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Date Posted: 01:33:05 06/24/02 Mon
Author: DS
Subject: How long is too long for web forum fiction?

As Nigel read the stories by Slapdip Thwang and Papa (Hemingway?) nausea began to creep into the back of his throat like a cold Sartrean finger. It was the quintessential existentialist nausea, for he could not tell if the stories were intrinsically too long for a forum post, or if he made them too long by defining them through his own limitations. How long, he thought, is really too long?

The web favors brevity: one screen, two screens at the most. Avoid forcing a reader to scroll down, Nigel mused, and a writer has to condense the entire piece to 25 or 30 lines. Call it 300 to 400 words. Some supershort fiction contests put a 200-word limit on the work submitted, he knew, and one anthology (Flash Fiction) ran stories averaging around 500 words. And Richard Brautigan worked the supershort form, pushing it toward the condensation of poetry.

But the clammy finger of Camus (so to speak) still twitched in his esophagus. Then it struck him: if other readers posted their ideas about web forum fiction then he would no longer be confused about the existential validity of his own thoughts on the subject.

Er, so go ahead and write something, already…

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