30 Days of Fandom Meme: Day 5
Aug. 12th, 2015 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archer5 – If you have ever had a character try to push their way into a fic, whether your "muse" or not, what did you do about it?
I wouldn’t call it pushing their way into a fic. Sometimes secondary characters whom I have graciously allowed into the fic will start growing subplots of their own, and I try to prune those ruthlessly, because I have learned through bitter experience that if you allow subplots to proliferate too much then the story will become unsalvageably convoluted, not least because the proliferation of subplots can obscure the fact that there is not, in fact, a main plot, which makes writing a resolution nearly impossible.
I actually learned this lesson from an original novel, my poor abandoned 70,000 words about Sage and her friends and their senior year of high school, which sprouted so many subplots that I didn’t notice it barely had a main plot until it came time to the write an ending and it was impossible because there were simultaneously too many things to tie up and nothing with enough heft to make its resolution seem like a fitting conclusion for the book. It was, as I said, a bitter experience.
I wouldn’t call it pushing their way into a fic. Sometimes secondary characters whom I have graciously allowed into the fic will start growing subplots of their own, and I try to prune those ruthlessly, because I have learned through bitter experience that if you allow subplots to proliferate too much then the story will become unsalvageably convoluted, not least because the proliferation of subplots can obscure the fact that there is not, in fact, a main plot, which makes writing a resolution nearly impossible.
I actually learned this lesson from an original novel, my poor abandoned 70,000 words about Sage and her friends and their senior year of high school, which sprouted so many subplots that I didn’t notice it barely had a main plot until it came time to the write an ending and it was impossible because there were simultaneously too many things to tie up and nothing with enough heft to make its resolution seem like a fitting conclusion for the book. It was, as I said, a bitter experience.
