I'm trying to work on a piece that's supposed to be about 5000 words. At 3500 words it's not half finished, so clearly it will go over the length limit. It's not a disaster for this piece, but I still can't quite figure out how to keep my story line pared back to know that when it's finished it will be a particular length.<\/p>\n
Is there a trick<\/strike> method for this? How does everyone else do it?<\/p>\n
I usually come up with a story idea for a particular theme or topic, based on a call for subs. Then I sort of hope that I can finish within the guidelines while doing justice to the story. So far, I've failed trying to use only 30k on what should have been 35-40k story just to hit a target for a particular editor. It didn't work and I need to go back and flesh it back out before subbing again.<\/p>\n
In general, should I outline it first, and then figure an average scene length to come up with approx finished word count, then leave out scene(s) that won't fit? <\/p>\n
I have a few shorter pieces I need to write and I'm worried my ideas are just too complicated to fit into the length requirements and I need to either come up with simpler ideas or completely new ideas. Any help here is greatly appreciated!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I'm trying to work on a piece that's supposed to be about 5000 words. At 3500 words it's not half finished, so clearly it will go over the length limit. It's not a disaster for this piece, but I still can't quite figure out how to keep my story line pared back to know that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pzLgx-3i","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emlynley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}