Sam Winchester

Could not have said it better myself. All you have to do is double space the paragraphs, possibly change the font, and centre a few headings. I don't mean to offend, but that's a piece of piss compared to trying to read something that appears to have no ending. You reach the end of it and you can't remember what the friggin' start was about!

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To those who live by and never stray from the creedo of "show, don't tell," here's a thought - it's called storytelling not storyshowing.

JosephB

OK. Valeca. Sorry about my tone. Back to work.

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"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
-- Albert Einstein

"I am really only interested in a fiction of miracles."
-- Flannery O'Connor

valeca

Thanks, Joseph.

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You know you wanna.

JosephB

Great! That's a concise, logical explanation. Thank you.

Regardless, writing and editing a 3-4000 word short story certainly doesn't indicate laziness to me.

__________________
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
-- Albert Einstein

"I am really only interested in a fiction of miracles."
-- Flannery O'Connor

Loulou

Surely this is just bad story telling and nothing to do with length?

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www.thewriterseye.com
A website with great and refined taste....

Sam Winchester

I think it's a combination of both, Loulou.

Sam.

__________________
To those who live by and never stray from the creedo of "show, don't tell," here's a thought - it's called storytelling not storyshowing.

gohn67

It would be nice if the posting limit were increased, but if not, then oh well. It's minor annoyance to post in two, sometimes three posts when someone wants to post a longer story.

However I don't think the posting limit stops anyone from posting longer pieces or complete pieces. It's a minor deterrence, more annoying than anything.

If someone wanted to post a longer piece they'd just post in more than one post.

It is probably true that shorter pieces gain more feedback, but that should not be a rule. It should be a guideline. If they don't listen. Well, they may not get more feedback. Their fault for not listening.

Whole stories are posted all the time. From ten words to ten thousand. The word limit doesn't deter, and it shouldn't. Again this should be more of a guideline. It is their risk. And maybe they don't care about publishing said piece later.

One thing I also noticed is that most people post pieces under the limit anyway, so they never encounter the char limit. I wonder how many of those people know there is a char limit? My assumption is that most people post very short pieces, because it's easier thing to write. The char limit has nothing to do with it.

What I mean by this is the majority of people will not post five thousand word stories. In the Writer's Workshop, the majority of stories are around 500-2000 words.

I think their should be a character limit, but it should be to prevent people from posting their whole novel, not a short story. Short stories can be quite long. A lot of the stories in the New Yorker for example run about 5000 words. There was one that was six thousand one week. And in short story collections and anthologies, I'll find stories that are longer than 3,000 words very often. My point is that short stories can sometimes be very long. The definition itself is not very clear, and many people have their own definition of what is to be a short story.

But in the end, if the character limit stays the same, it's only a minor annoyance that affects a small portion of users.

At the same time the character limit does not affect the majority of users. Most probably don't know it exists.

I was on this forum when there was no posting limit, or the posting limit was much higher. I'm not sure why it was changed in the first place.

Basically I agree with JosephB. The only good reason for the limit is if it's a technical problem. Maybe the limit is vBulletin imposed. Or maybe large posts slowed the forum down.

eggo

Perhaps I haven’t explained exactly what transpires when you go over the character limit correctly so you can understand.

Say, I am posting this story:
I have a singularly unique apartment.

When the architects designed the building I live in, they saw a way to squeeze one more apartment into the middle of every other apartment. The new owners, when seeing it on paper, were very happy with the thought of collecting a little more income from the building.
The supers, on the other hand, were not happy when showing the place after it was built; mainly because there wasn’t any windows.
But when the proverbial, torn white tee shirt super took me down the dark alcove hallway that serviced only my apartment, I knew it was perfect. Among some of my other hobbies, I’ve always loved to eavesdrop on the neighbors. I love to witness there little struggles with meaningless, petty things. They argue as if the meaning of life revolves around bills, work or the “in-laws“.

Of course the formatting is poor, so I go through and fix the yabb so it will look like this.

I have a singularly unique apartment.

