>tfw I can write well but I can't write long How do

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By spreading out what I write.

You probably spend too much time on one sentence. You should just write as much as you can, then revise later.

>tfw I can only write short, florid pretensions which take me a 3 words a minute

>>9400801

It's just a consequential series of short stories that have an interlinked, overarching plot. View it as several smaller stories that create a whole. Write 10x5000, and then meld into a whole.

>>9400938
That's good advice, thank you

>>9400801
just add more shit to it

>>9400801
You actually have to have something to say. That which is actually profound and literary tends to struggle for clarity and brevity, not length.

>>9401071
I do. The problem is constructing a long enough narrative to accomodate it

>50,000 word novel
That's more on the novella side. L'etranger in English is a bit over 42,000.

>>9401083
50k is generally the cut-off for novel. its still quite short tho.

>>9401071
>Implying you have to have something to say
Someone clearly doesn't know what post-post-modernism is.

>>9401083
Great Gatsby is 50k and I've never heard it called a novella

>>9400801
>a 50,000 word novel?
novels are more like a minimum of 75,000 words. you need to write 100,000 words of gold with the expectation that 10,000 to 20,000 will get the ax in the editing process (professional editing not your own editing).

>How do you go about stretching a story
there should be no "stretching" required. if you have a big story that is worthy of being a novel then length should come naturally. assuming you have 10,000 to 20,000 words there are probably many holes in the story that need to be filled in. to do this you need to be able to distance yourself from your work and approach it from the reader's perspective. if something is not clear then add more to clarify. if a thought appears incomplete then add more to make it a complete thought. this process gets easier as your word count gets higher and higher because you tend to forget exactly what you wrote 3 months ago and you can better evaluate your work.

this is hard and takes lots of work so buckle up. you are at the point where you have to decide if this is really what you want to do. you either figure out how to fill the page or give up.

>>9401189
>the exception to the rule changes the rule
50,000 is a novella. lazy wordlets just want to fantasize that 50,000 is a novel so they dont have to write as much.

>>9401231
OP here. My ambition is only to write a novella. I just used "novel" as shorthand. It's not even something I have any ambition of getting published. I just want to see if I can write something of substantial length.

Also, plenty of 50,000 word books are simply called "novels". Farenheit 451 for example. I didn't wish to split hairs.

>>9401081
You have a lot of little things you want to say; a narrative is one big thing to say. Claiming that you know how to write and have something to say, but don't know how to present it in a narrative it is like claiming you know how to cook, but just have no idea how to combine the ingredients you like into a cohesive dish.

>>9401397
>>9401397
That sounds like a neat analogy, but it makes no practical sense, cooking and writing are not comparable in the slightest

combinatorics
number of characters n! times the number of distinct threads that will be touched throughout the work, times the number of average daily word output.

>>9401083
>>9401170
>>9401189
>>9401205
>>9401231
>>9401261

You all do realize there is no official number of words that is a line in the sand between "novella" and "novel", right? There are other factors that should be more important in determining to which category a work belongs, if you feel the need to categorize works in this way (I'm not really sure why it matters anyway, unless you're talking about qualifications for awards, and fuck that). A novella should tend to concentrate on only one theme, while a novel may have a "main" theme but explores others in more depth as well. Similarly, a novella would present far fewer and less complex conflicts than a novel. Either way, its all clearly subjective and subject to trends in thought, and, again, a rather pointless excercise anyway.

>>9400801
To actually answer the OP, why do you feel the need to stretch out what you're writing? I'll tell you the same thing (with a slight modification) I tell my students when they ask how long an assignment needs to be: your writing should be as long as it needs to be to say what you want to say. If you actively attempt to stretch it out, I can only see that resulting in shit with which you will be disappointed.

The only reason I can see is the point another anon made, that you should expect a certain amount to be cut by editors during the publication process. There I can see the purpose of including strategic extraneous material in the hopes that that's what get cut and they keep what's actually important to you.

>>9401397
I'm not sure the analogy works entirely, but I get your point.

Basically my problem is that I have a comic character, partially self-parodic and partially archetypical of a particular phenomenon I'm trying to convey. My problem is that I want to move him into the right situations whereby I can effectively coax out what I need from him in order to get my point across.

>>9401452
thats why I said "generally"

>>9401452
you know, I could tell before I got to that part that youre a fucking teacher, do you not get enough of a sense of superiority at work? you gotta bring it to 4chan too? you must be insecure as fuck

>>9401424
The concept being described is the combination of individual elements into a larger whole, which writing and cooking share and which is separate from the skill of preparing those individual elements properly (which writing and cooking also share).

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>>9401601
>help, I really need to learn something!
>oh god, not a teacher - how unbearable!
Not even that person, you're just that fucking terrible.