yuletide_coal | It's a Coal (w)rap Battle

It's a Coal (w)rap Battle

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Writing Post : http://yuletide-coal.dreamwidth.org/4047.html

If the letter is more than about 500 words long, I only read the do not wants and ODAO on the rest. Brevity is the soul of not annoying your assigned writer.

1/10

http://yuletide-coal.dreamwidth.org/4313.html?thread=14100441#cmt14100441

OP

I can't even lie, that was the letter that inspired this thread.

The length is literally the least of the problems with that letter.

Per fandom, or total?

Per fandom.

That or less is my preferred length as well.

Any longer and they should write the story themselves. Give me a few prompts and your hard squicks, not your life story.

What? That only makes sense if they write more than 500 words for one prompt. If you have several prompts plus an explanation of what you like about the canon/characters, why you ship your ship, what kind of dynamics you like between the characters ... it's really easy to go above 500 words per fandom without having one ridiculously long prompt that's a story outline.

Yeah, the idea that a long section = "you should write it yourself" makes no sense. Almost all of the very long letters I've seen are long because of how many prompts there are, and they feel very flexible.

+1000

I've never seen a letter go above 500 words for a fandom that wasn't tl;dr. When they're that invested, they should write their own fic.

Wow. Why are you even here?

Grabbing a random letter out of my "possible treat" pile - http://abluestocking.livejournal.com/60712.html

Every one of the fandom sections is in the 500-600 word range. It doesn't seem "over-invested" to me - she just gives a healthy but not crazy number of prompts. The reason it's IN my "possible treat" pile is because some of those prompts are interesting to me.

I could see your point if it's "more than 500 words on one PROMPT". That's over-invested. But 500 words per fandom?

And that's not even going into letters that have fandom sections where they picked "any" for a large fandom (and really want "any"). I'd be worried if I was assigned a letter where the recip wanted "any" and the section was under 500 words.

It's not inconceivable that mentioning what you like about a canon and a few of its characters, then providing a few prompts, can easily go over 500 words. God knows there's enough threads around here bitching about people who don't describe every possible combination of characters in detail. Being able to give your writer some ideas isn't remotely the same thing as being able to write your canon's setting, voice, historical details, etc.

I know this might blow your little mind, but it's possible to be so invested in a fandom that you both want to write fic yourself AND read fic written by someone else for you. Unbelievable, I know.

LOL, I love this assumption that we are not doing exactly that. I regularly write for one of the tiny fandoms I have requested, and in fact the fic I originally started for last year's yt before backburner-ing to write something more manageable is now about 50k long and the final chapter is still in beta. Part of the fun of yt for me is that I can POTENTIALLY GIVE SOME OF THE PLOT BUNNIES I HAVE AWAY, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, and not write them myself. My yt letter is but a small fraction of the potential plot bunnies that are in my head that I may one day write if no one takes me up on them, but oh god I would love it so much if someone would only take one of them off my hands and write it for me.

troll in the dungeon

Speak for yourself, dude. I don't want a 500 word letter, that's miniscule.

(Also, my section for *one* of my fandoms probably breaks 500 words. Any, large character set, etc. Hope you're not offering any of my fandoms.)

I hope you're a troll.

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