OCR is Not the Only Font

The Section with Graphs and Stuff

One of two things has happened. Either you have just finished reading Story #31, or you just passed up an opportunity to read a story about a vampire. In any case, you’re in for some science now, as I attempt to analyse the results of this thirty-one day challenge. If that’s not your kind of thing, feel free to skip this section. Otherwise, feast your eyes on this line graph:

 Wattpad won't let me include images within the text, and will only allow one photo in the sidebar. Just use your imagination, okay?

The x-axis shows the number of days into the month. The y-axis shows the number of words. The blue line (square dots, for those of you reading in black and white) follows the word count for each and every day. Not much of a trend, really, unless you count my tendency to do a really long story one day and a really short one the next. The green line (triangular dots), however, puts things into perspective somewhat. Each point on the green line represents an average of five days: the day itself, and the two either side of it. This evens out the crazy “Bart Simpson hair” jags, revealing what everyone already knew: it’s hard to finish what you’ve started. It’s pretty clear from this line that the stories generally got shorter as the month went on.

It should be noted that Day 22 represents the celebrity monkey story which was limited to the minimum fifty-five words. Day 23 I spent at the zoo instead of writing anything serious, so I guess you can blame both 55-worders on monkeys. At the other extreme, Day 27 represents the collaboration challenge, so half those words weren’t actually mine. Basically, I went more than a week without writing more than about five hundred words in a day.

However, that’s not to say that more words are better. Have some more science. Boom! Another graph!

 Totally, absolutely a real graph that exists and you can see. Definitely not just a thinly-veiled apology for the complete lack of a graph.

Okay, so it’s not really science at all. It’s just speculation and pretty pictures. But that’s the next best thing to science (and let’s be honest, newspapers do it all the time). This graph shows the word count as before, averaged over five days, along with the number of times each story was added as a “favourite” by members of deviantART (the navy blue bars). Since the “faves” are mostly dealing with single digits while the word count deals with triple, I’ve multiplied them by 100 for comparison. A value of 100 on this graph represents either 100 words or just one solitary fave.

So what does this tell us? Well, nothing very much. Some stories picked up quite a few faves, others none at all. The word count—and the time since the start of the month—don’t seem to have had that much of an influence. There do seem to be a comparatively high number of faves on the stories submitted in the first few days, but since many of the readers were Flash Fiction Month writers themselves, it’s likely they felt the pressure piling on in much the same way I did: just like my average word count dropped over the course of the month, so too did the number of other writers’ flash fiction pieces I managed to read each day. The number of times a story is added to users’ favourites is not directly representative of its quality (it’s influenced by, among other things, the number of people who read it in the first place), but hopefully it gives some idea.

Based on the reasonably consistent (or at least consistently erratic) quality of these stories, I believe that the decreasing word count is not only the result of me getting lazy, but also a consequence of practice. Towards the end of Flash Fiction Month, I had the feeling that I was getting better at putting these stories together, using fewer superfluous words, and this is one reason I would really recommend it to any writers out there.

Though I initially compared Flash Fiction Month with NaNoWriMo in my bunny analogy, they’re really very different events. NaNoWriMo seems to be intended to get words on the page: it encourages its participants to produce that daunting first draft, something they can hopefully clean up later. Flash Fiction Month does something quite different. Instead of slogging away at the first draft of a novel, providing a starting point for something huge, it demands that its participants produce a great many separate stories, small but complete. Where NaNoWriMo asks writers to dig the foundations for a house, Flash Fiction Month gets them to put up the same tent again and again and again. I’m aware that I’m not making either of these things sound tremendously attractive.

The point is, NaNoWriMo encourages you to get a big job out of the way in many small steps. Flash Fiction Month, on the other hand, encourages you to complete the same small job many times over. In doing so, it improves your aptitude at this particular job. It’s not all great, though. Have a look at this pie chart:

 A pie chart this time. Om nom nom nom!!!

As you may have noticed (if you didn’t come here instead of reading about the escapades of that vampire), most of these stories are funny, silly, light-hearted. This is not Atlas Shrugged. If you make me write one story every day for a month, I will most likely produce stories based around stupid jokes. Don’t get me wrong: I like stupid jokes. But the pie chart of my complete works would look very different (probably more like 50/50). Flash Fiction Month really hones your ability to write one sort of story, but it doesn’t exactly encourage variety. That said, very few of these stories would have got written without it, and the kind of stories it prompted me to create was a little out of the ordinary. I hope you have enjoyed them.