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I’m not in that many fandoms so I don’t know what it would be like to not have a good share of epics. I mean, I guess I’m in a few little fandoms, but they’re mostly book fandoms so I figure the canon material is more like a fic itself.
(If Martha Wells stops writing Raksura maybe I’ll do an epic. Probably not though.)
Long fic problems are kind of… I mean. I think I have a better grasp, now, after about twenty years of writing (wait 2016-1991=25, ok 25 years of writing) what kind of factors go into making a piece long vs short and where you can go wrong in estimating that. But it’s taken about that whole time. It’s really hard to just– make something be the length you want it to, and it doesn’t always work.
Sometimes you can force it, sometimes it’s just–
For some reason, probably because that’s what I’ve been doing a lot of lately, it’s all suggesting itself in metaphors about wreath-making. So we make holiday wreaths on the farm, out of a combo of purchased Canadian balsam boughs and locally-harvested pine, spruce, cedar, juniper etc. These are made by buying a wire wreath form– a circle with some giant staples on it– and then sticking bits of greenery you’ve cut to length into the staples, and then clamping them shut with a foot-pedal-operated clamp set into a table. I should post a video, it’s kind of neat.
Anyway. If you’re making a wreath, you can make a lot of choices about its final form while you’re doing the prep. #1 is, of course, picking the wire form you’re building it on– we have six, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-four, or thirty-six inch forms, some of them new and some leftovers from prior years, and then we also have flat swag forms that are similar but not curved, and so on. So you pick what size you’re making, and you cut your branches– the length you cut them to could be dictated by the size of the form you’re using, but I found that sometimes, I’d cut a whole bunch and then look at my pile of greenery and put the six inch form back and grab an eighteen, because the branches I had were really pretty big.
And then when you’re loading up each staple thingy, you have to pick an assortment of branches, and some are going to be uglier and go in the back, and then the top ones are pretty, and you want some to extend over the previous or next staple and either go under the next bit or be pulled out of the way so they can flop over the previous bit after it’s clamped– and the angle you put them in at is going to dictate how much fluffier than the form the wreath is. You can make quite a small flat wreath, or a really extravagant and big and floofy one, depending on how you fill each clamp. (The key is consistency. One under-full staple can be compensated for with a bow, but if you go fat-thin-fat-thin-fat-thin-thin-fat it’s going to look like shit no matter how you fluff it afterward.)
And in the end you may end up with exactly what you set out to make, but you really, really may not. Practice will mean you’ll be aware as you’re going that this one is turning out mega-fluffy so you better cut some more before you keep going, but once you have one staple clamped down you really can’t turn back.
Bouquets work the same way, all summer I made fresh bouquets, and we had to make them to either a five-dollar or eight-dollar size, and sometimes you started with a really extravagant sunflower and you knew this was an eight, and sometimes you were planning on a five and you got nearly done and realized, hoshit, this one needs a bunch more stuff in it to balance it out and when I’m done, it’s not going to be a five anymore. Practice helps you figure out what’s going on earlier, but it also helps to know that there’s more than one target to aim for.
The woman who sold the business to my sister was mostly not great at business or at passing information, but when she gave us the ten-minute tutorial that was the sum total of knowledge transfer on both bouquets and wreaths, she kept saying “Do what pleases you,” meaning you should let your aesthetic preference dictate the outcome, because that’s the only really true thing about any of it.
And while her business acumen wasn’t the most amazing thing, it has been a good adage for me to keep in mind. Do what pleases you. Let the work dictate itself a bit.
You just kind of have to be prepared for that, and have a kind of framework to know what other targets you could aim for if your initial assumptions don’t work out.
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