the importance of length

[davidwatts]

If this has been touched upon previously, I apologize.

What are authors experience regarding the length of stories and their acceptance by readers?

Do you get better response with longer or shorter stories?

Are stories better received when left whole or submitted in chapters? For example, an eight page story as opposed to four two page chapters.

What I mean by response is not necessarily in terms of higher voting, but more along the lines of the number of people reading and the volume of responses.

Thanks in advance.

 

[impressive]

It is just my personal preference (as a READER) to have each story be 1-3 Lit pages. As I've said in other threads, anything longer & I want real paper in my hands.

 

[oggbashan]

Long is wrong.

If you post it as one story of say 4 Lit pages then most people won't read to the end and vote.

If you post it as several chapters most people won't read more than the first chapter. Subsequent chapters don't get views and votes.

If you post several linked stories only the first one gets read and voted on.

Og (who writes LONG stories and has tried all formats)

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Write the story. Don't worry about the length. A good long story will do as well or better than a bad short story or one where you had so much more to say and butchered it to get in under some arbitrary minimum.

My longest stroies do just as well as my shorter ones. It isn't the length, it's what you do with the words that matters.

Just my 2 cents.

-Colly

 

[alg68]

So, Og, how does one get people to read a longer story? Or is this simply not the best place for longer stories?

I would think the category also makes a difference - personally I tend to goto 'erotic couplings' for a quickie, but to horror or romance for a good read.

 

[Weird Harold]

Do you get better response with longer or shorter stories?

My best received story (of thre posted here) is aso my longest story. However, it's simply the best story i've posted so I think it depends more on how good the story is rather thanit's length.

Are stories better received when left whole or submitted in chapters? For example, an eight page story as opposed to four two page chapters.

I haven't posted any serials or novel-length stories that required splitting them into chapters.

I do know that personally, I avoid anything that has "chapter one" in the title until I see some sign of commitment to "chapter two" and beyond from the author.

It depends on what you mean by a "page" -- MS Word and other word processers count pages differently than Lit does. A single Lit page is roughly 3,750 words (as counted by MS Word's Word count function) but that can be anything from 4 to 10 pages in MS Word.

The bst advice is write the story you want to write and don't worry about how long it is or readers' quirks about story length. If it's a GOOD story it will get read and voted on. If it's NOT good, it won't matter how long it is.

 

[oggbashan]

So, Og, how does one get people to read a longer story? Or is this simply not the best place for longer stories?

I would think the category also makes a difference - personally I tend to goto 'erotic couplings' for a quickie, but to horror or romance for a good read.

How long is long?

My stories get read but the length of some of them restricts the audience.

Some of the advice given by others is a valid as mine. People will read a Good Story whatever the length but reading from a screen is tiring. If two stories are equally good the short one will get more attention.

Og

 

[davidwatts]

thanks to all who are taking the time to respond...

To clarify what I meant by pages, I was referring to Literotica pages.

 

[carsonshepherd]

So, Og, how does one get people to read a longer story? Or is this simply not the best place for longer stories?
]

One gets people to read longer stories by writing really good longer stories!

 

[cantdog]

Bingo, carsonshepherd.


Great advice, but of course not very helpful per se.

In order to write these very good stories, you may as well know that you are not entirely on your own. The way to do it can not be "known" in an objective way, the way the angle of a triangle is "known," first of all, because it concerns quality. There was some discussion by Socrates about how the Good is known or perceived, and a good deal of discussion since.

The consensus seems to be, that a person can train themselves, at least, to recognize the Good when it's in front of them. It took me a good ten years of effort to acquire a palate for good food. You aren't born with that ability.

So I suggest placing one of your better works before a discerning audience, folks who will more-or-less-mercilessly tell you what they see that needs to be improved.

There are two such forums here at lit:

Story Feedback [sfe]
Story Discussion Circle [sdc]

They are not identical. The best, the most thorough and harrowing, that is, is the sdc. Read the initial, sticky threads there and you'll have the tools to make use of it.

The sfe is more ad hoc, and kinder, but many times a lot less specific. It too has a thread at the top.

RTFM and hop right in.

A patient editor can also help, loads.

Those patient editors, many of them, have distilled their advice into How To articles, also on the site. You saw and probably skipped over many references to them in the lead-in screens as you submitted you stories.

Not all of them are worth your time, entirely. There may be 74 synonyms for "cunt," for example, but the fact is, you won't want them in a story, for the most part. People are put off, for instance, by reading about the squack, the bearded clam, or the sweet patootie in use in the course of narration. But many of them are very good, nudges in the right direction.

