How long should a story be?

by Wholesome Rage | 17 December 2017

There’s one answer to this, the publisher’s answer. According to Meg Cabot, most publishers are looking for something under 100,000 words, and teen novels tend to be closer to 55,000.

This is a very neat answer on what’s salable, but it doesn’t actually describe how long a story should be; Long running series are a thing. It’s the lifeblood of comics and TV series alike. Anthology series like Hitchcock Presents, the Twilight Zone and Black Mirror are the exception rather than the rule; The rest are trying to run to 100 episodes on the back of a single cast, and that at the very least means character arcs.

So how do we know when a long-running show should keep going, and how do we know when it’s time to finish with dignity? How long should a series be, whether it be television or manga or fan fiction?

My answer is; As long as it can reasonably continue to escalate.

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Pantsing Vs Plotting

by Wholesome Rage | 15 December 2017

It’s an expression among writers; Pantsers write by the seat of their pants going where the work takes them, plotters sit down and get the whole thing structured and organized before word one hits the page.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both, both as an author and as an audience. Neither is the truly correct way to write a story; we all have our preferences. It should help to compare them, though, to see which suits you better as an author, and maybe to identify it better as an audience.

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The Hazardous Materials of Writing

by Wholesome Rage | 14 December 2017

Rape, drugs, suicide, abortion, depression, oppression, infidelity.

Beginner storytellers — film students, poets, authors, songwriters, all of them — seem to have a fixation on making their first stories about the most powerful things they can think of. Almost always, it boils down to the list above. Throw in stuff like child abuse and PTSD, why not? People coming out to an angry, homophobic family when you’ve never gone through the same? More often than not, they don’t have much personal experience with the subject matter, but they think that this is what makes for a great story, because it’s powerful subject material.

This is the only time my advice stops being about how to fix elements, how to improve, and just becomes a single word; Don’t.

I think the best way to explain this is to remember that writing isn’t just an art, it’s a craft. It’s technical knowledge and experience and practice. While not everyone agrees what makes for a good story, we can at least understand that there are wrong ways to do it.

Right? Can we at least agree on that? Good.

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