Too Much Plot - The Outcome

Late last month, struggling to meet a May 1st deadline, I wrote a blog post entitled "Too Much Plot". The problem, in a nutshell, was that I was writing to a word count limit and couldn't figure out how to fit all the scenes I'd outlined into the story.

I received many sympathetic and helpful comments from my fellow authors. I thought you might want to know how the whole situation turned out.

First of all, I made the deadline. I submitted Wild About That Thing on the 28th of April. With 63 words to spare!

It's possible that the story might have been improved if I could have made it a few thousand words longer. However, as this was intended as a contribution to an anthology, that just wasn't an option.

So how did I manage to shoe-horn my plot into my word limit? Well, first of all, I had to cut out one of the two three-way sex scenes I had planned. As you may imagine, I regretted this, especially since this is a ménage anthology. However, it couldn't be helped. I did manage to draw out the scene I retained, importing some of the emotional (and sexual) content from the discarded scene. I know it's a bit implausible that three people should develop a strong bond in a single sexual encounter. On the other hand, this is romance - fantasy - so maybe my readers won't mind.

Another way that I condensed my plot is by moving events from one setting to another. For example, I had originally worked out a scene that revealed a critical secret about one of the three main characters. I had envisioned this revelation as occurring while the three were sitting together at breakfast, the morning after an erotic encounter. Moving your characters from one place to another does consume time and word count, though. As an alternative, I incorporated the discovery scene earlier in the sequence of events, in the same setting as another scene.

The third strategy I used was trimming the back story. One of the characters was supposed to explain the tragic events in his past, that led him to behave in a certain way. I kept the explanation, but cut it to the bare bones - just one or two sentences, enough to suggest his grief without going into detail.

Quite a few of the romance novellas I've read have a rushed feeling near the end. I really hope that my attempts to deal with the "Too Much Plot" problem haven't had this result. I can only cross my fingers.

I do have one piece of encouraging evidence that this isn't so. The story has been accepted!

Too Much Plot

My current WIP has a May 1st deadline and a 20,000 word limit. I'm up to 16,000 words at this point, but I having a problem, one I really haven't experienced before. Too much plot.

I don't normally do a complete outline for a book of this length, but I will create a set of notes, including a scene list. In the case of "Wild About That Thing", I've got way too many ideas! Already I've scotched three or four of my projected scenes, but I NEED the remaining ones in order to bring the story to an appropriate resolution. I'm really worried, though, that I don't have the word count to complete the tale.

Now probably any authors who are reading this are thinking, "Heck, just cut something earlier in the story." That's easy to say, and I'm sure the story includes some fat that could be excised, but not whole scenes - at least, I don't think so. As it is, I'm concerned that I haven't taken enough time to develop the relationship between the heroine and her two lovers (this is a ménage). I don't want to make the story even less plausible. It's hard enough to believe that my heroine falls so quickly for a man she's just met. If I shorten their joint scenes, that will just make things worse. At the same time the plot requires some of the non-erotic scenes in order to clarify the heroine's situation and her internal conflicts.

I've been writing romance novellas for a couple of years now. This is the first time I've run into this difficulty. Usually I'm very good at estimating how long a story will be based on my initial concepts. I've never yet had to perform surgery on my first draft in order to shorten it to the specified length.

I'm not sure what's going on. I will say that I feel like I know my heroine really well, perhaps more deeply than is usual for one of my novellas. Maybe I'm trying to expose too much of her personality and her history. Or perhaps my premise is just too complex for a work of this length, though it doesn't seem like it should be.

If I had more time, I'd send the work to one of my crit partners for cutting suggestions, but it looks like I may be right up to the wire. (But maybe I can beg someone to give me a really quick turn around...)

Does anyone else suffer from Too Much Plot when you've got an upper limit on length? If so, how do you handle it?