I would be interested in views about the length of WAM stories.
What do authors and importantly readers consider the "best" (very subjective word) length?
Personally my shortish stories tend to range between 2000 to 2500 words, although I do not use word count, but many excellent authors here produce far more detailed and comprehensive efforts.
How do writers who produce longer stories, sometimes inter active style, keep the readers interest or do they recognise the detail is unlikely to be absorbed in one read and assume they will read smaller chunks at one time, rather like one reads a novel.
Are the lengthier more detailed stories more of a challenge than trying to condense into a shorter framework?

Several questions raised and no doubt potential for several others! This is not a poll, purely as I said above, interested in views.

Unless i'm specifically doing some kind of micro/flash fiction or a commission, I don't worry about word count much. One thing I will do if something is getting to be on the longer side is try and include multiple "finishing points" and no I don't mean alternate endings. Is that too subtle? I hope not.

I find that most of my one-off stories end up being somewhere between 5k and 10k without me doing it on purpose. Anything longer than that, I've usually written in individual stories anyway, and when I post them on Literotica or my own site, they end up as chapters.

I've thrown myself at Nanorwimo a few times, but only one was smutty. What I will say is that it that i still tried to make it somewhat episodic. Not literally, but in the sense that most sections had some kind of money shot. Instead of the cliffhanger of a mystery novel, there was something messy and horny at the end of most chapters. I guess that's how longer stuff - in my experience anyway - is different to the typical short stories we get in WAM. WAM stories are often more building up to a single climax (heh).

In fact, one of the things I don't like in some WAM stories is that they're often not really stories at all - they're scenes. But those are really just the super short ones that someone obviously rushed out in a spare 20 minutes.

Heck, if you wanna get really technical about it, even some of the longer ones don't necessarily meet some criteria for being a story at all. I think one of the reasons that sub/dom dynamics work so well in WAM ficiton is that they give you some conflict that isn't otherwise there. Anyway, I'm really rambling now.

TLDR: don't worry about it too much. If the story is good, people will keep reading. If not, there's always ctrl+F.

I personally think nearly all my stories are too long honestly. (Having wrote this all out, even this comment is too long)


Particularly when I am doing gameshow style stories, I find I have wasted time on the games themselves which are often a means to an end. Often after reading something back I wonder if I had simply replaced the whole thing with:

"Panting and out of breath, still Jessica was grinning at Trish. Upon seeing the disparity between the balls in each of their nets, her friend finally had nothing funny to say..."

Or

"And that's time!
Red faced from both exertion, embarrassment of her poor score and nerves of the forfeit coming her way, Claire bit her lip. The twenty year looked across the studio to where stage hands were already bringing across two very large looking pies. Her mum wouldn't actually pie her right?"

Would I not have achieved pretty much the result I needed without 1000 words of running back and fourth? (This varies, a deciding game I think writing it out can build the tension). In addition I'm also quite bad at editing and even when trying to simply cut down, end up tinkering and playing with wording too much.

When reading, I judge length based on the context. If it's a means to an end or setting up mechanics I think I get the gist of, I can skim through. If it's character/conflict based I stick with it.

The gunging itself I also think length varies more than some might think. As the story gets longer it makes sense to add Wamming segments to break it up but it's possible to do too much too soon.

In my SJW series (basic premise is vigilante gunging of various corporate rich women) one of the first gungings is of a women getting dunked and stripped in the process. When reviewing it as part of posting it on DA as a back up, I regretted such a big gunging earlier on as it meant the subsequent were a bit of a step down so I could build back up to the finale.

I think the same holds true for stand alone stories. If you have a character get pied silly, covered in baked beans stuck in a gungetank all in the first act, only to get cleaned up and in act 2 pretty much do it all again, it looses the punch. Better to keep it smaller and steadily build, which will also impact wordcount and keep the flow and length smoother.

In many ways I think shorter stories are harder than longer ones to write but neither are bad. I think it's more important your wordcount matches the scope of the story.

This is an area that I struggle with. While I don't think that there's a "best" story length, and that any story can run for as long as it can sustain itself, I do think that structure and pacing become much more important in longer stories. My main experience is in writing a single long series over multiple chapters, most of which are in the region of 10,000 words (though some are significantly more). When a story is even longer than usual, I tend to include a foreword that pre-warns readers and hints at convenient points to pause.

I don't claim to be an expert, but with lengthier stories I find that switching between different POVs or briefly cutting away to a B-plot can help with pacing issues. I also find that these stories become harder to sustain without some kind of dramatic tension. It took me a long time to realise that a scene that would be incredible to watch isn't always interesting to read.

As an example, when I was editing my series I came to a chapter where a contestant ends up on a conveyor that sends her into a gunge machine that'll eliminate her from the game. As I re-read it, I realised that the outcome was decided near the start, and everything that followed was just watching a pre-determined outcome unfold, so instead I changed it so that two characters were in jeopardy, with a game playing out that determined how fast their conveyors moved and which of them would be eliminated. The idea was to ensure that something was at stake right up until the end.

In the case of a long story or series (and especially in my case since I knew my series would only appeal to a small niche), I find that it's best to be upfront with readers on what the overall tone is going to be. That way you can set expectations and give people chance to drop out early if what you're offering isn't to their liking. I once wrote a longish standalone story where I didn't do those things, and that ended up getting the most mixed reviews of anything I've written. I suspect that that was - at least in part - because people had read through 5,000+ words only to find that the story didn't deliver what they were looking for.

I agree there's no such thing as an ideal length for a story as it's dependant on so many factors, for example: level of description, plot and probably more importantly purpose.

In general I tend to write shorter than average stories compared to many other WAM authors and don't usually monitor word counts or other metrics. I do however have a nasty habit of trying to make all the stories in a series approximately the same length which I don't think necessarily helps the stories.

As a reader I like both short and long stories but I do find I reread shorter stories much more than I do with longer ones.

As others say, go with whatever feels natural. We'll never get rich from the WAM erotica gig (alas). But we might have fun writing stories, and a few other people might then 'enjoy' reading them.

If you write a 1k shorty, someone might enjoy it. If you write a 100k interactive epic, anyone liking it will hopefully be interested enough to return after their immediate 'satisfaction'.

Good question, but if it's a good story, people will read it, whatever the length.

I also don't tend to worry about hitting a particular length.I have a couple of beta readers who are helping me with my current project, cutting down on purple prose, exposition that doesn't matter and other filler. Ultimately though, I'm beholden to nobody, so why worry about an arbitrary word count?

I try to do this with every story I write, especially on here and other niche sites. I don't usually have the big payoff moments that a lot people are hoping for, and instead write more slice-of-life stories with way too much dialog and tangentially-relevant information. I know I should probably do a better job of writing for the site's audience, but I've never been particularly interested in writing fetish/explicit material.

I used to be bothered by downvotes or low ratings until I figured out that I'm really only writing for myself, to get my characters or scenes out in words instead of just floating around in my head. Some people like my writing style, others absolutely hate it. I just try to let everyone know what they're getting into ahead of time now.

As for the original question: The story is done when it's done, whether that's 100 words or 100,000. I think most of mine are somewhere between 4,000-10,000 words, with probably a quarter or a third of it being stuff a pro writer would edit out or not write to begin with. Honestly, I'm surprised people actually read my stories.