Are Vingettes Allowed on Lit?

[ChibiFangirl]

I've only have 2 stories on Lit at the moment and I have the tendency not to finish on what I start (and currently I have started three stories, but only working on ONE), so I wanted to make a series of vignettes stringed together in one story. Can I do that or is that not allowed?

 

[i_would]

I guess it'll be allowed as long as you reach the minimum story length (750 words?) for your submission

This can be achieved by adding several short stories in one submission, like I did with a bunch of 50-word stories (a fun exercise, by the way: tell a story in exactly 50 words, no more, no less - inspired by a.o. the works of Oggbashan who also has a whole range of them).

 

[ChibiFangirl]

I guess it'll be allowed as long as you reach the minimum story length (750 words?) for your submission

This can be achieved by adding several short stories in one submission, like I did with a bunch of 50-word stories (a fun exercise, by the way: tell a story in exactly 50 words, no more, no less - inspired by a.o. the works of Oggbashan who also has a whole range of them).

Mine is more 100 themes, a similar challenge. It would just be a compilation of short stories.

 

[oggbashan]

Sometimes I write 50-word stories. I submit them in sets of 15 to reach the 750 word minimum.

Originally I submitted them as poetry. There is no minimum word length for poetry.

I have written two How-To essays on short fiction:

https://www.literotica.com/s/how-to-write-a-fifty-word-story

https://www.literotica.com/s/how-to-plot-flash-fiction

 

[Hypoxia]

Do you want something like artistic cohesion? You could plop a bunch of disconnected 50- or 100- or 200-word vignettes into one submission, but would anyone like or even read that? I tried a trio of 2/3-LIT-page shorts on a vaguely common theme and it was not well received. I did another with 7 unrelated but thematic shorts plus fillers, with a framing device of tales told over a campfire, and it scored high. I'm working on another of group-incest confessions framed as bar-talk.

Yes, you can post a cluster of vignettes. Will you do so only because you can and you want to? Or would you like to engage a number of readers? If you want to grab eyeballs and garner responses, post a framed vignette series in Loving Wives.

 

[oggbashan]

Do you want something like artistic cohesion? You could plop a bunch of disconnected 50- or 100- or 200-word vignettes into one submission, but would anyone like or even read that? I tried a trio of 2/3-LIT-page shorts on a vaguely common theme and it was not well received. I did another with 7 unrelated but thematic shorts plus fillers, with a framing device of tales told over a campfire, and it scored high. I'm working on another of group-incest confessions framed as bar-talk.

Yes, you can post a cluster of vignettes. Will you do so only because you can and you want to? Or would you like to engage a number of readers? If you want to grab eyeballs and garner responses, post a framed vignette series in Loving Wives.

I posted this series of incomplete stories:

https://www.literotica.com/s/family-history-pt-01

They have had some response but not much. I just wanted to get them out of the pending file. They were separate stories but I linked them as 'family papers'. Sometime I will get around to the rest of them and post part 02.

My 50-word stories, on the same theme and usually contest entries, have done reasonably well, but I have been writing 50-word stories for more than a decade.

 

[ChibiFangirl]

Do you want something like artistic cohesion? You could plop a bunch of disconnected 50- or 100- or 200-word vignettes into one submission, but would anyone like or even read that? I tried a trio of 2/3-LIT-page shorts on a vaguely common theme and it was not well received. I did another with 7 unrelated but thematic shorts plus fillers, with a framing device of tales told over a campfire, and it scored high. I'm working on another of group-incest confessions framed as bar-talk.

Yes, you can post a cluster of vignettes. Will you do so only because you can and you want to? Or would you like to engage a number of readers? If you want to grab eyeballs and garner responses, post a framed vignette series in Loving Wives.

I'm not worried about viewers. If I did, I wouldn't be writing. I write becuase it gets me off. XD The vingettes revolve around a small group of characters that are related to each other one way or another.

 

[Malraux]

My first posted story was a vignette on LW (I jumped into the LW War with a story about a wife and husband who loved each other). Anyway, as long as there is a beginning, middle and end and is more than 750, I think it is okay. But critics may want a sequel. That does not mean you have to give them one. Some stories should hang, like a good Hitchcock movie. In my little tale, a husband and wife had sex as she tried to affirm her commitment knowing he had been suspicious for decades. At the end he'd had great sex, but was no more sure she'd always been faithful.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Play it by how much you write, I'd say.

If they are individually very short vignettes (less than the 750 word posting minimum) you could bundle a few together, but make it clear in the text that it's not a continuous narrative. If individual sections are longer by themselves, you could post individually and name them all "Tales of Longing (whatever) Part 1 Part 2 etc..." and connect them together that way.

If you're mainly writing for yourself, do what suits you best. Some readers might give you heat for not 'continuing' the way they want you to, but you can always turn comments off, or delete the blah blah blah if it turns up.

What might also happen, once you get a few written and posted, is that some over-arching narrative will emerge, and the individual elements will start to weave in and out of each other in a way that surprises you. I ended up with 23 chapters of a story that way, which went places I never expected.

I'm not worried about viewers. If I did, I wouldn't be writing. I write becuase it gets me off. XD The vingettes revolve around a small group of characters that are related to each other one way or another.

 

[jomar]

Absolutely. I did that with 100 word flashfic stories from a thread here on the AH some time ago.