Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

My favorite 'hot mess' was from some time ago, and I can't even remember the name now, but each chapter started with the same "3s" routine, where the author would detail the characters early morning 'shit, shower and shave' before he started the day.

Sounds like Cammie Sue and sequels.

I suppose you could say Oyster50's Smart Girl stories fall into this category and it's probably the only one I'm still paying attention to. I mostly bookmark stories and wait for them to be done. If they keep going and going and going I delete the bookmark and forget about them.

Sounds like Cammie Sue and sequels.

That was the one. The 'Day in the Life' approach is a pretty common storytelling technique on SOL. It takes some experience before most switch over to 'episodic' chapters, which focus on specific plot points. Back when I was using 'day in the life' chapters, the sizes ran 6,000 to 14,000 words, and I had many more chapters. Since abandoning it, my chapters run from 1,500 to 8,000 words.

Release that Witch, I thought the translation could cought up with the chinese release, but they dropped from 14 chapters translated a week to 7 chapters a week.

For translation work, that's an incredible turnover, as it is for any written or edited work. I suspect the slowdown has nothing to do with the translation, but everything to do with the submitter's deciding the rapid postings were costing his votes, so decided to slow the postings down to a more easily digestible pace.

My favorite 'mess' is definitely 'Pete: A Young Man's Story' by Magi. It seems it'll never be completed but I prefer reading an incomplete great story than a shitty completed one. The best about Magi's tale are the characters. They are alive, have depth, and aren't boring.

I agree with your summation of Pete:, but that's another example of why I prefer stories with definitive beginnings and ends, rather than authors who simply start a story, with no clear idea of where they're going, where the story simply drifts from one encounter to the next. Series are nice, as readers get comfortable with the characters and what to see how they progress, but there comes a time when an author needs to control their story, drop all the non-productive story threads, clean up the loose ends, and repackage the entire story into more manageable pieces otherwise commonly known as 'books'. Never ending stories are a sign of hobbyists, rather than authors serious about their craft. :(

That said, after publishing 16 books, I find that I've got a fixation with books of twenty chapters. My books range from 16 to 28 chapters, but they're all in the twenty-chapter region, which makes me wonder why that seems to be my limit. I also, much like the publishing industry at large, fond of trilogies, there's just something reassuring about three books, whereas two seems incomplete and four almost too much (i.e. too tedious).

But I guess that's a discussion for an entirely new thread.

I don't care what others perceive as professional or amateurish. I want to read an author's story, not his work résumé. As long as I enjoy reading a story, it does not bother me there is no end in sight, quite the opposite.

On that we can agree, I prefer the 'delightful failure' of a tremendous story where the author was unable to successfully conclude the story, much more than I am a horrendous success, where the story is successfully completed but it generally unappealing. Several of my all-time favorite stories on SOL have been red-striped for a long, long time.

Still, there's much to be said for writing towards an end, rather than simply 'throwing up on a page', where you dump your every thought without holding back all those elements which don't directly advance the plot or develop the characters (the many 'harem' stories reflect this, where readers give up caring who the next 'wife' is, because each eventually becomes yet another hollow cardboard figure in the story).

Like many, I don't object to those long, never-ending stories, but I'd prefer if they'd eventually clean and tighten them up eventually, rather than leaving them as 'stream of consciousness' rants.

If the story deviates far from the path to that end, he loses me as a reader. Since Mark Twain could write "Tom Sawyer" in 229 pages, I'll allow SOL authors 2 more pages so Tom can have his way with Becky Thatcher, but no more!

I agree, but alas, few SOL authors have the training in writing short stories that Twain did. As Twain himself said (I can't find the quote offhand), 'Sorry this letter is so long, but I didn't have time to make it shorter'. It takes hard work and dedication to make a story as short as it needs to be, it doesn't take much focus to let it meander wherever it wants to roam. That's the literary equivalent of herding cats.

As Twain himself said (I can't find the quote offhand)

I had to do a bit of research, but the reason I couldn't find the quote is that it's been attributed to a whole slew of authors. It turns out, the first recorded use of this term was by the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote:

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

For those not up on their high-school French, here's a summary of his reference in a 1676 French book about language, "The Art of Speaking":

These Inventions require much wit, and application; and therefore it was, that Mons. Pascal (an Author very famous for his felicity in comprising much in few words) excused himself wittily for the extravagant length of one of his Letters, by saying, he had not time to make it shorter.

Which in itself exemplifies the need for simplification and shortening!

Like many famous quotes, I suspect this one was so profound and popular, that many famous figures quoted it, and were then attributed with have first said it themselves.