Desiderius Price

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They say debut novels for publishing should be 100k or less… that’s a short story! I had a similar issue with wanting to write the smut while also wanting to have a plot-centric story when I returned to my potter story. I’ve ended up making two versions… one I consider “explicit” and the other “cleaner”, so think Unrated vs R MPAA movie ratings. This has been a success IMO, because I’ve also written a bit of software that lets me write the two versions in the same file, where I annotate what’s “clean” and what’s “explicit” – it filters it out and I post the results. Thus certain descriptions, scenes, themes, and characters (& implications) are in that explicit side only. Of course, this has now resulted in the explicit side being about three times the size of the clean…

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The *other* trap with an OC is the Mary/Gary sue phenomenon. (See the “Ensign Sue Must Die” web comic...) Nah, wrote mine with issues so he’d foil Harry in trying to assist Oliver Wood in teaching first year flying lessons (you know, have Harry focus on one person instead of helping with the entire class). This OC loitered because it was useful for showing Harry caring and helping somebody having trouble adjusting to Hogwarts. Subsequently, became useful to show the differing levels of concern teachers had when a student goes missing (all-hands-on-deck if it’s Harry, whereas a shy first year, the assumption is “ran away” when the truth was the opposite). And this OC is now a useful observer to show the events happening within the castle when Harry’s attendance is spotty at best. Overall, the story is definitely better with this addition, even if it’s blowing up my word counts (around a 7:1 ratio compared to the previous version). But I digress...

Aside from the potter story, the rest of stories are original works. Thus, backstory episodes help a lot with some characters and setup to that universe as a whole. Funny enough, having delved into originals helped when I returned to the potter story, I accidentally made some well rounded characters, one of whom is now getting regular attention because it offered a good vantage point I didn’t have before.

One twist you can do, especially if you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of writing backstory character development fics, is to write it as an episodic serial. Thus each chapter is an “episode”, with its own mini-plot contributing to the overarching development you’re after. Characterization backstories, where I’m simply filling in their character(s) using the episodes to define it, are the most agreeable to this format.

Cool. Having stories that breed plot bunnies is how the adventure grows. Half debating to simply post my Halloween story as the first chapter to a longer story, myself.

Maybe… the remaining word count is quite high TBH. To the original point, Thucycides and lots of early works didn’t have paragraphs/pages, those were mostly added in later.

Extra line breaks had gotten lost, so no scene separators, thus 109k wall of text. Know I’d occasionally get one determined reader here or there, but yeah, intimidating. Even FF.net gave the hint, because they updated their word counter to max each chapter’s word count out at 65k (ie, they’d simply not count anything more to story’s total). Thus, my first action when I started the current rewrite was to simply break those chapters in two (ie parts A & B), though I’ve now totally yanked them until I get the revision bit done (due to confusion with how their alert notifications worked) – maybe this decade?

Alas, we both kinda agree 109kwords (about the same length as JKR’s third NOVEL) is generally excessive for a single chapter? Current rewrite has 170 chapters where there used to be 44ish of those older 108, so it’s definitely way more detailed and enjoyable now, with 6-7k averages, and I’m having to mix the two versions as there were some good ideas in that previous rewrite. So, 50 might’ve been better, but I agree the execution was dumb. Hey, making mistakes is how we get better at writing, right?

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Ages ago, I thought longer chapters were better. So I took my potter fanfic, then around 108 chapters and 660+k, and during a rewrite condensed it down into 11 chapters, but the result was one of those chapters was around 109kwords! Two others were 91k & 70kish. That ... was … horrific. Individual scenes get lost, run together, etc. And I’m still detangling that mess!

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Aw, the eternal debate on “size” Shorter generally means a faster tempo, but you cover less. Longer means you can get into more detail, but can be a slower read too. Also, there’s the attention span of the reader to consider, and giving them natural “stopping points” to come back later. I’ve tried short chapters before (2K) and that was faster to write that story. OTOH, I tend to go for 7-8k averages for the contemplative/serious writings. However, if a chapter hits 10kwords, that’s when I’m looking to split (even if it goes “part A” and “part B”).

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