 Ahoy, ahoy, and welcome to the video. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about something that I think is apropos because the 7,000 contest is currently underway and I get the inclination that a lot of people are going to be writing very, very long entries, much as they have done over the last couple, three times now. And I thought I'd talk a little bit about the differences between short and long articles and the benefits of both. So first of all, let's answer the simpler question. Why is it that people tend to write long articles for contests, especially the big XK contests? And the answer to that is, is a misconception about what makes an article good. It's not something that the wiki alone gets and does to itself. One of the best examples I can think of a devaluing content that somebody has created because it's not very long is the Great Gatsby. Now the Great Gatsby I don't like for a bunch of reasons, but if you talk to people who know fine literature, one thing they'll say is, you know, it's short. That's part of what makes it bad. And so there is a weird attraction to making longer works. And the idea is always that longer means you've done something better. This is absolutely untrue. There are 200,000 word novels out there that are just crap. And there are 40,000 word novellas that are exceptional and short stories that are exceptional and very much worth reading. And so when people have this misconception in there, and the part of this misconception is simply the work put out, right? With the SCP wiki, the average quality level is quite low compared to professional writers. That's not a knock on the SCP wiki. It's not a knock on the writers of the SCP wiki. It's just a simplest statement of fact. I think it's pretty understandable that, you know, you have a bunch of amateur writers, then quality levels tend to be a little bit lower. Now, the SCP wiki's quality level is probably higher than almost any other amateur writing community, collaborative community on the internet, but that isn't a very high bar to clear. I will caveat that because it's important to do so with the idea that some of the stuff in the SCP wiki is as good as the best stuff elsewhere. Some of it, not all of it, not most of it, but some of it for sure. Now, with that out of the way and making sure that people don't think that I'm insulting them, part of what makes an article good or bad is not quality, especially on the SCP wiki. It's effort. If you look at an article and you see that somebody has put in an incredible amount of effort and it's only mediocre, I'm saying you, but just in general, voters will tend to upvote more than not upvote. And this isn't an absolute. I'm plenty of others will probably evaluate it for other reasons as well and their votes will accompany it, but you don't need everybody. You just need a lot of people longer articles that are decent will get tend to get more reputational value. And that's also important, by the way, but they'll tend to get more reputational value from people who read it. That is, I think, a mistake. And it has, it did for a very long time start pushing people to write longer and longer and longer things because they tended to, especially when those were the only options, like the only things you could read on the SCP wiki were 10,000 to 40,000 word diatribes. It starts to get to the point where if there is nothing else, then you start evaluating them based on quality again. There was recently sort of a backlash towards this style of writing. And what ended up happening is is that we very much over corrected. There's a quote often attributed to Mark Twain, but from all the research I could do seems to source from a mathematician, which is I think interesting called blaze Pascal. I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter. And when the SCP wiki started making short works for a short period of time, started making short works sort of paramount, people got lost in that and also started making similar mistakes to the long form stuff. With the long form stuff, it was just length is the only thing that matters. Well, if that's what you believe and you start working on short works, then again, you start shortening things down too far, too far. So you would end up with articles where people really didn't know what the hell was going on because they were so short that they didn't actually cover the basics very well. And then there was a backlash against that. And I think we've moved into sort of not an equal equilibrium. It's still balancing back and forth. And sometimes they're longer works, sometimes they're shorter works with the seven K contest, though, I guarantee you, we will start to see a push towards longer form stuff because there's going to be very, very highly, this is what happens. It's going to be very, very highly rated long, long articles in the 10 to 40,000 word range and maybe even higher. And people always follow the trend setters, whether or not those trend setters are doing good or bad. I think, or at least I wish, that people would instead just write what they're comfortable with because short works, let's put this way, because people want to say short form and long form as if that's the only thing, the only options there, but there really aren't. Short form would cover short story and flash fiction, which are two separate types of fiction. And long form would cover novella and novel and probably a few other like epic series sort of word counts. What we're talking about is the difference between on the SAP wiki at least, mostly there's maybe one or two novel length works, but out of the multiple thousands of works on the multiple thousands, nearly 10,000, if not more than 10,000 works on the SAP wiki, one or two is probably not worth mentioning. You have flash fiction. So stuff between, I'd say, well above zero, obviously, and probably below 1500 ish. And then short stories, which are sort of crossover with flash fiction, I'd say, because the lines are fuzzier than we would like to admit, probably 