Basic Trope: A long, thick, heavy book.
- Straight: The Story contains 30 chapters, each around 100 pages.
- Exaggerated: The Story contains 3,000 chapters, each goes well above 10,000 pages, printed in 10pt fonts.
- Downplayed: The Story actually consists of a trilogy of books, published as one.
- Justified:
- The Story is a long, complex story, perhaps with several different Plot Threads.
- A How To book or other nonfiction book details a complicated subject.
- Or it's a Great Big Book of Everything.
- Inverted: The Story is a one-shot Short Story or a novella.
- Subverted:
- The Story is a compilation of short stories writen over a large period of time.
- The Story is big in volume but only a little fraction of each page is used.
- The Story has really big letters.
- The Story is mostly composed of blank pages.
- There are a lot of illustrations.
- The Story has really thick pages.
- Given that most of The Story is filler or padding, the author warns the reader to skip them entirely.
- A much shorter abridged version of The Story is published.
- Double Subverted:
- Even when the individual stories are deceptively short, taken as a whole, the series constitutes a Doorstopper Series. (May or may not be combined into an Omnibus), depending on the publisher.
- Even if the format makes use of lots of pages to comunicate very little information, when taken on a normal format still takes 20 thousand pages.
- Hardcore fans read the padding and filter anyway.
- The abridged version is still bigger than most phone books.
- Parodied:
- Bob manages to lift The Story over his head, but is promptly flattened by it.
- Bob uses The Story as an actual doorstop.
- Zig Zagged: The book is magical and gets bigger or smaller depending on who is reading.
- Averted: The book is of average length.
- Enforced: "I want to write a Heroic Fantasy containing many different plot threads, a large cast, a Love Dodecahedron, etc."
- Lampshaded: "It's a long story..."
- Invoked: See "Enforced".
- Exploited:
- Bob uses The Story as an improvised weapon.
- Someone uses The Story literally as a doorstop or paperweight.
- Bob writes secret information in one of the pages of The Story, knowing that, given its size, nobody will find it.
- Defied:
- The writer doesn't want the audience to be intimidated or bored by a long story and either shortens it or doesn't write it.
- The publisher makes the author compress the story, fearing that a book that length will hurt sales.
- The story gets Divided for Publication.
- Discussed: "Did anyone actually finish The Story?"
- Conversed: "It was so long, I couldn't finish it with my busy schedule."
- Implied: "Alice is a fast reader, but she's been at The Story for a long time."
- Deconstructed: May be a sign of excessive Padding and/or just plain bad writing. The audience may grow bored and give up.
- Reconstructed: Padding is not used excessively, and the plotlines keep the audience hungry for more; they end up not giving a damn how long it is.
- Played For Drama: Alice neglects her schedule to finish The Story.
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