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.