making fanfics and instead draw comics or animate the shit yourself.
You may be able to READ a story at different speeds, but you can't really WATCH IT at a different speed. If it was on TV it'd still be 22 minutes or so long (Using a playback speed changer doesn't count)
Maniak: Again, what I said about two different media. As such, the entire absorbing the content at “different speed” thing is pointless. It also doesn’t help much that similar to books, I can actually do one thing with TV episodes he did not account for: I can skip through them. Not “speed up” the video, but I can for example switch the channel when I think there is a boring scene and change it back later, when I think it may be interesting again. Depending on how important the scene was, I may overall not even missed major beats of the story. Same thing goes for books. I don’t need for example to know in detail the backstory of a character introduced all off sudden, when 20 or 30 pages down the line the character is going to die as the random murder victim of the antagonist anyway.
For someone who dabbles in the media of tv and fanfiction as much as Mykan, he really does not understand much about how things work or are perceived by the consumer.
And here's another bit of force I can add to my argument: Deviantart.
Maniak: You mean the dumpster fire of fanart and diaper fetishism?
Many of my fics also get posted there,
Maniak: Except your old stuff from like ten years ago, cause for some reason you are focusing all your energy really just on hating ponies now instead of doing something you may at least slightly enjoy. It kinda confuses me, cause Mykan is also all about getting praised for his stuff and has actually fans on deviantart who have asked him to reupload some of his older stuff, as they genuinely like to read it there. However, Mykan either ignores them or claims it is not the time for it yet.
but I discovered that their uploading capacity has a limit on it as well. If you try to load a text document that is over 10,000 words long, it'll go "ERROR" and be unable to load it up, and you can't try loading it paragraphs at a time, I tried that..
I was loading DARKNESS OF DIMENSIONS on DA as well. and some of the chapters as you see are QUITE SIZABLE.
Maniak: I know, I am reading/skipping through them. It is really funny to see how much you can whine like a cartoonish bitch in over 9000 words and how the “dark” story we are meant to take serious has some really silly plot developments and elements such as you self censoring the word “fuck” on multiple occasions.
One of them was soo big (More than 11,500 words) and I couldn't shave anything off no matter what I did. so... I had to split that chapter in half "Chapter 4 part 1... and Chapter 4 Part 2)
Maniak: And you couldn’t just cut it into two independent chapters because?
The DA loading manager can't handle documents that big! I even tried loading it paragraph at a time, and it didn't help. the loader automatically deleted all my test and replace it all with a simple "1" that was it.
Maniak: The thing is, I can confirm that this is the case with deviantart. Fanfic chapters in general have a word limit of 10k words there. I even looked it up again by doing a word count on one of the most overblown MLP fanfic I have ever read yet enjoyed for its complexity.
I am of course talking about the Pony POV series aka “Alexwarlorn, take a break. I don’t need your own two cents to everything in the show and franchise.”
No chapter is overall longer than 10,5k words.
In addition, when I tried to load up a fanfic once there, it also demanded for the chapter to be cut down. But here is the thing…
So, again... my word limit rule is LEGIT, and have more PROOF and REASON to keep it up now than ever.
Maniak: … despite what he claims, the actual observation and state on deviantart is not a confirmation, that the page supports Mykan’s view on “how” to write an episode. Specifically when it comes to style. In fact, as long as no moderator or higher up on deviantart clearly states why there is a word limit in place, anything may be possible. Personally I assume it is because they don’t want people to write over 30.000 words long walls of text as fanfic chapters, which may affect the general programming code of deviantart when it comes to presenting that stuff. A site primarily build on to show off painted work, not works of literature.
Furthermore, while deviantart “limits” how people can present their written work, they do not try to tell people on how to write and what to write about, as long as it does not break any major copyright law or laws considering other people’s safety. As such you can find anything on deviantart, from an ultra detailed epic story down to a short fetish story to troll someone.
That is, when the freaking search function doesn’t first force you to search through one garbage entry after another.
So at the end, deviantart does not hold your “narrative style” in higher regard than lets say the style of Stephen King, Mykan.
And while deviantart is forcing a word limit on fanfic chapters, what about other sites? Fanfiction.net never had that sort of limitation set up, which you should be able to confirm based on the fact you were a member of this site for almost a decade.
And the same goes for other pages. Mediaminer, fimfiction, Archive of our Own, they do NOT force that kind of rule on the users.
Using deviantart as an example for something that supports your views, is really just cherry picking. Like how people who believe vaccination is evil will point at the one study with questionable data confirming their views, while there is simultaneously a high amount of valid data confirming the opposite on average.
Bottom line is as followed: If you want to keep your stories and chapters the way you write them, fine. But wasting your time to prove how your way is “perfect” or widely accepted by pointing at the one page out of the norm to “support” you while also going over some episodes you don’t like and retelling them as fanfic chapters, is laughable.
In addition, this insistency of how you are right will only show that you are unable to adapt, accept or understand, why others prefer to use the tools of writing to create more elaborate and complex stories.
Lastly, if you write your stories “your way” because you think it is the best way for you as a whole, why do you feel the need to react to the criticism of us idiots as much as you do? Can’t you just not give a crap and do your thing your way, certain of the fact we are all inferior for not seeing the brilliance in your stories about how Beastboy wants to kill everything cause Terra did not suck him off?
This entire post really just boils down to your insecurities and trying to own your critics, who see far bigger issues with your writing than just the fact your stories read like Mr. Enter’s Growing Around novel in an abridged version.
👏Good show, ol' bean! Well said!
The only thinkg I want to mention here is that, scripts tend to run from 20-45 pages for a thirty minute episode. 6,000 is not enough to hit that mark. Also this is not including things like writing in sound effects, desscriptions, movements.
I think AO3 has like a 500K word limit for their chapters, but I think it's a matter of bandwidth rather than an actual rule of chapter length.
Also, I wrote this in my, admittedly inferior refutation, but look at all this work on just one character death in an unmade episode Star Wars the Clone Wars (Be wary of spoilers).
lumiere-a.akamaihd.net/v1/images/open-uri20150608-27674-1w8lkop_1c1a80d5.jpeg?region=0%2C0%2C1877%2C2160