WhirlwindBrushMethod/WBMDiscLength
Length Discussion
Discussion of how long parts should be, and some related ideas.
Who feels up to doing a slightly less optamistic version of WWBM? Something like writing between a page and a 1.5, then letting someone go from there. It alleviates the pressure of having to write lots all at once, and can be a good practice on a much smaller scale for the larger gols with WWBM. -EndlessChase
I suggested a smaller-scale version of WBM at ikselam's page, but my intention was to make it more challenging, not less, by means of restricted structure (such as forcing participants to write in heroic couplets or whatever), at the cost of reduced length. I thought it would be an interesting exercise in linked poetry, like the Japanese tradition of "conversation tanka". - willows
A simple idea would be to just say "everybody writes one scene." You could impose restrictions, or not, as desired. Some kind of short-form option is probably a good idea, though, since it won't be something that people will look at and say "looks neat, but I don't have time."\\ _Ikselam
The two parts posted last night and today (9 Feb.), illustrate something useful: parts don't have to be long to be good. Previous chapters ran longer than I expected; while that's really fantastic, these two are more along the lines of what I'd initially envisioned, length-wise.\\ _Ikselam
I thought mine was too long ^^; -Dim
I was completely intimidated until I actually sat down and read some of the work others had posted. Maybe I just got sucked into the story, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that anything in PotW is actually 20k long. I mean, NaNoWriMo makes a huge deal out of the difficulty of writing a 50k novel in one month; that comes out to roughly 100 pages. I don't think these would come out to being almost 50 pages of plain text. --Dissolvegirl
Makes me worry, as much as I wanna write something, I know I'm wordy. Wouldn't want to throw off the pacing of what has been written too badly. XD -MidKnight
If I'm not mistaken, my starter, which was the longest segment of PotW, is about 15k plaintext, including markup. - willows
willows, that totally makes sense for a story starter (and thanks for posting such an awesome one, BTW!)-- and I was just guesstimating, I don't have any word-processing software that does word counts. And if a bunch of authors come along who DO have the time and inspiration to write 2,000 words a day for 10 days, that's awesome. Don't get me wrong, I'm aiming for the 20k mark, but I'm just thankful for the "quality over quantity" codicil, otherwise I wouldn't have signed up. ;) -Dissolvegirl
PoTW part 1 was about 16k. Part 2 was about 27k. Part 3, 14k.\\ CTS part 1 was about 32k. Part 2, 30k. Part 3, 12k (but missing a scene). \\ All of these figures are based on character-count in my plaintext editor, and include the markup (which I don't expect totals more than 250 characters per part).
The reason NaNoWriMo makes a big deal about the number 50,000 is that they're counting words. We're counting characters/bytes.\\ _Ikselam
Ohthankgod. I misread. I thought we were supposed to be going for 20k words, not characters. Thank you so much for clearing that up. *LOL* --Dissolvegirl
