Retainer Ad-Venture Contest (EU) - Discussion Thread

[Chiramu]

Wow 500 words is SHORT. I'm really struggling editing mine down from around 1,000.

This is a great competition, and I understand that you can't very well read a ton of long short stories, but if (hopefully when!) you run a competition of this kind again, could you please consider upping your word allowance to 1,000?

Would YOU like to read a hundred entries of a 1000 words?

If you're having a hard time getting the word count down, throw your story away and plan it again from scratch. Plan the important parts and revolve around that, do we NEED to read about your retainers interaction with your character? Does your retainer NEED to talk about your character?
Questions that I've brought up from the very long entries(the ones that also disqualified themselves ), the story is about the retainers' adventure. Do we need to read about the parts we see in game? What is the most interesting part of the story? Is the most interesting part what you have written down?

[Mjollnir]

If you're having a hard time getting the word count down, throw your story away and plan it again from scratch. Plan the important parts and revolve around that, do we NEED to read about your retainers interaction with your character? Does your retainer NEED to talk about your character?

Had already cut mine down to 500, but it took a lot of the storytelling and emotion out of it which was a shame. I wanted to write about my retainer's interaction with my character, so aside from the required mention of what was brought back and how it was gotten hold of, I though it would be interesting to reflect on the current state of the game from my perspective. We have plenty of roof-stealers and minion-hunters in the thread so far, but in-game my eight retainers are past that phase and only head out to get the specific materials I require for the crafts that day.

On reflection, I stand by the 1,000 word request for future shirt story competitions. 500 words only takes about a minute and a half to read. Would I like to read a hundred entries of 1,000 words? Sure! Not all at once, but there's no reason to do so. Spending an hour to read twenty a day for a week seems fine, especially if it was part of my job to do so!