I think I'm starting to understand how to write long stories.
Not the story I'm writing; it's over 15,000 words now, which is so hysterically longer than anything I've written before, but it's a long story, not a story that has been made long. I mean everything happens for a reason, and everything is reasonably pared down and put together in a necessary way for the story to make sense, like cheap Swedish furniture that just happens to need a lot of screws. I'm starting to look at the way stories are put together, stories that don't have outlines and instruction manuals, or if they do they're so small and insignificant in comparison to what is actually there; no twiddles and woodworking stuck on as an afterthought, but a necessary part of the whole, just nicer than it needs to be. Or, rather, as nice as it needs to be only we've forgotten.
Somehow this has become a reflection on my attitudes towards Ikea and modernism in architecture and how very much I want to live in a fusty bookshop with ridiculous narrow staircases and ancient furniture and twiddles just precisely where twiddles ought to be.
*flaps hand dismissively*
I know what I mean.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}