My latest novella for Blushing Books is coming along wonderfully and I'm really excited about it. However, I have noticed that, as far as pace goes, it's much, much slower than my previous books.
Novellas are usually 30-40K words long, on average, and with the exception of 'Taken In Hand', which I wrote on a chapter-by-chapter basis for the Woodshed, mine have been mostly even shorter than that.
And a lot takes place over the course of those works... usually the book covers a time period of at least a few months.
My new book is different. For some reason, I'm about a third of the way in to an average-length novella and so far, only the first two plot points have been addressed. In other words, our heroine has not yet had a single night's sleep.
I became aware of this fairly early on and tried to speed things up a little but it's just not happening! I find myself taking things slowly, going into detail, wanting to enhance and build suspense.
I really don't think this will necessarily always be the case from now on. In fact I'm fairly certain that the story in my next book will move along more quickly.
But this one? It's writing itself and forcing me to relinquish any notions I may have had of telling the whole tale within 30K words.
So I thought I'd ask all you lovely spanking fiction fans out there - what's YOUR preference? Do you like a story to be slow, leisurely, detailed? Do you prefer fast-paced action where a lot happens within a short period of time? Or do you just skip all the boring stuff anyway and scroll straight to the juicy bits?
Any comments on this would be greatly appreciated, I genuinely want to hear from everyone.
Thank you so much!
~ Tabitha xo
I'd say somewhere between those two. Although building the story line and fleshing out the characters is essential, I think it has to be punctuated with "action" sequences or the reader may lose interest. There are several ways to do this. Action scenes can be anecdotes recounted by third parties, events that they either experienced or witnessed in the past. The main characters can perhaps reminisce about past incidents. There can be warnings, or musings or other types of foreshadowing. Also, the action can happen to someone else with a main character as a witness, maybe to establish the nature of the culture. That way you can maintain a pace that builds tension surrounding your main characters, and still deliver the goods along the way. I have some examples if you are interested.
ReplyDeleteAll brilliant suggestions, thank you so much Rollin.
DeleteI know exactly what you mean but I'd be an idiot if I said no to free samples! :-P
Your comment made me re-read the blog entry and I think I may have misrepresented my dilemma - the long scene IS an 'action' one. So I should have rephrased one of my questions to read something like this:
"When writing an explicit spanking/inspection/erotic scene, is there such a thing as too much detail? Can an action scene be TOO long?"
Ok, well if that's the case, it's interesting that you mention it. In the last month I've been writing a series on my blog entitled "writing the spanking scene". I think it's just what you are talking about. Take a look and you'll get at least my take on it.
ReplyDelete