coaltide | It was the Coal of Times

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2019

It was the Coal of Times

It was the best of assignments, it was the worst of assignments, it was the age of gaming your offers, it was the age of forgetting to remove that one fandom from your offers, it was the epoch of treat writing, it was the epoch of apocapinch-hits, it was the season of fics of your dreams, it was the season of explicit DNW spitefic, it was the spring of hope that the anon in the comment above is writing for you, it was the winter of ars_belli is your author.

Prompts revealed and Madness opens: Approx 9 November
Default deadline: 11 December, 9am UTC
Assignment deadline: 18 December, 9am UTC
Main Collection Reveals: 25 December (time tba)

Yuletide Discord for Hippos. Google Group for PHs. Fail_fandom wiki for wank history.

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No, that'd be great! It's not about the fic length for me, it's about how good the fic is. A 1000 words of a well-crafted scene is better than 5000 words of bad fic.

I always think that's an odd comparison. Yes, sure, 1000 words of well-written fic is better than 5k of SPAG errors and DNWs. Obviously. And 5k of well-written fic in better than 1000 words of SPAG errors and DNWs, so this says nothing about length, just that good fic is better than bad fic (duh!).

When people say that they'd be disappointed with 1k fic, they're not comparing it with 2k or 5k or 20k of objectively worse fic but with longer fic of the same writing quality.

DA I mean, just speaking for myself, I'd rather get 1K of badfic than 5K of badfic. Less to read through to comment on!

I think the other reason for the comparison is time. If someone has a set amount of time, they could either choose to just write and gift me 5K of unedited, un-beta'd work, or spend time writing 1K and then get that 1K edited and beta'd. Odds are that the 1K gift would be better (or at least less SPAG-y), even though the same writer created both gifts and the same amount of time may have been spent overall.

NAYRT

I mean, the question was would we be disappointed with 1000 words of exactly what we asked for. The answer is no. The further expansion of that answer is that experience hasn't led us to assume a correlation between length and quality anyway.

But there's more to something being well-crafted than just the quality of the words. If it's a tight scene that ends at one particular point for a particular reason, 1000 words could be more or less effective than 2000. If a writer is good at being able to tell how much is needed to have an intended effect, the length can be well suited to what it's trying to do.

AYRT

Fair enough. I personally feel like every decent or good story would be even better if there was more of it. I never read a fic I enjoyed where I didn't think "I wish this went on for another few thousand words".

Yeah, sometimes that feeling is the intended effect, though. Leaving you wanting more can be a good feeling. It can be better than actually getting more and then realizing it didn't live up to your anticipation, or it expanded something you were imagining differently.

AYRT

Leaving you wanting more can be a good feeling.

Huh. I... don't get that. It's frustrating, and frustrating is never good.

it expanded something you were imagining differently

See, THAT is a good thing to me. I usually have all those ideas in my head how I think a fic should go on and then the author does something completely different, and that's amazing because now I have the version in my head and another version in the actual fic. That's, like, twice the fun.

Frustration can be good.

I think you have a different definition of "good" than I do.

+1

This is something many people in fandom don't get, though, since a lot of fanfic writing revolves around providing you with the more you crave for. Which is why you get people who write epics that get bogged down by the writer having to show everything, and commenters who are upset when the story ends when the main arc does, instead of dragging on for a couple of chapters until you've examined every angle and all the characters and fullfilled the iddy expectations of even the last reader.

I think this very much depends on what your reasons for reading and enjoying fanfiction are. If you're in it for a narratively and artistically well-told story or if you're mainly in to get iddy expectations fulfilled. I freely admit that I do fanfic for the latter. I will take a story that is iddy but flawed over one a well-executed masterpiece any day.

Some of us have ids that don't get turned on by crappy writing.

+1000

A lot of fandom nowadays is about not just "More is better" but "MOST is better" which is what leads to stuff like 150K slow burn fics where they maybe kiss at the end.

I don't think this is a "nowadays" thing; there were plenty of superlong fics in my fandoms written in the early and mid 00s with dubious amounts of plot.

+1

m/m slash has been "The love that never shuts up!" since I first encountered the genre in the 1990s.

DC

All fic has been like that since the 90s, nonny. All of it. m/m isn't special that way.

Fuck, the longest fic ever written is apparently a 4.5 million word genfic for some video game on ff.net. You'll be happy to know it's still incomplete.

Yeah, but fandom these days is more on the side of writing 5000 words of badfic.

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