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

[brightknightie]

Definitely, customs and expectations vary a lot by fandom! And by era of the same fandom, in some cases.

I'm very interested to learn that you're seeing games where WIPs are allowed, as long as they meet the minimum length; that's a wholly new idea to me! I note carefully that you specifically designated these as prompt fests, not exchanges, which is an important distinction.

I had not been thinking about the "mini gift" gifting games when I posted this. I'm not sure why, as I listed fandomgiftbasket in my monthly fest round-up just a week or so before this post!

Thank you for sharing this!