The Eight Hundred Word Story

Well it seems the verdict is in, the great literary minds of the Literotica Survivor Contest have made it official: the eight hundred word story has now replaced the seven hundred fifty word story as the new standard for crap. Yes, the seven hundred fifty word story, the scourge of last year's contestants, seems to have faded into the Survivor Archives.

Now, the advent of the eight hundred word story as the new crappy story has created some mathematical complexities in story evaluation. You see, while the gold standard for crap has shifted up the word count scale, the standard for an acceptable story has remained anchored at one thousand five hundred words. The math was easy last year, to properly judge a story as acceptable you just had to find one exactly twice the length of the crappy seven hundred fifty word story.

Yes it would be so much easier if the standard for the acceptable story was upped to one thousand six hundred words, but for some reason it remains at one thousand five hundred. Okay, I see I am confusing you with the math here, let me give you an example:

You have a story at Lit and you want to know whether it is crappy or not. The first thing you need to do is open the story and quickly scan its length. Now obviously if it covers more than one Lit page, it will be well above one thousand five hundred words, if fact it may actually achieve the revered three thousand seven hundred fifty word level, which seems to be on its way to becoming the new standard for enjoyable reading, though that is a different story.

No, we are sticking with crappy here so you need to find a story of a dubious shortness. You simply copy the story, without the title, and paste it into a word processing program. Let the word processor count the words and check out the result.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Now, I should've mentioned it earlier you are not to read this story during this crappiness evaluation. Well, yes you read the title and the author, but nothing further.

Okay, so you have checked out the word count results from your word processing program. Say the word count is eight hundred forty seven words. Well, you know it is above eight hundred, so it not judged as the crappiest. What you need to do is set up a ratio as follows: (Actual word count -- eight hundred) / (one thousand five hundred -- eight hundred). So in our example you have (847-800) /(1500 -- 800) or 47/700 which reduces down to 6.7%. In other words, your eight hundred forty seven word story is actually 6.7% less crappy than an eight hundred word story. We can call the 6.7% the crappiness index.

Now as you leave the crappy ranges of stories and soar to two or three thousand words, there is a new set of mathematics that helps determine how enjoyable it will be to read a story. The calculations are similar for longer stories, except there you calculate the enjoyable reading index, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Of course, with any rule there are exceptions. Remember how I mentioned above that you need to read the title of the story and the writer's name (read nothing else mind you). Well there are a number of writers at Lit that have reached such a level of crappiness in their writing that the eight hundred word standard no longer applies. No some writers have been granted a range of crappiness, the most current is the eight hundred to twelve hundred range.

Yes for these writers the crappiness index simply doesn't apply. You see for these writers, any story ranging from eight hundred words to twelve hundred words is automatically considered as equally crappy. To find out which writers have achieved the crappiness range you merely ask the question on the Survivor Contest forum.

Granted, there are not a lot of writers who have achieved the crappiness range status, but there have been enough to actually impact all the numbers I have mentioned above. You see, while the gold standard for crappiness remains at eight hundred words, if you actually average in the crappiness of the stories written by the crappiness range writers, the actual word count for the crappiest possible story actually drifts up to approximately eight hundred three point zero five (803.05) words, or eight hundred three if you round it off.

Of course to keep the math simple for ex-accountants and math challenged folks, the standard does remain at eight hundred. Just keep in mind when you see someone complain about an eight hundred word story, just remember, it could be worse, it could be an eight hundred three word story.