Does a good Aspect say one thing? Or more than one thing?
We see in much Fate material the advice that a good Aspect says more than one thing. OK: sort of. It should say one thing and then say more about that one thing. It shouldn't say many things which aren't directly related to each other.
Many wordy drafts of Aspects contain information which don't need to be part of the Aspect in question, or indeed of any Aspect at all.
It's not about the word-count, it's about the encapsulation of a single major element of the character (or scene, or campaign, or Extra, or Advantage, or whatever other type).
One Aspect should establish one primary fact. And any color which that primary fact needs.
This does indeed happen a lot: While in "draft" progress, a single Aspect can grow to include (as worded) many different facts and lots and lots of words.
What I do when working out Aspects either by myself (for plot, campaign, scene or NPC Aspects) or with my players (for PC or Advantage Aspects, or some of the other baroque types which players can create, depending on what hacks are in play) is: I ask the Aspect's primary owner what three facts in this lengthy list of words are the really important ones. Three. One of them should be a primary fact, and the other two can color it. If one of the three facts doesn't color the other parts, it gets cut.
It's not that you can't have an Aspect include more than one fact. it just can't include utterly unrelated facts.
"Deposed Pirate King". Primary fact: "Pirate". Color: "Deposed", "King". The only further thing I might consider adding to this Aspect might, might might be if the player wants to say how or why or by whom the former Pirate king was deposed. It could fit here: "Former Pirate King, Deposed by My Own Bastard Son".
I work with the player until the Aspect has what she wants. But I do coach her to narrow a single Aspect to the salient facts about that Aspect. Other facts belong on other Aspects.
If the player must have Aspects which establish entirely unrelated facts, those would be different Aspects. "Gladiator" doesn't color "Pirate" in this case. (Maybe there's some other game or character where "Pirate Gladiator" makes sense, but that isn't what this example was about.) Embellish the "Gladiator" part as much as you and the player want, but every word which is added should be about the fact that it's a Gladiator. What kind, where, whose, how strong, whatever, I don't know, but it must be all about the Gladiator.
But:
Not all facts need to be Aspects.
Having too many Aspects, or too many facts captured in Aspects, dilutes all of the Aspects. It winds up that none of them get their due. Ryan Macklin's thoughts on "aspect spamming":
http://ryanmacklin.com/2013/11/fate-misconceptions-and-aspect-spamming/
So:
The other thing I do with players in this situation is, I ask them: Which parts of their character details don't need to be Aspects. You only get five.
Just because there are details which don't fit into five Aspects doesn't mean they aren't truth. Every player gets up to five Aspects at character generation, and that is the space within which they can put their Compel-bait and their Invoke potential. This is their moment to say what is and is not going to be important to them in play. They can't have it all, so, if they're in the weeds like this, help/make them cut the weeds.
It does not cost them character richness to leave things out of the Aspects. My players all have character history and other facts which are either understood as being part of what a given concisely-worded Aspect is saying-without-saying, or which are facts which aren't even reflected in any of their Aspects. Maybe you don't have to say in the Aspect that he was Pirate King of the Western Spice Continent's Less-Than-Perfectly-Charted Tradeways. Maybe you don't need an Aspect which says that as Pirate King he enjoyed the loyalty of twenty-two captains and their two thousand scummy villains, and which ports-of-call and pirate conquests were the origins of all of these dependable souls.
It's fine to have character details which aren't Aspects: The fact that my bastard son had the same name as the priest who excommunicated me for witchcraft isn't relevant to my deposed-pirate-king Aspect, but the fact that my bastard son deposed me is. The fact that I'm excommunicated or whether I did or did not actually dabble in witchcraft as a younger pirate might be things which I, as a player, don't ultimately want as an Aspect: It's not who-I-am-today. I don't want Compels on it, I don't want to Invoke it, I don't want to use it to Declare a Story Detail related to witchcraft, the Church, or anything else. It's history, it might come out in roleplay, but there's no room for it on my character sheet. That's for things I really want to be mechanically important in play, and all I get is five slots.
It's great when an Aspect does say more than one thing or does establish more than one fact, but, it still needs to say one main, major thing, along with whatever reasonable amount of color or decoration hangs on that thing. Not multiple unrelated things.
