wherein Liz is ever so slightly frustrated by the travails of the creative process

[edenfalling]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, why do my stories always expand on me?????? Always, always, always! There has never in my life been a time when I said to myself, "I think this story will take X thousand words to write" and it ended up taking fewer, but the reverse happens EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Well. Okay, technically I sometimes escape at only a couple hundred words over my planned length, and I don't usually have expectations at all when it comes to 15-minute fics and comment!fic, but! You will notice that whenever a meme comes up that says something about "give me a prompt and I will write you a few sentences" I always alter it to say "a few paragraphs," and if the meme suggests a few paragraphs, I end up writing complete ficlets.

...

This outburst brought to you by my Homestuck fic that is now at 5,800 words and just WILL NOT END. Every time I think I'm approaching the final scene, there turns out to be more intervening stuff I have to write before I reach the end. It's like Zeno's Paradox come to life. Argh!

*beats head against computer desk* *literally*

(I shouldn't even be writing this now anyway, not when I have my NFE fic waiting for my attention. Whyyyyyyyyyy, brain, why do you do this to me????? *wails and gnashes teeth*)

Comments

[branchandroot]

Homestuck does seem especially likely to do that kind of thing, but yeah, it's an endemic problem once you start writing any longfic at all. /Everything/ wants to be long after that.

[edenfalling]

I blame my pre-teen self for getting in the habit of planning stories in the form of six novel fantasy cycle epics (each focusing on a different girl in a different century telling a story spread over a whole multiverse, sheesh!) rather than anything small and self-contained. Also for telling bedtime stories to my sister in the form of an episodic tale that continued from night to night as if I were Scheherezade or something. Bleh.

I think I also am just bad at estimating which scenes need to be told at full length and which parts can remain compressed in quasi-summary form, but that's a slightly different failing.

(6,050 words and counting... *pained grimace*)

[lady_songsmith]

I'm pretty much convinced Zeno was a fic writer trying to explain his frustration to more athletically inclined friends.

[edenfalling]

Yes! That! Exactly!

(6,800 words now. I think I may have finally cleared the climax, and it's just a denouement scene to go. Maybe. Then of course I have to go back and edit the thing to make sure it all hangs together. *headdesk* It's like I am assymptotically approaching the state of being done, but somehow I will never quite arrive.)