Yeah. Well, and original fic gets annoying because there really is a market for 1.5-5K fic (short stories) and 80-120K fic (novels). And not much for longer or mid-length (or super short) stuff.
So to a real extent you do have to sort of work your "grand vision" into something that's of sell-able length (if you want to sell), which may mean trimming characters and sub plots that are less valuable, or padding it out if you write short stuff (like I do). It's kind of irritating either way.
A kind of sad RW example is Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, which is one of my favs. It was written as a ~50K novella and is excellent at that length (won a Nebula and all, so I'm not the only one who is all <3!!!!!). But to publish it for more readers, she had to more than double its size. The result wasn't bad...but it wasn't as good as the novella which was a much stronger work. She's claimed that she prefers the novella format, and complains about having to pad out novels to sell them...so you're not alone in being driven crazy by market demands! (And you can almost see the padding in some of her novels!)
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So to a real extent you do have to sort of work your "grand vision" into something that's of sell-able length (if you want to sell), which may mean trimming characters and sub plots that are less valuable, or padding it out if you write short stuff (like I do). It's kind of irritating either way.
A kind of sad RW example is Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, which is one of my favs. It was written as a ~50K novella and is excellent at that length (won a Nebula and all, so I'm not the only one who is all <3!!!!!). But to publish it for more readers, she had to more than double its size. The result wasn't bad...but it wasn't as good as the novella which was a much stronger work. She's claimed that she prefers the novella format, and complains about having to pad out novels to sell them...so you're not alone in being driven crazy by market demands! (And you can almost see the padding in some of her novels!)