Me: I Am INSPIRED I Want To WRITE

me: i am INSPIRED i want to WRITE

my brain, immediately: i have never once even seen a sentence

Another thing that’s cool about fanfiction: it’s as long as it needs to be.

Well, sometimes it’s longer than anything on God’s green earth needs to be, but my point is that there’s really no rules about fic length.  In traditional publishing there’s this awkward middle where nobody wants to print a novella that’s too long for a short story collection but doesn’t really fill out a book.  Ebooks have changed that somewhat but it’s still a convention that a book is about 75,000 words.

Fanfic is not bound by this standard.  If your story takes 25,000 words to tell, then you can do that, and there are readers for whom that’s a sweet spot.  If you just want to keep going and going for 350,000 words and beyond, nobody’s going to say “only famous authors with grand ideas get to do that”–text is low bandwidth and there are readers who will love the feeling that your story is a home where they’re invited to stay as long as they like.

Sometimes restrictions breed creativity, and some writers need to be forced to edit themselves.  But some writers know exactly what they’re doing when they make a story a certain length, and it’s awesome that the Internet has created spaces that put no limits on that.

Writing advice

Real talk here, especially for writing longer works:

You need to trust yourself to pull it together by the end, even if you think you’re going completely off the rails. The trust might be unfounded, hell, you might even be wrong, but you need to do it.

Trust your story. Trust the point you want to get across. Trust your subconsciousness to get it right. Because the moment you start to doubt and second guess yourself, you stall. Get to the end, then you can see if you succeeded or not.

Trust yourself.

Art by Minna Sundberg

Awaiting Dorothy