Comment by mrec
13 hours ago
Plenty of webfiction out there which is exactly this. It does tend to fall into the trap of going on forever though.
13 hours ago
Plenty of webfiction out there which is exactly this. It does tend to fall into the trap of going on forever though.
Printing is a good constraint against getting too long, both the physical and cost constraints. Though the Harry Potter series in full still managed to reach a million words.
For another comparison, the Bible is around three quarters of a million words, and tends to use special paper (20–40gsm/30–50 micron) so it works in one volume.
Handwriting is also a good idea for encouraging keeping lengths down; typing and dictation make verbosity too easy; and as for LLMs, words are clearly far too cheap there.
There is a lot of web fiction out there that would be better if the authors had written "the end" a few years ago.