Leave It In

[foxinthestars]

When I was a girl and consumed all manner of Writer's Digest Book Club books on how to write, one of the lessons was that a story should be streamlined.  Like, one passage I can recall was, roughly, "don't cut off your story's head, but do cut out all the fat" (ie, everything that isn’t strictly necessary

Comments

[lorata]

Oh absolutely agreed, you could not sell a pro novel that was 100k of slow burn feelings with the first kiss showing up around the 70k mark, but that's absolutely a thing fanfic readers adore.

I actually have trouble with my own original novels because of this! I think my original style is far closer to the fanfic genre (fozmeadows has a great post about fanfic as a literary style/genre due to its conventions) and that gets me in trouble sometimes. (I'm having to cut some characters from my current WIP novel because while it would be fine in a fic, in a novel they don't have enough to do to justify their being there..)

[foxinthestars]

If anything I have the opposite problem --- I taught myself to write in more of a pro-fic style and have to fight with myself to let my hair down in ways that are ordinary/tame by fanfic standards.

[lorata]

I do have two very different modes, but I've never been a "brevity" sort of person, ha XD Although i will say I'm not "it's 86,000 words and the main adventuring party has not yet been assembled" NaNoWriMo 2004 levels anymore. ;)

I think I'm noticing this with my novels now because for a while I was writing nothing but original pretty solidly, like several years worth of just origific, but then I hit the Hunger Games and suddenly I output like 2 million words of fanfic, and coming back to novels was a bit like, well but I don't WANT to play by the rules anymore! I just wanna do what's FUN!