Story Length?

[hazel43]

I am working to correct a rejected submission. My spelling is clearly the number one reason.
Just to cover the bases, I would like to ask about limits on length.
My story is fairly long.
How long can they be?

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I am working to correct a rejected submission. My spelling is clearly the number one reason.
Just to cover the bases, I would like to ask about limits on length.
My story is fairly long.
How long can they be?

They have to be 750 words long. there is no upper limit.

-Colly

 

[cookiejar]

A good place to check story length...http://javascriptkit.com/script/script2/countwords.shtml

 

[Vincent E]

This is not the question, but it often seems to be the other question.

The amount of work that you do on your word processor is indicative of how much space the story will take up once it is posted. I have found that approximately seven pages of work in MS Word translates to one page on Lit. More than that, and you get linked to a second page. I have seen at least one story here at Lit that is about 12 pages long; that should translate to somewhere around 84 pages of text in a word processor.

The trick is not in making the story long enough or short enough. I think it is in whether you decide to serialize if the sory goes on for too long. That 12-page story seemed a bit excessive. I would have recommended that the author send in three or four seperate submissions and make chapters out of it.

Less than 750 words and you are a piker. 750 words is mere foreplay. A good op-ed piece or a column in the daily newspaper should be at least 1000 words.

Then again, the idea is to communicate the story, so economy of length is not a factor. Expound and be proud, but try not to prattle on just to get up the word count.

 

[Weird Harold]

The amount of work that you do on your word processor is indicative of how much space the story will take up once it is posted. I have found that approximately seven pages of work in MS Word translates to one page on Lit. More than that, and you get linked to a second page. I have seen at least one story here at Lit that is about 12 pages long; that should translate to somewhere around 84 pages of text in a word processor.

FWIW, one Lit Page is approximately 3,750 words -- as reported by MS Word' word count function. (Tools -> Word Count.)

Word count is a more reliable way to predict the number of Lit pages, because font, font size, margins, extra spaces, and indents all affect the pagination in Word.

It's still not perfectly reliable because a Lit page length is set by a character count, modified by the nearest paragraph break -- crating a range of 3,500 to 4,500 words per Lit Page. 3,750 is close to the average last time I bothered to check a random sampling of stories for the word counts. There is about 14 KB of story on a typical 25KB Lit page.

PS: The proper length for a story is exactlythenumber of words required to tell it. Not one word more or less -- excepting the 750 word minimum required for Lit to accept a story for posting. That doesn't mean that a story might not be perfect at 600 words, just that Lit won't post no matter how perfect it is because of overhead and bandwidth considerations.

 

[Just-Legal]

I am working to correct a rejected submission. My spelling is clearly the number one reason.
Just to cover the bases, I would like to ask about limits on length.
My story is fairly long.
How long can they be?

Hi Hazel!

As the others have said, there really is no upper limit

If you have any more questions, please feel free to drop by the Newbie Support Forum - the link's in my signature

 

[hazel43]

Thanks everyone for providing me with all of this valuable information.