Here is a wild scenario that I would like you to tackle!

The Chatters
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Let’s say you are good friends with a writer. S/he enjoys writing online and sharing their work with a small-ish community. S/he has no desire or interest to publish and simply enjoys having fun writing.

However after all the short stories and two standalone novellas s/he written, there is one novel that s/he has been working on for a long while.

Your friend finished the story three months ago and it is online for people to read and enjoy. S/he did some editing as they wrote it which too a bit longer, but they were able to stick with it till the end.

Your friend is very proud of their story and their fans seem to like it in their own way. So, you decided to read it then surprise your friend by letting them know you’ve read the story.

Unfortunately, you were NOT REMOTELY prepared for the story your friend finished and started wondering, how in the world they managed to do something that wild and crazy!

Your friend worked on a single story and post it online with a grand-spanking total of 2,387 chapters and each chapter is 9,500 words long. The word count total is over eleven million.

The story that your friend wrote is a MASSIVE epic fantasy story about adventures, friendships, and crazy other happening with immense magic systems and etc.

Your friend does confront you to ask you if you could read the story, but knowing how crazy long the story is, and that you were going to read it with your friend knowing, you quickly turned away.

In this scenario, what could you do or even say to your friend who wrote an epically long single novel from when s/he first started to three months ago this year? S/he really wants you to read it and give feedback, but you aren’t that ambitious to read something that outrageously long.

What do you do in this wild scenario?!

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@JohnnyTuturro
@CoffeebyNight
@TheTigerWriter
@J.L.O
@copyedit
@NotARussianBot
@Akje

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Make them an offer they can’t refuse :wink:

They have to watch 100 Barrio Movies with me. Or else the deal is off.

In return for slogging through their fantasy story, I am making them get stuck in over 250 hours of gritty realism, to make the deal even remotely fair. And if they want feedback, we need to watch a TV show to make up for the lost time of going through that. :smiley:

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Well, shit!
LMAO!

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I’m with Churro on this one, Eleven Million words?

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That is a passion I sorta envy.
Keyword: sorta.

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Reminds me of this

Imagine if your friend made that and wanted feekback on it.

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:flushed:

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  1. If politely obliged, to a novel’s average if I’m very invested. This means 50K-120K depending on the genre.
  2. If its to to give interest to their work, at least a fre chapters.
  3. I’d be more inclined dto spot-check.

But this is over 22.5 million words. Even as 120K novel lengths, itd almost 189 novels, dobule that for smaller novels.

Even in a good year, where Im crunching through reading, (which I cannot do with small kids), thats my entire resding list, right there.

No one could be obliged to resd this much, unless it’s my passion or my burden.

That does NOT mean its not interesting, that it has no place out there in this world, but this is more like reading a novelist’s lifetime body of work. And Ive got a handful of writers that I read everyrhing from.

I haven’t written this much. I am pretty prolific. And I won’t burden people with my writing, demanding they read a ton.

But if someone has this much work in themselves, do it.

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I can only imagine if this person didn’t edit as they wrote and simply wrote.
Can you even imagine the hours/days/months/years it would take to thoroughly edit the ENTIRE novel alone?

That is sheer madness! I could never do something that bonkers!

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Im sloely wditing throufh somethinf at a snails pace for .y peace of mind. That thing is 88K currently, and that was much of a month.

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As far as I know the longest book ever written is In Search of Lost Time by Proust, which is over 4000 pages and 1.3 million words. So your friend is asking us to do the equivalent of reading Proust eight or nine times? It took Proust more than ten years just to publish the darn thing. If your friend gave me ten years to read it, I might consider it, depending on how much they’re willing to pay me…

Yes, reading a monster like this is worthy of payment. Beta readers aren’t supposed to be taken advantage of, and this is more like what a professional editor would do. A professional would get paid THOUSANDS for doing this, and they deserve it for this kind of work. Eleven million words? Whew! (♯^.^ღ)

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That makes so much sense!
And you do have to wonder, why such a single story is that long for and what is the purpose of such a thing?

Like I can admire the passion for doing something like that. Yet that would drive me bonkers if I did not edit as I go and had to edit that entire thing alone.

That is a scary task to do alone.

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Let’s not get into the fanficiton whose length puts even that to shame!

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If I had a friend who asked me to read a story of that size, I will have to respectfully decline their offer, because my ADHD self could not do a paragraph of that even on a good day, unless I am hyper-focused or some shit.

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What if it was the official novelization of Tower of God?

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I couldn’t do it and the same applies for One Piece too.
I am sorry but I would probably have to do an audiobook and that is only if I remember to stay on track.

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girl there are stories that i volunteered to read that i still haven’t finished. honestly, i would totally start it

and then i would totally forget it for 11 months, oops. time don’t real.

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I tip my hat to you, If I had a hat.

:sweat_smile:

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I’ve been in a similar scenario…but in a slightly different way than that…twice.

First case: a read-for-read where it was a novel on Wattpad. Okay, so that’s tame, right? The wild part was that chapter 1 was an entire book. Or section one, or whatever you call it. It was going to take me estimated 10 hours to get through that first part. And the read-for-read is my first chapter and her first chapter.

I kindly had to tell her that I’ll read chapter 1 not part 1 (my 4 min vs her ten hours, are you kidding me?) and asked her where chapter 1 ended. Eventually, we got it settled, and I didn’t have to point out that she would read for 4 min and I would read for 10 hours and how unfair that was, but I would have told her the workload must be as close to equal as possible.

I would have, I hope. Back then, first-time Wattpadder me wasn’t sure what other Wattpadders were like and a bit nervous :stuck_out_tongue:

But that’s a read-for-read. How about a non-read-for-read?

Second case: I have this writer friend who can probably write a stream-of-thought 100k word novel in a week if they wanted to. They write a lot. No problem with that. But I was once asked to read their book of over 50 chapters a long time ago.

It was a three timeline multiverse story with complex plots and side plots, they had told me about this story. Personally, I wasn’t interested in reading something so confusing. It confused me outside of the story. idk if I was going to enjoy the story itself.

I think I put my editor hat on and ended up reading the first few chapters, then said it wasn’t my cup of tea, but if they ever wanted to bounce ideas off again, they could. Truthfully, it was interesting, but just a LOT. The way they chat online is the exact same, so, I didn’t know the best way to tell them without hurting their feelings :sweat_smile:

Just to give you a feel of “a LOT”: three timelines, three characters, each character’s family and relatives and pets, and love interest, and there are also fairies, and angels and witches and King Arthur inspirations, and aliens and space, and oh, can’t forget the doppelgangers and villains and the villains’ doppelgangers… And that’s not all of it.

(whispers I really still feel like they should’ve stuck with one timeline, but that’s just me, I guess :sweat_smile: Besides, how could I tell them when they were unaware of their own writing style being somewhat of a problem? )

We’re still writer friends to this day, so, I guess they were fine with my seemingly “not really caring for their story but still willing to listen to them talk about it” stance :stuck_out_tongue:

So, based on my previous experience, I would probably do the latter. That would also give me time to get into it in my own way if I wanted to and not feel pressured to give feedback right away.

Then maybe one day I can say, “Hey, by the way, I actually read the book” and that would be an even bigger surprise for them because up until then, they would have thought it wasn’t my cup of tea :wink:

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