TnT: Size does matter!

[mercredigirl]

A gentle reminder: Contest 40, Earth and Sky, is still open!

How we define various forms of writing by length is quite subjective. 5,000 words is the rule of thumb for a short story, but does flash fiction stop being quite so micro at 100, 200, 700, or even 1,000 words? And if 20,000 is a novella, why is 50,000 words a novel?

Everyone has their preferred writing length, as well as their own idea of what that means. – I’m partial to microfiction myself, which I think of as anything under 1,500 words.

What’s your comfort zone?

Comments

[ex_pippin880]

Flash fiction!

I don't really distinguish it from micro fiction (except for twitter fiction), though; I usually separate it between flash fiction and vignettes.

[twisted_times]

I like all sorts of fiction, but wordier a novel is, the better the quality of writing has to be to keep my attention on it. For example, much as I love Stephen R Donaldson's writing he has always - by his own admission - over-written his novels, to the point that Gilden-Fire is actually an entire plot thread that was extracted wholesale from the Illearth War novel to reduce the word count to an acceptable level.

Having said that, short stories require different skills than those for writing novels in some ways and tend to show up poor writing even more so than their bigger brothers. I tend to read more short stories then novels at the moment, partly due to time constraints but also because I just don't have the attention span to stick with novels at the moment. My personal favourite writer of short stories is Ursula K LeGuin. :)

[draigwen]

I find it hard to write flash fiction, although I find that most stories determine their own length and so sometimes end up with flash fiction. Writing to a fixed length is incredibly difficult for me and I find the minute I start doing that I lose something in the story. So I tend to just go with the flow unless it's for an assignment or competition.

I think I prefer writing short stories than novellas/novels but mainly because I don't have to worry about thinking in great detail about plot arcs, etc, and I'm too lazy to write longer pieces and rarely finish them. But at the same time I'm not such a fan of reading short stories (although I've become more interested in reading them as I've been writing more)