Brevity is the soul of wit

For me, watching creatives achieve storytelling heights with limited resources is a neverending marvel. By limited resources, I don't mean just money; although, that is a glaring factor in movie, TV, and game productions. The writer, on the other hand, is bound only by his imagination and the limits of the medium. The only real costs are ink and paper, which the industry has simplified to a calculation based on wordcount.

How long should a story be? However long it needs to be, is the best answer. (Or, if you're Zack Snyder, twice as long it needs to be.) From a story-telling perspective, the quotas tradpub puts on words is completely arbitrary. Which is why, despite my misgivings about the digitization of entertainment, I still celebrate the ebook revolution. There is no set length for ebooks, so the writer can tell the story in as few or as many words as necessary.

In the last couple of years, David V Stewart has done well self-publishing short-form books. His Eyes in the Walls was one of the best stories I read last year. I can't recommend it enough! But rarely does tradpub take a chance on a standalone novella of 120 pages.

Movies are undergoing their own change. It used to be movies respected a hard upper limit of 3 hours. Then the coronavirus killed theaters and pushed Hollywood onto the small screen. Now movies are no longer constrained by how long you can sit in a dark theater with a belly full of popcorn and carbonated soda. Realizing this, Warner Bros. released a gratuitous 4-hour cut of Justice League to sell HBO Max subscriptions to DC Comics cultists.

Is it worth it? I could give many reasons why not, but the one I'll focus on here is time. The older I get, the more I value my time. Nothing upsets me like wasting my time. If you want to sell me a 4-hour movie, it had better be on par with Ron Maxwell's Gettysburg or the The Return of the King extended edition. By all accounts Justice League was a mediocre 2-hour movie. Four hours to tell basically the same story is the definition of self-indulgence. It verges on disrespect for the audience.

Then again, I'm not their audience. This guy, whom the well-worn aphorism "quality over quantity" was meant for, is.

In an era of virtually limitless data, creatives are tempted to push the upper limits of length in their stories. They do so at risk of alienating their audience, who are still limited in the amount of what they consume by time. Style differences aside, storytelling done right is tight, efficient, and economical. It should linger to drive home significant points, and it should describe to excess when the reader's imagination fails.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.