suzakugaiden

I recently finished a chapter, but the ending was sort of... offputting for me, so I went back and tried to revise it a bit. What happened is this. I basically continued writing for another 3000 or so words. In the process, the entire theme and basic idea shifted a bit. By the time I finish, it'll likely be about 12000 words long. I think it's better than what I had before, but is this necessarily the best way to write, considering I'd already deemed it finished?

Dookie

12000 word chapter....cut it man. How many pages is that? About 30?? Thats A4 too. Your average book is 100,000 words. Thats over one tenth of your book already. But, if you have that much story in you for just the first chapter then good on yi. But could some of it maybe go in a prologue?

suzakugaiden

No, not really. Considering it's the middle of the book.

Also, "chapter' is a bit... of a misnomer, because the "book" doesn't actually have any. Just several short stories that all... "arc up" to form something more grandiose.

Also, the chapters in Dhalgren are like, 100 pages long. 25~ isn't THAT many.

Alternatively, if I wanted to, I could probably split it into about 8. But it reads more as a short story anyway, so...

Dookie

fair play. I misread, i thought it was the first chapter. I was only saying that stuff because I thought it was a bit heavy to throw a long chapter on readers at the start of a story. But its not so its fine. Be free!

mswietek

If each story is relatively self contained, than 12,000 words is fine (as long as they are 12,000 words filled with conflict, interesting characters, and dazzling description! ).

Your structure sounds interesting. Are you doing something like The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien?

Michael

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"Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music." - Ezra Pound

suzakugaiden

Not intentionally, although now that I think about it, that's not really all that off of a comparison. I'm more aiming at emulating/janking stuff from Faulkner, conciously, but yeah, the Tim O'Brien thing works.

Anyway, I wouldn't say there's a lot of conflict, per se. In a sense there is, but exactly with WHAT is rather... vague.

As for the writing style, it's probably the oddest thing I've done lately ^^ It's experimental. I like it for THIS, but I might not keep it up, or use it sparingly.