Fanfiction minimum lengths & customary lengths

[brightknightie]

I've been wondering about the ongoing development of minimum lengths in fanfiction events and customary lengths in fanfiction in general. What have you observed? What do you think and feel about lengths? Both in terms of events (exchanges, challenges, games), specifically, and in broader terms of preferences -- what do you personally like best to read and write, and what do you think today's audiences like best to read?

Having a minimum length for an event, of course, aims to set a shared baseline for predictability and fairness, so that no one is unpleasantly surprised or feels poorly-done-by.

• In recent years on DW and AO3, the standard minimum length of an exchange story seems to have gone from 1K words (as in the saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words") to 500 words.


• In my email list days, exchanges weren't really a thing, but challenges were. As I personally remember it, we had few if any length requirements, just implicit customs and expectations. Most stories were 1K+ words; anything smaller was called a vignette, sketch, or ficlet, not a story. (Drabbles were exactly 100 words.)


• For paper zines, of course everything depended on the editor/publisher/compiler! Most of those I've seen have all their stories at 1K+ words, with only poetry and 100-words-precisely drabbles at lower word counts.

(Maximum lengths seem always to have been rare on all platforms. Where they existed, they seemed to be driven by capacity (how many words or bytes fit in a single post) and the importance of stories in an event being complete units at sharing, not serials or WIPs.)

Comments

[senmut]

I have had to cut back severely on reading, but even when I did... 5k was an upper limit for me to read. If it was longer than that, but posted in chapters, I could get by reading a chapter at a time. My reading time is post-work, and I have learned the hard way that I do not give the attention and respect the stories deserve, often only clicking Kudos. So I save my reading "spoons" for exchanges mostly.

Writing? I prefer the 1k minimum for exchanges. I find exchanges that have moved to the 500 minimum but give you 3-4 months to write lead to either a lot of last minute pinch hits (oh I can knock that out closer to the deadline/oh no I forgot about it) or a so-so performance in readers from outside the exchange participants. Granted, this is just a casual observation from those metrics that are visible on those exchange fics.

As to my personal preference for writing? The length needed to tell the story. I love popping drabbles and ficlets off for small concepts, missing scenes, character introspection. But I have had a number of fully plotted fics in recent years (not your fandom, BK, unfortunately) that have been novella and even novel length.

[brightknightie]

Thank you for sharing your observations and preferences on this!

Yes, I've been thinking lately about the "one chapter at a time" posting style, which was actually kind of enforced on the email lists back in the day, come to think of it. Each person was permitted a maximum of three posts per day per list, so on the fiction list, where there was a maximum reasonable length you could expect the listserv and people's email programs to process, you could post a maximum of three parts per day. I definitely read only completed stories -- I learned my lesson about WIPs long ago -- but chapters! A few parts at a time for a while was very nice, all around.