Fangirl on a Bicycle

Probably, in your journey of self-reproach, you have sought out tips on How To Write Longer Fics. This was a good idea, don’t feel bad about it! But you may have found that the tips you got were not very useful, because they assumed you were a complete noob and that the reason for your generally low wordcounts is the classic noob mistake of massively underwriting the story. So you’ll get told to ‘add feelings’ or ‘make the characters reflect on events’ or ‘describe every single thing in the story in detail’ (that one is terrible advice btw, well done for not following it).

But ‘make the characters reflect on events’ is actually halfway to the answer, it just has it the wrong way round. Your short oneshots probably consist largely of that already, the problem is that there are not many events for them to react to. 

This is the secret that longfic writers have kept from you because they didn’t know it either! You Just Need More Scenes! The chances are that the scenes you do write are good, you just don’t have enough of them to get above 2000 words because you have correctly realised that the story you are telling should be about that length. 

So what you - and I - need is to find a fic idea that needs to have a lot of scenes in it. All those “ha ha I need to write 70k words of context for The One Scene I thought of!” jokes confuse you because you’ve got good at working out how much context the story needs and working out how to fit that into The One Scene. I have come to think of this as expanding the story inwards, and the people making the joke are used to expanding outwards. They try to work out how to fit that scene into the story, you try to work out how to fit the story into the scene. Both are valid approaches to writing, but switching between these modes can be tricky and you need to know that you need to do it in the first place. Which you don’t or you wouldn’t be reading this post.

There’s a shift in mindset needed here. If you want to get this longer fic idea to stay long and become longer you will have to limit your learned instinct to reject extra scenes as soon as you think of them because you know there’s a way to get the same information into The One Scene itself. But what we want for this experiment is to aim for more scenes, so jot down those ideas when they come. What scenes would you put into this story if you weren’t concerned about the relevance and utility of them? (You are going to be concerned about this, but not yet.) What extensions to The One Scene suggest themselves? What happened before it and what happened after, and how would you tell us this if you were not allowed to put that information into The One Scene itself? 

You must allow yourself to expand outwards from the very first step. Later you can start merging scene ideas to stop them feeling too thin and discarding ones that don’t work, but when you’re getting started just brainstorm until you have a list of ideas to work with. 

The Advice They Give To Overwriters

It may surprise you to know that while fandom discussion is full of people asking how to write more words, advice for people aiming to publish a novel is more concerned with cutting wordcounts that have gone well over standard publication limits (70-100k words, to generalise). Telling those people to cut a few words from every sentence is not going to help them, they need to be removing entire characters and subplots.

“Sub-whats?” you say. Yes, that’s the key to all this. Subplots add more scenes, as does including more characters because then you have to tell those stories as well. I would bet cash money that you’ve read a longfic with a pointless subplot or two that you just skipped past because you didn’t care. To get the wordcounts really high you’ll need things happening alongside the main story, and I will trust that you know those should tie into the main plot and not be mere distractions from it. 

Overwriting in the sense of using far too many words also gets targeted in such discussions, because - shock! - it is generally considered best to use as many words as the story needs and not just add extra ones for the hell of it or because you don’t know how to say things concisely. The problem with ‘too many words’ (not to be confused with good prose that’s just wordy) is that words without purpose will pile up and distract the reader from the important stuff in the story and also risks tiring them out on pointless nothingness when you want them to keep going while you feed them the good stuff. 

But good news! You probably don’t need to worry about that! If you can tell a whole story in 2000 words or less it is very unlikely that you don’t understand the importance of staying focussed on the stuff that matters. Remember when someone told you “describe everything” and you thought (again, I would bet money on this) “but most of these things don’t matter to the story, it’d just be annoying”? You were right. Some things in a story deserve your words and some do not, as you already know. 

The Best Plots For Moar Words

So you need a plot, and optionally some subplots if you’re aiming for the very high numbers. The easiest thing to start with is a plot that requires a lot of words, which for me tend to be stories where some amount of unskippable time has to pass between Events before the Conclusion can be reached. You have, most likely, thought of such a plot at some point and instantly discarded it because you “can’t write longfics.” 

But consider: you recognised that as a plot that would need a lot of words. So you know what to look for. Which means you can find another one even if it takes a bit of thinking outside your usual boxes to get it. Stop telling yourself you can’t write those stories and at the very least write the idea down. Have a think about how you could fit it into a number of words you feel comfortable with. It doesn’t matter if you get that estimate wrong, this is about removing the mental barrier of self-doubt and by the time you realise you over- or underestimated by even something huge like 20k words you already have a good chunk of the story written and now you might as well finish it because you know writing this is not as hard as you once feared.

