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Post by Mengde on Mar 20, 2009 16:00:41 GMT
Sai, what are you - Proust but with gay men?
At the End of All Things is my longest fic right now (126,787 words posted, ~30k or so written but not posted, ~25k or so to go), but people seem to have been very pleased by it. I haven't received any complaints about the lack of hot sex, and here's why - I said up front I was doing a post-apocalyptic FFVII-meets-Trigun shounen-story kind of thing, and did not say it was Cloud/Tifa or Vincent/Yuffie specifically, because it's really not about that. It sounds like your story isn't really about Cloud/Zack, either. I would have said up front that I was doing a retelling of FFVII with Zack surviving and let the readers interpret the romance for themselves.
The whole of fanfiction is far too focused on pairings anyway, I think. Your readers should enjoy your story for the story, not for the people banging in it. Anyone who criticizes you for not pandering to the pairing-hungry masses can go fornicate themselves with an iron stick.
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Post by quietncryptic on Mar 21, 2009 1:23:11 GMT
I agree with Mengde. Do it for the story, not the glory!
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Post by VulcanElf on Mar 21, 2009 2:18:58 GMT
For the record, I'm not suggesting that long stories are bad. I rarely bother with books that are less than 400 pages -- it's generally not worth the effort to get involved in something that's over as soon as it has begun. That having been said, The Lord of the Rings, as an example, is one of the twenty longest novels ever written at approximately 470,000 words. (That's all three volumes together.) So it should be evident that there's long and there's loooooooong, and a book is fully capable of being a lengthy monster at 300,000 words.
And while we're not talking about marketability, we are talking about readability. So, no, just because we're discussing fanfiction and not a book on a bookshelf, it's not a moot point. Wordy, awkward sentences are an issue no matter what genre you're reading in, and I think the lack of real accountability in fic generally makes for wordier, more ponderous works where the author feels little to no obligation to pare down.
I am not trying to attack you, Sai, by the way. I'm just saying that especially when you're telling what you know is a long story, it's important to be hard on yourself when it comes to wordiness and unnecessary footage.
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Post by Moira Rose on Mar 21, 2009 8:37:25 GMT
I agree with Mengde. Do it for the story, not the glory! Third-ed and Motion Carried. On the subject of over-emphasis on pairings in FF.Net, I do confess that I've become more and more choosy as to which stories I'll read, ever since I blew my eyes out over a story that was...not as nice as it was made out to be. I think the choice of the number of words you're going to use, SaI, is very much up to you, but I do advise caution like Vulcan has. I trust you not to let the fact that there's no real barrier/word limit make you add too many irrelevant details.
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