The Long And The Short Of It

Introduction

When I started on Vocal all communities had a minimum word requirement of six hundred words, apart from poetry, which required just a hundred words.

Since then, more communities have been added and a couple of Vocal Challenges specified a maximum word count (there was a fifty-word microfiction and a fifty-word critique challenge, plus the various pseudo-haiku ones) and these have resulted in the communities below having their minimum word count set to zero.

If you move your mouse over the word count to can see this.

I added this to clarify the image above

The music is "Long Time Coming" by The Delays

So How Have Things Changed?

I was criticised in the past for publishing too many stories, but I am lucky that I can write about anything.

The thing is since the minimum word counts were dropped, publications have increased significantly. While sometimes a maximum number of words can be a challenge, it also opens the way to significant numbers. That may be what Vocal wants, to increase the traffic on the site.

The problem I have is the number of notifications I get which are very short publications, and it just means I have to ignore a lot of them.

Taking another view, shorter pieces are quicker and easier to read, so people may prefer shorter pieces.

I write micro fiction and this is a piece which will either drop into Writing or Critique so does not need to hit the six hundred word limit. If I stopped now I could submit this piece but it would not make sense.

Almost every poetry piece I write is well over a hundred words because I often include explanations and links as well as music.

An interesting development in Challenges is that the minimum word count for the challenges has been upped to between seven hundred and fifty and a thousand words. I wonder how many entries have missed that criteria and I wonder if Vocal will enforce it if they feel the entry is still good enough. In the past, they have ignored Challenge Criteria to award places.

In the past I tried submitting a single-word piece but that was rejected, although I did a piece on one-word poetry.

Conclusion

I think this is just part of the evolution of the Vocal platform, but you need to be aware of the requirements, especially with Vocal Challenges.

Many of my stories are in Beat and Confessions and I would rather the six-hundred-word minimum stayed there otherwise we might see people just dropping a few words with a YouTube or Spotify playlist, and a Confession does need a full explanation.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope that this has given you one or two things to ponder.

I am posting this in writing and it clocks at four hundred and fifty od words.