What I’m currently doing is finalising the rules for all future artisans and golden hats, something I really should have done years ago. Better late than never though!
This thread will decide the maximum word count that we will use for the short story contests. It will be exactly the same maximum word count on all future occasions, anything else will not be a staff run artisan’s contest.
Seeing as the final rules thread will be finished in about 2-3 weeks, I will put a time limit on this for voting. 20 days. So it closes Monday 20th December.
When you are voting, please bear in mind the position of those writing as well as those reading the stories. Those writing them probably want more, those reading them less, and even if you’re never going to enter I’m sure you’d like to give them what you consider a fair word limit. Not too long, but not too short.
I’ve tried to give an indication of roughly how long this is in pages, but this all depends on how many new paragraphs there are obviously, and the font size, borders etc. I just used a story I’ve done in default Word formatting for this.
I think as far as short stories go, length isn’t much of an issue. If the story is no good then I wouldn’t bother reading more than a 1000 words. If I’m hooked until the end then it’s likely to get my vote.
As someone who is trying to get published and has written several short stories, I think about 5000 words (!) should be the limit. It is hard to write an actual good short story, especially if the limit were 1500 words or less! 1000 words is a lot shorter than people realize when you’re trying to write a cohesive plot in such a short space. I’ve done it, but I don’t like being limited.
That said, there shouldn’t be a penalty for not writing a “long enough” story. Any length of story is good (except those three word stories… seriously. Fun, but not good here.) but I don’t think there should be too much restriction. I actually do tend to write shorter word count stories, but for someone who can average about 1000 words a night when I set my mind to it (of course those need revision!), I’d like to see a larger possibility. Anything past 5000 words, however, has moved beyond short story territory into novella, which should be avoided.
Also, since the limit will be so high, it is up to the writers to limit themselves, as too long of a story would push some readers here away from it. Sparrow said it quite well, if it’s worth it, you’ll read past 1000 words. You can usually tell if a novel is worth reading in 5 pages or so, and for a short story its that first 1000 words that let you know if its worth it. That’s why a lot of short story publishers only ask for the first 1000 words of your draft!
As the poll is now closed we can see that there was a draw for 1000 and for 3500 (or 3501 ;)). As I said earlier, if there was a draw we would just split the difference.
So the max word count for all official short story artisans going forwards will be 2250. Which is a 50% increase on 1500 and will hopefully encourage people to enter still.
If people want to write 10 page stories they are more than welcome to, it just won’t be for an artisans contest.
We’re also going to be putting in a minimum word count of 1000 words.