1000 to 5000 ish. No, 1000 to, you know, 10,000 ish. And then I think past 10,000, you're starting to get into the novella territory where it's nearly a fully formed novel. And then, of course, novels, which would be probably 40, 50,000 and higher. For the SAP wiki genre, by the way, you wouldn't have a novel length work until you got to, you know, 120,000. But there are novels of other genres that could be in the 50,000. Obviously, we can think about The Great Gatsby as a great example. I think it's, I think it's somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000, which is the one, the example that I led off with in this particular diatribe of mine. The thing is, and I want to make sure that this is clear, each of those types of writing is a different skill set. Now, there's a lot of crossover in the skill sets. What you learn in short story writing is going to be a lot of it's going to be applicable to novels, novellas, and flash fiction. And what you learn in flash fiction and a lot of it's going to be applicable across the board as well. However, not all of it is. And some people are better at writing shorter stuff than they are at writing longer stuff. And some of those people don't seem to know that. You think they would pick it up from the votes, but then, you know, you get, oh, nobody reads tales and that kind of stuff instead of maybe it's you. I always say that, like anytime somebody tells me nobody reads tales, I'm like, take a second and self reflect and see if maybe it's not always true. But take a second and self reflect and see if the problem is you. What are you doing wrong? And if nobody reads tales, figure out a way to get them to anyway, but you want to write a really, really long story, either an SCP or a tale. You need to develop those skills and flash, you know, this is the thing, right? You watch somebody write an SCP that's got 60 different, you know, not 60 different characters, but six different characters that try to be fully developed and they try to do it in 1500 words. To some degree, that is probably possible. However, the skill required to do it would make you the kind of professional writer that doesn't have to write on the SCP Wiki because that is incredibly difficult to accomplish because you only have 1500 words. How much development can you do? If you think about novels you've written, or not written, but longer novels you've read, there's not one story going on. There is, yes, the undercurrent, the main story that's happening, but it splits off. You don't just follow the heroes. Sometimes you follow what's happening with the bad guys and sometimes you follow what's happening with some characters that your main character met two chapters ago and find out what they're up to now and maybe follow their story. And then it weaves back into the main story at the end, right? You develop a wide range of characters in a novel because you have the word count to do it. And in fact, the primary story generally wouldn't be enough to carry the whole novel, right? You need some sort of levity to distract in some cases. You need some other stories to keep people's attention. That is a skill that requires, and weaving those together and say, starting them together, taking them in separate directions, and then bringing them back together is its own type of skill. You can't do that in 1500 words. You can, again, but it is incredibly difficult. And I would argue even the people who can do it in 1500 words aren't able to do it to the level and extent that it's necessary to really drive home the plot that they're trying to do or the character development that they're trying to do. Short stories, on the other hand, can give you room. Say we're talking about 10,000 to maybe a thousand. Some of them are between a thousand and 10,000. It's hard to say for sure. But can sometimes give you the room for at least two characters to work with. I always say to new writers on the SCP Wiki, pick one character and write flash fiction to start with. Work your way up. It's not necessarily that's how it goes. You don't start with flash fiction, go to short stories, go to novellas, and then go to novels. But I think flash fiction is easiest. It really is, because it's the least words. But you can create something in flash fiction that's just as good as a novel. And you can certainly create something in flash fiction that is as good as a short story on novella. So anyway, I just wanted to examine this and talk about some of the pitfalls that I've seen people fall into on the SCP Wiki and talk about, because I know when the 7K contest comes out, there are going to be a lot more words on the SCP Wiki. How many more? I don't know, but we're going to find out. Anyway, that's it. Thank you very much for watching. I don't know if anyone, I mean, I don't know. I know some people did. But for anyone who wasn't watching last week and wondering why this is coming out on a Wednesday, the 7K contest is on going, and I would like to write for it. I've got a lot of work to do. So I paired my schedule down to one video a week for July. So dank memes next week. The week after that will be the 20th. So the contest still won't have released, or I shouldn't say the contest has already started. We're in the writing mode right now. On the 25th, the actual articles get posted. So on the 20th will be another video where the contest articles haven't been dropped yet. And I might, depending on how much work I've finished up, give you guys a bit of a preview of what my 7K contest entry is going to be like because I was allowed to enter this time. So we'll see. Thank you very much for watching, though. And if you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. And then head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian and pledge at any level, like everybody here on the screen already has, including century key, who's pledged at $100. It is nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on Wednesday. I wanted to say on Thursday because that's just what I'm used to.