Generic wrote:What about fight length? I've been known to pump out sketches at will in a matter of hours, but more thought-out pieces of fiction often require a lot of effort, and the last thing we want to do is encourage people to jerk off and turn in the stains.
That would be filed under "Questions" then "Frequently Asked", I daresay. There's a lot of allowances made for length.
The biggest concern with length is readability. Someone experienced at all in writing fiction pumps easily a thousand words in a sitting of two or three hours. Compare that to songfighting, which (for me) usually takes a good eight or nine hours of work, sometimes more. I find that the best fiction comes when you think about something throughout the course of a few days, and finally understand the greater themes your working with when you sit down to write. Pre-writing is for pussies, but thinking about your work is probably the most time-consuming aspect of fiction.
Everybody writes differently. Most people, as I said, familiar with writing actually put out their work rather quickly once the idea is perfected in their brain. The general rule of thumb then is to edit that product, trimming off about 5-10% of it ruthlessly, because most people err in the direction of superfluous material. I don't think 500-2000 is unreasonable. 500 is long for "flash fiction', 2000 is short for "short fiction", and the result is something in between. I'm sure not everyone will agree with that word count (sparkette is dead set against it), but I'll remind you that stories tend to write themselves much more quickly than term papers (and they read a bit easier, too, if they're worthwhile). If you (not you personally, but "you") struggle for more than six or seven hours with the actual process of writing a 1000 word story, I venture to guess you aren't that comfortable with fiction, and need a good deal of practice.
I assure you there will be jerk stains submitted, just as a lot of proverbial jerk stains are submitted to Song Fight. It's the nature of the open fight format. Hopefully, there will be a good amount of redeeming material, as well. I'm going to try to tout this project to some people outside the SF community, namely with certain other groups I'm in to whom I think it might appeal. Hopefully the result will be positive, but it might take some time for the reviews (which I hope will be necessarily harsh) to weed out or whip into shape the real crap.
My real goal is to have at least one near-publication-quality entry in every fight. Maybe that's generous, but I think it's pretty realistic, as long as we have a healthy population of participants. <a href="
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%2 ... Sturgeon's Law</a> never fails--people think it's a cynical quote, but there's always that 10%...
And there was a typoed mailto in the FAQ as heuristics noticed, but it's fixed.
You might perhaps encourage this sort self-policing to make the site more public-friendly. I know a lot of people who would be scared off if they went to this site and the first piece they pulled up was something unexpectedly explicit/gruesome/gross.
