More differences orignovel vs fanficshortstory

[lobelia321]

Structure
On my Magna Carta about what I love about novels, the top item I wrote was 'structure like scaffolding, like architecture'. So in the novel I wrote I promptly forgot all about structure. I was half-way through before I remembered that, oops, novels have chapters. Not to mention Parts. I rushed to the shelf and pulled off random novels: every one had chapters of some sort.

So I learned for next time round: give some thought to structure beforehand. *g* Also, structure, I suspect, will actually aid the writing.


Genre
I read few genre novels (sci fi, horror, chick lit, whatnot). But over the past five years that is almost all that I have written: genre short stories. Slash fanfic is genre fiction. I know the generic horizons of expectations, I know the narrative conventions and how to break them and how to play around with them, I know the tropes, I know the audience. Writing non-generic origfic, I was left sort of floundering. What I ended up writing was some hybrid between thrillier / adventure travelogue / romance, with bouts of slash thrown in.

In my writing, I have loved playing around with and overturning and indulging in the conventions of fandom and fanon, and I have loved both subverting canon and pedantically playing up to it. But when there is no canon, and no fanon -- what to rebel against??

I've now gone and borrowed a Crichton novel from the library. I haven't read that kind of adventure thriller since high school. But I thought, hey, seeing that's what I seem to have written, let's get acquainted with a master of that form. So that at least I'll have something to pastiche.


Straight style
I am too arty farty for writing narrative in a straight-down-the-line this-is-what-happened style. I find it very difficult (I tried to do it in the HP epic; it's hard, for me). And especially after I did those writing experiments in SGA last spring: I really got into the experimenting around with words. This works well for short stories. But novels, I think, cannot be too precious. I read a novel recently where each word was polished as if it were in a poem: it made for very stodgy reading and I got bored 1/3 of the way through.

In my novel, I wrote straight action what-happened-then, and what-happened-after. But I want to find some balance between straight and arty-farty. I didn't play around with language at all. I didn't borrow from other modes, e.g. from epistolary literature or from txt conventions or from nineteenth-century omniscient or surreal, all those things I mucked about with in SGA experiments.

This will be the challenge: to combine stylistic experimentation with architectural structure with narrative.

Comments

[22by7.livejournal.com]

I read a novel recently where each word was polished as if it were in a poem: it made for very stodgy reading and I got bored 1/3 of the way through.
very good point. i was reading a bunch of essays where various people seemed to think novelists have been ignoring the sort of thing writers like, say, Joyce, accomplished. but there has to be a reason why what is called 'realism' has proved so ... reliable when it comes to novels. i think the time it requires to read a work is important. and how important story is. there are some novels you can technically summarise in a single sentence and it's not even the point. also, personally, some novels, like 'Tristram Shandy', that i have never read straight through. i dip into places, pick, say a passage of five to ten pages, and focus on that. and i'm guessing you don't mean 'polished' in the way i'm thinking, because i've heard of a lot of good writers working on one sentence of their novel for months on end. heh.

this is all very interesting to me because i come in from the opposite end - it's fanfic i struggle with finding my way around. but anyway, someday i hope to read original fiction you've published. because you're damn good.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I am in the mood for very arty novels; at such times, something like Gertrude Stein is like eating a pickled gherkin on pumpernickel bread after too much sugary cake. At other times, my eyes fall shut when trying to fight my way through the thicket of words.

Writing arty-farty text can often be more fun than reading it.

You come from the opposite end? You struggle with fanfic? What end are you coming from, then??

Also, thank you so much for your kind compliment at the end. It is really heartening. :-)

[giglet.livejournal.com]

I'm running into problems with book-length structure now, too. I'm good at introducing themes and tying them up in under 1000 words, but when I have 80,000 words -- or even just 5,000 for a chapter -- the supports and complexity and even the pace of transitions have to change.

Because I'm a geek, this reminds me of the biophysics of size: proportionally ants are stronger than elephants, simply because of their size. Their volume-to-surface-area ratio is fairly small, and that gives them a huge advantage. Books to drabbles are the same: books need all sorts of structure and support, relatively huge feet and bones (and feeding requirements) but they can lift huge logs of philosophy. Drabbles get a lot of mileage out of each word: they are very efficient but also very limited in what they can accomplish. And an equivalent number of words in drabbles does not add up to a cohesive book.

Speaking of scaffolding, have you seen this page?
http://www.ingermanson.com/writing/snowflake.php
It's a very mechanical system, but it's good for making sure that the structure is *there* and that one at least starts with a plan for where the story is going.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

That snowflake page is very interesting (and the man strangely mesmerisingly geeky-daggy). Thanks for that link. Mechanical structure doesn't come naturally to me but as the just splurging it onto the page didn't generate structure magically for me, I think I may have to get used to a certain degree of mechanicality (is that a word?).

I like your ant metaphor a lot. Brilliant!

So is this book-length structure you are struggling with fanfic or orig? And what tips can you offer??

[giglet.livejournal.com]

Mechanicality *is* a word!

I'm writing a nonfiction book, and I really don't have tips to offer. I have notes for each chapter, but going from 100 word description to 5000 word chapters is really tough.

[birdgerhl.livejournal.com]

belatedly - that snowflake link was v. interesting. a bit *too* structured for me, but i shall definitely be referring to it.

b.x :)

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

I read a story in that SF/F mag I showed you the other day (the one with the person we know in it) that appeared to be entirely made of words and language. No actual story or characters to speak of. I didn't make it to the end.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I have read many such a story in fanfic. But as they tend to be about droolsome characters, I have often not minded.

The thing is in orig: why should anyone care about your made-up person??

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

I like playing with language: I haven't really got as far as playing with structure except in the sense of having multiple threads that get roughly equally shares. And are in different voices so I get to write in different styles.

Wordplay can go too far: polished prose lovely, overpolished lapidary prose gets in the way of the plot, in which case they may as well just write poetry and then I will know what I am up against. And read it word by word. (Someone, a short-story editor, said that in short stories the unit of thought is the paragraph. Is it the chapter when writing at novel-length? Is it the line or the word when writing poetry? Is it in fact the sentence when writing short fiction?)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Ooh, you interesting icon-less person.

It is a fine balance, between the story moving forwards and the words making you stop and wallow in them. I suspect it has to do with pace and rhythm.

I like this stuff about paragraphs being the unit of thought. I am sure the chapter figures large in novels.

Gertrude Stein on paragraphs (from How to Write, 1927-31):

I once said in How To Write a book I wrote about Sentences and Paragraphs, that paragraphs were emotional and sentences were not. Paragraphs are emotional not because they express an emotion but because they register or limit an emotion. Compare paragraphs with sentences any paragraph or any sentence and you will see what I mean. ...

In a book I wrote called How To Write I made a discovery which I considered fundamental, that sentences are not emotional and that paragraphs are. I found out about language that paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not and I found out something else about it. I found out that this difference was not a contradiction but a combination and that this combination causes one to think endlessly about sentences and paragraphs because the emotional paragraphs are made up of unemotional sentences. ...

I love this.

[giglet.livejournal.com]

Oh, also: about style: Patrick Leigh Fermor was (and maybe still is) apparently fond of saying that writing should be about clarity, brevity, and euphony. He's good at the euphony part.