When the architects designed the building I live in, they saw a way to squeeze one more apartment into the middle of every other apartment. The new owners, when seeing it on paper, were very happy with the thought of collecting a little more income from the building.

The supers, on the other hand, were not happy when showing the place after it was built; mainly because there wasn’t any windows.

But when the proverbial, torn white tee shirt super took me down the dark alcove hallway that serviced only my apartment, I knew it was perfect. Among some of my other hobbies, I’ve always loved to eavesdrop on the neighbors. I love to witness there little struggles with meaningless, petty things. They argue as if the meaning of life revolves around bills, work or the “in-laws“.


After I go through and fix the Yabb throughout the entire piece, I get the message that my post is too long.

Some of my changes in Yabb are now gone and I have to start again.

If, after making my changes, It is still too long it will happen again. Once pared down to an acceptable size, finding an acceptable place to break my story, I post the corrected piece with changes.

I then take the other section and after formatting it, am pretty sure it will fall in the parameters. If not, I should have realized that it would take three posts, not two to complete my work.

This happens sometimes with Open Office, Microsoft Word Processor and occasionally Word.

(If i'm the only person this has happened to, then I am indeed lazy and ignorant, but still reasonably good looking which makes up a fair amount.)

I’m reminded of this article posted by Chris at his website,

article by Roger MacBride Allen on Professional Manuscript Submission,




So, I don’t think it’s laziness, far be it from the case as Lou Lou pointed out, I think it’s just the basic usage of tools available to make posting easy. Writing will, at least for me, be one of the hardest thing I ever do here.

Laziness is why I don't wash the car.

Posting is the orgasm of writing.

So if the posting remains as it is, oh well……back to writing.

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The server here is a Commodore Amiga in someone's basement in New Jersey.

Raging_Hopeful

My biggest complaint is that in my MS Word program I specifically try to measure out a chunk of 20,000 characters. What happens? The website spits it back saying its over 20,000 characters. *does a double take* Is there a lack of consistency with character counts or what? So in my attempt to comply with the system, my formatting gets screwed and the forum says that MS is wrong (and yes, Microsoft is often wrong) but its friggin' irritating.

As for the explanations and defenses, I think it was decided that we'd put it to a poll. So we have. So far I see more people are for the change than against it, so I say let the people speak for themselves. Individual opinion in this case is besides the point as we are all working together to make a decision.

FYI, I don't really mind either way as it really is a minor annoyance. But I did vote 'yes' for those for whom it is a real issue.

Cheers,
Linz

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The Backward OX

Who pays for MS Word? I got mine for free. Just now, I googled "free ms word" and on the first page alone found links to three (3) free downloads.

eggo

Beware of trojans bearing trojans

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The server here is a Commodore Amiga in someone's basement in New Jersey.

Remedy

I voted no.

I haven't really responded to any long stories on here yet, and I don't post that much, but I have on other writing forums. My dog is sleeping on the couch, and she's scared of hunting (despite being half hunting dog), so I can't say much for her side in this.

I honestly much prefer longer stories to be split up. I can read them in one shot, but oftentimes I don't have enough time to read and reply to the whole thing in one sitting. I have other things going on after all, and it's not that I don't want to give a whole critique, but my time is limited.

When the story is split up, I have a definite stopping and starting point. I don't like stopping and starting in the middle of a post; it's not clean, and I don't always remember exactly where I stopped, because I mentally critique the whole thing as I'm reading. Once I come back, I know exactly where I stopped (if there's multiple posts), and I can pick it back easily again.

Perhaps it's lazy on my part, but I don't respond to edit long, on-running stories without some sort of break.

JosephB

Remedy, I voted yes, but that's a decent reason to vote no, and well put.

So, would you walk into your local big box office store and walk out with MS Office and not pay for it?

__________________
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
-- Albert Einstein

"I am really only interested in a fiction of miracles."
-- Flannery O'Connor

papertears

The Backward OX

No I wouldn't. But neither would I be in that store in the first place. I do all my business with lurkers.