the ghoulish beauty of remorseless editing
That’s right, friends, back at it again. Queue the opera and grab a scalpel: it’s time for surgery. You know the routine by now. (If you don’t, go take a peek at the last 3 posts).
In short, we’re making your story epic by amputating anything and everything that doesn’t need to be there.
Episode 4: Murder House Rules
The terrifying anomaly of the fabricated philosophy
I know, mes amis. I can already hear you going: Et tu, Burnell? We write speculative fiction, it defeats the purpose if there’s no speculation! I’m with you guys, I swear I’m on your side. The point is to pick your battles.
If you write fantasy or sci fi, you’re necessarily devoting a decent percentage of your text to world building, that’s unavoidable and frequently awesome. It can fatigue your readers, though. People don’t have an unlimited reservoir of patience or curiosity.
What I’m pointing at specifically is a social issue that doesn’t have an immediate real-world corollary, such that it needs to be explained at length. If it’s central to the story, it’s central to the story; even then, you might ask yourself if talking about it for pages on end is the way to help readers understand.
If believers of the Toad Cult are being persecuted by the Turtle Church, that’s potentially very interesting, but Turtle Church thugs kicking down doors is obviously going to be more engrossing than a treatise on their theosophical differences.
If it isn’t central, ask yourself how much text you really want to devote to a MacGuffin.
How do you spot the difference between riveting nuance and time-wasting vanity? I would suggest asking yourself the following questions:
- Does it impact one of my central characters?
- Is this belief or institution going to change over the course of the story?
- Just how abstruse is the subject matter? How much of my word count will I have to devote to making this make sense?
If the answer to the first 2 questions is ‘yes,’ you don’t just need to explain, your readers want you to. We want to hear why those Turtle Church bastards are persecuting our Toad Cult friends. Really, don’t freakin’ tell me ad nauseum that blood magic is evil and fail to illuminate WHAT IS ACTUALLY WRONG ABOUT IT. Yes, Bioware, I am looking at you.
I would still be wary of lengthy exposition, but just how brief you ought to be, I leave to the reader’s taste and your style.
If the answer is ‘no,’ you need to ask yourself whether it merits a chunk of your word count. You can always opt for a middle ground and put an explanation in an appendix; readers who are curious can get their answers, and you haven’t bogged your story down with big chunks of text that are only semi-relevant. This leaves your narrative with ample space to regale us with Turtle Church outrages.
Congratulations! We’ve figured out which monster our hero is facing, the first step in monster-slaying.
Next: the blood-chilling events that started it all, which no one cares about.
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