Legs

So, I get this idea that might be fun to turn into a story. Most of my stories are written in my mind before I sit down to actually write the silly thing. The stories seldom surpass 3000 words, almost 10 % of the words are even true...but not always.

But, and here it gets weird, I surpass 3000 words, then 4000, then 5000!

It really has legs, if a little wobbly.

This thing is expanding like an inflatable boat has been stuffed in the back seat of a Volkswagen Bug and then some doofus pulled the cord. Characters begin to appear, characters I did not plan; they just arrived like they'd been transported from Cpt. Picard's NCC-1701.

Where did YOU come from and how did you get into my story?

I am over 8000 words now and there is still more to go...I think. I'm not writing this thing, it is writing itself. I have no idea what I will do with it. If I had a hard copy maybe I could paper the parlor.

I may not drink Chilean wine any more, at lest not when I am fooling with a story. It must be the wine. Right? Chilean wine is bad, real bad, although it tastes great.

Rap

It can be weird when a story won't end. That have been the cause many of my longer stories (ones broken up into series for this site).

Some stories seem to take on a life of their own. I have one that I turned into a series that I decided to end after seven parts. But it took on a life of its own and it went on far beyond what I had originally wanted. Suddenly it stalled and I am stuck - with a series without an ending. I have a vague idea how it will continue - but I still have no ending. I have decided to leave it for the moment hoping that it will materialize some day.

I had a serial that I had planned in my mind as about 10-12 parts that ended up at 30! :-o

sometimes things just have to happen that you didn't originally plan on -- lucky for us we're not working for publishers who will insist on a certain story length.

My only advice is to keep the ball rolling, chop it up in parts about 3000 words each, smack a minimum of one spanking into each episode and you've got a winner.

But try to finish it before you start uploading the first episode. I did that mistake in the beginning and then I had serious problem with plot continuity as I kept on developing the story.

Yes - only post after you have finished it all. Otherwise you can be near the end and faced with the choice of writing a huge workaround OR going back to near the start to add an extra minor character, or mention that the character was wearing a wedding ring, or otherwise hang a version of Chekhov's gun on the wall.

A good explanation of Chekhov's gun is: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.". Or to put it another way - if you're near the end of the story and you need something for the plot to work, put in foreshadowing in the start. For example, if near the end of the story the heroine's skirt needs to fly up so that everyone can see the smack marks on her upper thighs, go back to where you introduced her and replace "wearing a skirt" with "wearing a short. flaired skirt" to her description to explain how it will blow up in the wind.

That's easy to do if you haven't posted parts 1, 2, 3, etc, but impossible to do if you have already posted parts 1, 2, 3 etc.

Yep, made that mistake as well, had to do some tap dancing in the last few parts to clear up the inconsistencies from earlier on.

Yup, I'm often impatient and want to get the beginning out early, but I have had the issue Goodgulf describes of wishing I had put something in earlier. On the other hand, I have sometimes been influenced by reader comments in a good way.

At the risk of disagreeing with someone smarter than me, I think Chekhov was wrong. That gun hanging on the wall doesn't need to fire, for instance, to explain why the pregnant girl got married. In other words, the gun on the wall might, without firing a shot, tell us a wealth of information about our characters.

Which brings us back to the original point of the thread - we're all for a longer story if it gets us more well-developed characters.

It's a funny thing about this little genre - maybe I just haven't been here long enough, but literary value rests a lot on the development and reparability of the characters - and that's really hard to do in 5000 or even 8000 words. I had a friend who told me it took her 100,000 words to give her character a good spanking...

Anyway, that said, I managed to write one for the challenge, and it was under 6000. Maybe I'll !!win!! or place with it, in which case I think I have to eat all my words.

But Raptor, I say, if you have 8000 words, I can't wait to read it.

Hey, that can happen at times, a story unexpectedly 'elongating' on its writer of its own accord, I've had that happen as well--sometimes the author simply has to 'go with the flow' as his/her writing expands on its own, more or less.

Oh, while being a touch picayune here, it's either NCC-1701D or NCC-1701E, if it's Captain Picard's U.S.S. Enterprise, I believe...

--C.K.