The best thing to do is write more, listen to people speaking and think about that when you write dialogue, structure your story to carry the reader forward. And the next best thing is to make use of the resources we have here. This can be an ongoing workshop.

cantdog

 

[Pelios]

I have a length problem

Ok, first of all, I realize that this is my fault for not checking the submissions text closely enough, but the fact is, I submitted a story - Kathy Likes Women Chap 2, and for reasons unknown to me, half of it was missing. Disaster!!!!

I don't know what to do. There don't seem to be any provisions for pulling a story so I can resubmit it. I am afraid that if I resubmit the same story, I will be told that a story by that name already exists.

Does anyone have a clue? What do I do with my mess?

Feeling stupid and helpless,

Pelios

 

[carsonshepherd]

fear not, grasshopper. Merely resubmit the story, via the usual method, with "Edit" in the title. You can even PM Laurel if you like. She usually does it pretty quickly. You can pull a story by the same method but it's easier to resubmit as an edit. This happened to a friend of mine.

Moral of the story - always preview your submissions.

 

[Lovepotion69]

As I normally just copy and paste stories into a Word doc I don't mind them long. At the same time I have to admit I find anything about 5 Lit pages too long. That's my maximum. Three is good.

/LP

 

[Stefan_J]

Most of my stories are written between 6 and 8 Lit pages, and I've found that length doesn't seem to be a factor in how well-received they've been. The only time I would split a story up into chapters is if I were writing a series about the same characters, or if from the beginning I was aware that the story would exceed 8 to 10 Lit pages, which is where you'd be considering the Novel/Novella section.

The Novel/Novella section, in my opinion, is a zone in which you place a story if you want the least amount of reads possible. I may be wrong (and quite probably am, but does anybody out there have a Novel/Novella with a large amount of views?), but I do want my story to be given the best chance at having a large audience.

So, my answer to your question is no. Kind of. I do think that for a longer story to survive you have to make ten times the effort to keep it interesting, because most people will read a so-so 2 page Lit story to the very end, but even the most ardant fan of erotica will pull out if the tale becomes stale.

How do you make a story interesting? Provide the reader with realistic dialogue, nicely formulated characters and a plot/scenario that revolves around more than two people having a fuck.

Oh, and decent writing never goes astray.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well yeah, it’s a tautology to say that if you want to write good long stories, write ones that are good, but that doesn’t say anything about how one goes about doing that.

The secret is the architecture, or rather the rhythm of the architecture. If you listen to a long piece of music, you’ll notice the obvious overall structure moving towards the big climax, but there are smaller structures within giving us smaller payoffs, kind of a fractal thing, or waves on waves. That’s what keeps our interest alive. Long stories have to be structured the same way.

A long story has to present us with dramatic episodes. All books do this. They usually call them chapters. They break the story into meaningful portions that give us little payoffs along the way. The payoffs should be such that they whet our interest for the big payoff we know is coming, building the intircacy and meaning of the story.

If you can’t find the right way to do this, your story’s going to seem too long to a reader. A story about two people going out together and having sex is going to be too long if you take forever telling us how she goes about getting dressed or tell us about every forkful of food they eat. However, if you break it into little, dramatic, meaningful vignettes, you can write a whole book about this one date.

The tren in popular fiction is to write each chapter as a little sawtooth wave, taking you up to a crisis and then switching to another subplot in the next chapter. The result of all these little teeth is to propel you along while you chew up the story.

So think about writing your long stories as a series of episodes. That helps organize the material and gives the story narrative thrust. It’ll keep the thing from feeling like it’s dawdling, which is really what bothers us when we say a piece is too long.

---dr.M.

 

[Weird Harold]

Well yeah, it’s a tautology to say that if you want to write good long stories, write ones that are good, but that doesn’t say anything about how one goes about doing that.

The secret is the architecture, or rather the rhythm of the architecture.
...
A long story has to present us with dramatic episodes. All books do this. They usually call them chapters. They break the story into meaningful portions that give us little payoffs along the way. ....

A good point, Doc, but necesarily a bit incomplete.

There are all sorts of things that have to be done differently to make a long story good and several different techniques for accomplishing them.

In the context of online submissions, there are some things that are more important than than they are for a more conventional publishing venue.

For example, The Hook, has to be a bit stronger for an online story than for a print story, IMHO -- but we've spent entire threads debating how to write a good Hook to a story.

Since it's generally considerd harder to write "short" than it is to write "long," the simple answer to the original question is, "If it's good, they will read it," and leave the question of "what is "good" to other threads.