Well, I thought that I’d talk briefly about one of the cool things about the modern internet – namely that it allows creative works to be in a much greater range of lengths, sizes etc… than were common in the age of traditional media.
This is something I’ve been thinking about during the month or two before I prepared this article in early March, thanks to writing a series of draft sci-fi horror novellas. Not a clue whether I’ll ever edit or self-publish them [Edit: Probably not] but I’m up to the third one at the time of writing. The first two are both about 23,000 words long. And, if you know anything about traditional 20th century-style publishing, then you’ll know that this was a very uncommon length for traditionally-published books. Traditionally, the novel (50,000+ words) was king. Case in point, most of the books in my room are novels because they are just so much more common to find than novellas are.
(On a side-note: Back in 2019, the only way I was able to write an unpublished comedy-horror novel was by splitting it into six or seven “episodes” which were more like connected short stories than anything else. Eventually, by the third draft, it was about 86,000 words long. The longest piece of fiction I’ve ever written…).
With my daily semi-digital art, I’ve noticed that – during the past two years or so, I’ve gradually switched over to a much smaller format which is about 11.5cm x 8.5cm. This is absolutely perfect for me. Whilst there are still rushed and/or uninspired days where the quality of my daily art can temporarily suffer, I’ve found that this smaller format allows me to make the best of the time that I usually have for making original art every day whilst also often leaving time over for making “art journal” paintings, fan art paintings etc… too.
In other words, I tend to thrive whenever I make smaller or shorter things. Yet, traditionally, these sorts of things were almost outright ignored by the pre-internet world. I’ve already talked about how traditional publishers are obsessed with novel-length books but most art galleries that included actual paintings traditionally prized and/or focused on gigantic canvases rather than on smaller “A bit larger than a playing card” paintings.
Of course, these are hardly the only mediums where there was a “traditional” size or length in the pre-internet era. All of the modern complaints about indie games being “too short” come from an age when, with the exception of some genres (like survival horror games), videogames were often expected to be at least 10-20 hours long. In the age of physical media, and given the prices many “AAA” studios charge for their games, this made a bit more sense. But the most recent game I played was a shorter PS2-style 3D platformer game called “Lunistice” (2022) which, even at full price, only costs about £5. This game wouldn’t have existed during the 2000s because, well, only longer games were usually allowed.
Although there were some good things to be said about the age of traditional media. As *ugh* ultra-competitive and gatekeepery as traditional publishers were, they at least acted like a crude quality filter of sorts. Likewise, traditional “offline” physical media meant that videogames had to actually be finished before release and couldn’t include any greedy post-sale “micro-transactions”.
Still, one cool thing about the internet – with things like self-publishing (whether ebooks or, better, print-on-demand) or the DRM-free versions of online game distribution (eg: Itch.io, GOG etc…) or even just being able to post artwork online – is that creative people now have so many more options in terms of length or size. We’ve moved past the hyper-standardised “Henry Ford production line” era where every book had to be a full-size novel, where almost every game had to be at least ten hours long and every painting had to be a giant canvas.
And this is an absolutely great thing for creativity, because not every creative person is at their best when they work at these sizes or lengths. Some of us only really thrive when we create shorter or smaller things.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
