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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 1341561" data-attributes="member: 6777">No argument here.IMHO, a story should take as long as it needs to take... which seems to be the real problem here, i.e., the need to stretch any given story idea into a multi-volume epic. It's not that there aren't stories that work well as multi-volume epics, it's just that there aren't nearly as many as there are ones that don't.As for where to place the blame...I think that media industries generally tend to be reactionary, i.e., they don't drive the market so much as react to it. If the fantasty lit market is being flooded with multi-volume epics, it may very well be, as others have said, becasue that's what people want to buy, and who are publishers to challenge this? Eventually, people will get sick of them (as the mediocrity reaches critical mass), and the pendulum will swing the other way.I once heard an anecdote that David Eddings, seeing that his first novel wasn't selling very well, said to himself, "I bet if I write one of those multi-volume fantasy epics, I'd sell some books." Voila! The Belgariad was born, Eddings got rich, and your truly was forced to read his work by my at-the-time girlfriend. Now, *there's* a story that could have been told in a single short novel... and said manuscript then thrown in an incinerator.**A wholly subjective opinion, as I now realize. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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