Writer's Digest is currently running a number of contests, looking for short stories. All fo the prizes from first to fourth place are awesome, and I though "Cool, I've got at least one shortie done; I can edit it and submit, right?" Wrong. Turns out, Writer's Digest upper limit on word count for short stories is drastically lower than what one would think.
To me, anything under circa 25,000 words is a short story. Under 5,000 is a short-short. The contest for short-shorts for WD has a limit of 1,500 words, while the others have an upper limit of 4,000. This seems unreal to me; a complete, coherent, publishable story in 1,500 or 4,000 words. It baffles me. Perhaps it has something to do with how quickly I type. When I know what I'm typing or when the fit takes me, I can bust out 10 - 15 pages of manuscript in an hour, somewhere in the area of 3,000 words.
Admittedly, I suffer from the same ailment as Stephen King: diarrhea of the word processor. Currently, I'm working on the second draft of my first novel and I've expanded the first draft by perhaps 10,000 words, maybe more. Partly by learning who my characters are, partly from fleshing out the country's history and mostly from running at the mouth, or fingers, if you prefer.
I personally don't see this as a problem; as a visual reader, the more detail the writer provides, the happier I am. I don't care if the book runs into the thousands of pages, that just means it'll take me longer to finish and I'll avoid the post-book depression to which I'm prone.
I think that's why I'm such a mark for Stephen King's books, because he writes the way I like to read. As a result of reading so much of his work, though, I've found that I tend to write like him as well. I write in the seat-of-the-pants method; I've tried outlining, and I just can't do it. Every time I try, I just end up asking myself why I'm writing about my story instead of just just writing the damned story. I constantly agonize over details, so much so that I've got detailed character bios written out in the form of interviews. I haven't written out the history of my world, but I have it planned and mapped out in my head.
I guess I figure that the more detail I put into my novel and its world, the more likely I will be to attract the kind of people who read like I do, assuming I get published. Ultimately all of the things I've listed here kills my chances to enter any of Writer's Digest's contests. There's no way that I'll be able to tell a story in so few words that will be satisfactory to me.