Fanfic plots that lend themselves to this kind of expansion and forced slow-down include: children/pregnancy; slow burn romance; arranged marriages (AKA slow burn strangers-to-lovers); AUs that differ significantly from the canon setting and familiar everyday concepts (fantasy and historical AUs, for instance); quests requiring visits to multiple locations; political situations developing over years or decades. Pick one of those that interests you and see what you come up with. 

The Skills You Already Have

You write shortfic. Let’s assume you’re good at it. This means you are precise, concise, and can spot what aspects of a story to zoom in on. Your lack of descriptive prose (if you worry about that) is likely related to the fact that you know 500 words of description in a 1200 word fic can unbalance it horribly if you’re not extremely careful. You probably do add detail when you know it’s needed, the ‘problem’ is that balance issue and that there just isn’t much to describe when the story’s in one location and centred on one character. 

You’re already experienced with writing in general, you’ve had a chance with those short fics to experiment with POV, tense, style, etc, that people who’ve only written one or two longfics haven’t had yet. You don’t have problems with padding scenes out and losing focus and you’re good at layering your sentences to make them punchy but packed full. Those may in fact be the very reasons you’ve struggled so much trying to turn a 2000 word story into 50,000 word one: you knew that was a 2000 word story so when you tried to add extra words you knew they didn’t belong there and you couldn’t do it. Well done! The people who complain that they can’t write shortfic are going to have to learn to do/not do those things, but you can already do/avoid them!  

The Hidden Problem: Prose

Okay, here’s something I struggle with a lot when writing longer stories: the information density will be different. Being used to stuffing sentences full it is hard to adapt to the more drawn-out pace of information that longer fic demands. It can feel like you’re wasting words or writing weaker lines, but the difference is not bad, it’s just a difference. Bluntly, writing 10,000 words the way you’d write 1000 will kill both you and the reader. You’ll burn out after taking forever to write 4000 words and you’ll make them miss crucial plot details and character insights. “It’s only AO3, nobody is paying me” is as true for readers as it is for writers. Nobody is expecting the casual reader to turn in an essay on that metaphor you used or the clever thing you did with wordplay that you’re convinced implied things strongly enough that you didn’t need to clarify. For 750 words you can ask them to read that closely. If you demand it for 75,000 you’re deluded and cruel. 

You’ll have to repeat some information as the distance from the last explanation increases. You’ll occasionally have to risk a thin scene that you need for pacing reasons or to slip in an idea that just wouldn’t fit into an existing one. This is fine. But actually fine, not like in the This Is Fine meme. A shaky sentence or two stands out so much less when surrounded by hundreds of others that nobody’s going to care even if they spot it. I for one struggle especially with accepting that I just cannot aim for particularly lyrical prose at length and in something plot-driven unless I somehow become a genius overnight – there’s a reason novel-length poems are exceptionally rare. 

You know how “100k packed full of meaning and subtext, a whole meaty meal!” comments made you wonder WTF longfics those people are reading? Probably the same ones you are but they’re not expecting the density of a drabble from a novel-length fic. Neither should you, so don’t beat yourself up when you find out it’s impossible. 

In Conclusion

There’s a good chance your long fic, or at least your first attempts, will end up substantially shorter than some other people’s. You’re concise, it’s not a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing, but fandom’s wordcount obsession has fucked up your ability (and theirs) to recognise that. As a general rule a better writer will need fewer words to tell the same story and for the purpose of this post we’ll assume that includes you and me 😘 Even if it doesn’t, you probably need the confidence boost of knowing that it could. Your low wordcounts are not a problem to be fixed, you simply want to try writing something longer and you’re gonna leverage your shortfic skills to help you get there. 

Basically, you're gonna do the same things you always do but with a plot that demands more of it. You will have to spread information (of all kinds) out a bit but you'll also have room to tell the reader more things and to linger a bit on each idea. It'll be hard at first to stop compactifying and fitting everything into a small space, but you can get used to doing it. I cannot promise you 100k words on your first attempt at this (I've never got above 45k and my average longfic is probably around 20k words) but this is the road that should get you there. I would strongly recommend that you outline your chaptered fic before you start properly writing it, so that you don't get lost or write yourself into a corner.

You already know how to write. You are not bad at it and I am not assuming that you are. This is not about writing better, it's about writing more, and there’s no reason to assume you can’t do that.