spike said:
I'm not getting into THIS discussion again.
If an adult's writer has 10K words and a children's writer has 800, you just don't have as many words to deal with.
Sure, and if a children's writer has a 25K novel, and an adult write is working on a 2,500 word short story, the adult writer has to be ten times as perfect as the children's writer, and must, of course, take ten times as long to write.
And heaven forbid that someone try to write a 400 word piece of flash fiction for an adult. It would be twice as hard to get perfect as the 800 word children's piece, and would probably take years to write.
How many words you have to deal with has nothing whatsoever to do with how well you write those words. It's a silly argument. There is no market on earth more competative that the adult short story market, but this aside, you either write a sentence correctly, you either tell a story correctly, or you don't, and anyone who thinks it's tougher to write children's fiction, or that it should take longer because it's shorter, which is just weird, and flies in teh face of all logic, and in teh face of how the best writers actually write and work, had better never try wriitng fiction for adults, and had definitely better avoid looking at how the best publisheed writers in both children's and adult fiction actually write and work.
I can write an 800 word short story for children three times as fast as I can write a 2,500 word story for adults, and I can get each sentence as perfect as possible three times as fast.
Saying short takes longer simply isn't true, and saying you have to be more perfect for children than for adults tells me you haven't sold much fiction for adults. It is, at best, an excuse for taking longer than you should to write a piece. Masterpieces have been written in a few days, and junk has has taken years to write.
You sit down and you write a sentence, and no matter what the target audience of that sentence, you either get it right or you get it wrong, and no editor wants wrong for any reader. Likewise, you sit down and you tell a story, and you either get that story right, or you get that story wrong, and it isn't one bit harder to get an 800 word story right than it is to get an 8,000 word story right. Neither has any room at all for error, but at least the shorter story has fewer elements to deal with, and fewer things that can go wrong.
