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[jaime_riordan]

It seems to me that once a story starts to hit the 40 - 50 chapters range, you need to go ahead and start trying to wrap it up. If it can't be truly finished, then close it out as best you can and start Book II. What is it with all these stories that go on for 60, 80, 150 chapters? I don't mind long books. But you can reach a point where it's

Comments

[skylark97]

There's Epic and then there is EPIC. Anything longer than 60 chapters/600 pages tends to be too much for my poor attention span to handle and that's if it's done right. Granted, I'm really not the posterchild for long attention spans. It's part of the reason that Great Literature and I have our disagreements. I want excitement and emotional pull, and Great Literature wants to be all Deep Meaning and Obscure References. ^_

[jaime_riordan]

Deep Meaning and Obscure References that, in the grand scheme of things, don't relate as well to modern society. I get tired of being depressed or feeling resentful of/disappointment for the protagonists. Thus, there's really not much Great Literature that I honestly like.

Seriously, after 60 chapters, what more could you possibly have left to do? That's assuming there haven't already been instances of repetition and continued stupidity.

Dude... that's just annoying. Granted, I don't care for amnesia stories anyway (generally, I think they're poorly written), but that's just bad form. By given the character amnesia, you're basically rewriting the story and the characters so why not just write a new story?

[skylark97]

!! I was thinking that as I was going to bed! Even if I like Great Literature, it's not something I'll reread over and over again. Getting depressed the once is once enough, you know? I just never feel the desire to savor the way that Romeo and Juliet suicide the way that I feel the desire to savor the happy ending of the romance novels I read. ^_^

Some authors get them that long too by having more characters than I know how to keep track of. There are some super long sci-fi/fantasy books out there that I've attempted, but too many storylines in one books is often too much for me to handle too. If you have six plotlines fighting for dominance, you probably should have written them into two or more different books, you know?

Ikr! I could have strangled the amnesia character and the author for writing it. Totally killed something I'd rather enjoyed reading to that point.

[jaime_riordan]

Pretty much.

Blah, I've learned to keep the character count low. I can barely manage writing two characters into a scene; I have to make myself insert three sometimes. Trying to revolve a story around several characters and plots would be crazy.

Part of the problem with the Broken Hollow rewrite, actually, is that its events and timeline overlap with another story in the arc, and I'm debating the best way to choreograph the two.

See, now I kinda want to write an amnesia story. WTF, yo?