AQATSA: Too much snogging!

[inverarity]

Current Word Count: 216K words, 34 chapters.

Actually, the problem (and I had a revelation that this is one of the main reasons for the book swelling in size, and indeed for much of the bloat in my previous books) is too many subplots. I spend a lot more time on subplots involving secondary characters than Rowling did.

Consider Cho Chang, Fred and George, Dudley Dursley, and hell, Ginny freaking Weasley. Each of them got a handful of scenes throughout the books. Rowling kept a pretty tight focus on the Trio. Secondary characters only got significant page space when a subplot directly involved them, and then they were lucky to have more than a few lines of dialog.

But I love my secondary characters. Also, my core group is larger -- instead of three, I have five. And I find that when I am writing big scenes where "everyone" is present, I have a hard time shuffling all the minor characters off to oblivion with a line or two. I want to describe what happens to everyone. This is the blessing and curse of fan fiction -- I have the luxury of adding material that would be cut by an editor, and sometimes an inability to see which subplots really don't need to be there.

Anyway, snogging, yes. (Why am I saying "snogging"? Charmbridge Academy is in the Midwest, not the UK.) I just finished the Winter Ball chapter, in which the Winter Ball was really not the most important event in the chapter but nonetheless took up the most space. There are some subplots which amuse me but probably aren't really important, and some others which might be foreshadowing or might just be me screwing with the readers. :D But I'm debating whether I could cut most of the chapter and replace it with: "The Winter Ball was that night. The next day...."

(Actually, I have debates like that about most of my chapters.)

So anyway, for a slightly more interesting Wordle, let's see which secondary characters are getting the most word count:

(Click for larger version.)



There is one name obviously missing from this word cloud. I left Alexandra's name out because it would be huge and take up as much space as all the other names put together.

Also, TealTerror, email me please. (I don't have your email address.)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Let's see. There's a lot of Grimm in there, but they are cheating, since they are two sharing the same name. But I see that Brian's name is bigger than Payton's, even though Brian is a muggle and they hardly spoke to each other since Alexandra first left for Charmbridge. Abraham continues to be an absent father, as we see from the insignificant size of his name, heck, it's a small as Archie's, though that's artificially deflated, since she obviously doesn't call her father by his first name.

Now if we could get our hands on two advance chapters ...

Keep it up,

--Geneva