Thursday, October 27, 2011

Increasing Post Length

To start off, I'm going to quote a rather commonly spoken phrase. ?Quality over quantity.?

With that said, this is something you should always keep in mind when trying to add length to your posts. A common mistake made by people trying to add length, is that instead of adding more content to their post, they try to add filler to stretch their content out. This can result in an over abundance of details rather than getting your information across clearly and concisely.

Here's a few ideas I like to utilize to get more length to posts.

Collaborative writing: This is one of the best methods of increasing content per post. It essentially allows more than writer to work on a single post, and you give each other content to play off from. It creates an exchange of actions, rather than big blocks of actions with no natural flow. Actions and dialogue (even in real life) are a constant series of interruptions and reactions to our environment and the people around us. If there's nothing going on around us, our actions are limited. This holds true for a post as well.

Multi-charactering: For solo writing, another good method of increasing content is simply to increase the number of interactions going on. This can be done through character dialogue or through NPCs. Either way, it creates rapid exchanges of content and provides more information to react to.

Introspect: When all else fails and your character is actually placed in a situation in which they genuinely have nothing to respond to (Example: A prison cell), then you can always utilize introspective thoughts to add content. However, care must be taken with introspect to ensure that it's used in the right time and place. Utilizing this outside of appropriate moments can quickly bore your readers or draw too much attention away from the overall story.



Essentially, when you get down to it, to get more length, you want more content for your character to react to. If you add length without extra content, you end up over-writing. So using your post example, here's some ideas to increase post length.

A phone call: This adds a new variable to the post (the caller could be written by you, or a friend) and provides more content for your character to react to.

Power outage: That's certainly going to give something to react to.

Sibling interruption: Same idea as the phone call.

Realization that the character is late for something: Quick way to wrap up while diving into a new series of actions/reactions.


Note: To avoid excess clutter, try to make sure that the extra content you're using to get longer posts, is in some way relevant to the story. If it's not, then chances are, you didn't need to write it. Anyways. Hope this helps. :)

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/kjBqyphPZEk/viewtopic.php

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