length lamentations
Jul. 6th, 2012 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliA story has a natural length, and hacking or stretching it past those limits distorts it -- not to its benefit.
Some story lengths are very hard to sell.
And while a story can be expanded, with care, by not just adding episodes but by adding complexity -- a new character, perhaps, or a bit character promoted to someone for whom the main character's plot becomes deeply significant -- it's a lot harder to lop out parts of a larger story. For one thing, the expansion trick only works if you marry the new subplot so deeply with the pre-existing story that it's hard to see where the joins are. To lop off the chunks requires seeing joins you were at pains to hide, or perhaps never noticed.
Naturally, of the two stories foremost in my mind, it's the one that's already noticably long that's hinting that it needs a lot more development in sections, not the one that could absorb quite a bit without reaching the Unpublishable Void length
Some story lengths are very hard to sell.
And while a story can be expanded, with care, by not just adding episodes but by adding complexity -- a new character, perhaps, or a bit character promoted to someone for whom the main character's plot becomes deeply significant -- it's a lot harder to lop out parts of a larger story. For one thing, the expansion trick only works if you marry the new subplot so deeply with the pre-existing story that it's hard to see where the joins are. To lop off the chunks requires seeing joins you were at pains to hide, or perhaps never noticed.
Naturally, of the two stories foremost in my mind, it's the one that's already noticably long that's hinting that it needs a lot more development in sections, not the one that could absorb quite a bit without reaching the Unpublishable Void length
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-07-06 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-06 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 12:04 am (UTC)Long enough to reach a conclusion.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 01:32 am (UTC)"A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles."