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]

Thank you for sharing these reflections!

If you're interested in expanding on it, may I ask what you mean by "the grinder" of exchanges? I couldn't quite tell whether you were praising the efficiency of shorter timeframes and lower minimums, or abhorring the whole idea...?

I have 3 exchanges/fests that I participate in every year (FKFicFest, HLH_Shortcuts, and Everywoman), all of which have been running (in one form or another) for over a decade. Many years, I also fit in a fourth, which is almost always a new event that the mod sincerely intends to be recurring, but which never recurs.

[kalloway]

If you're interested in expanding on it, may I ask what you mean by "the grinder" of exchanges?

Mostly how it's easy to say 'oh, I'll do one more, it's low-minimum' and get burned out for the whole experience. There are people who can participate in dozens per year but I was not one of them. Utterly burned out on the whole experience, though I'd intended to be a prolific pinch-hitter until AO3/OTW decided to show its whole arse.

(I don't actively post to Squidge but I'd probably take part in something happening over there. I do love doing fests and whatnot on DW.)

[brightknightie]

Thank you for explaining and sharing your experience! I'm in a very small, very old corner of fandom; I'm often without context. :-D