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How do you become a more verbose writer?
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categorycreativity
typeadvice
tynamite
tynamite's avatar familiarity breaks stacked

I've wrote 2 novels and one of them was 120,000 words. People say I'm a very talented writer. Despite all this, this is a very hard question to answer. I don't think that anyone intends to write long novels. Nobody plans to write novels that are long. Writing long novels is just something that naturally happens. Anyone who plans to do so, will fail as a writer. Nobody plans to write books which are long. If anything, people think they're halfway through writing the book, and then are both surprised and frustrated to find out the book is going to have to be longer.

From hereon I will teach you a writing lesson from myself. I use Harry Potter as an example because it's a book that everyone has read.

Every fiction novel is full of fluff. You can't in the Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince, have the chapter In The Cave, when he goes to destroy a horcrux, happen any earlier on in the book. From there onwards, the chapters are amazing, but you can't really have them earlier on in the book. Why? Because you have to have all the fluff first.

Fiction novels always have stupid stuff happening in them that doesn't mean anything. I call this fluff. Having finished the Harry Potter series, Do you really need to know about Moaning Murtle, the paintings on the common room doors arguing, the struggles of Dark Arts teachers, Neville being derpy, Crookshanks and Scabbers, Luna Lovegood adding nothing to the story etc.

Seriously, do you need to know any of this now you've finished the series?
The answer is, No you don't. It has nothing to with the story.
Every novel you read will have fluff like this.
Writers include fluff into their novels to make the story interesting, and help you get immersed into the book.

[x] Lesson 1 learnt: Include fluff in the book
I notice that novels which revolve around a character's progression in the book, tend to last longer than novels revolve around a good storyline. Find me a 2 novels about divorce and marriage, and I guarantee that the one about divorce will be longer than the marriage one. This is because books about divorce tend to be more about character development and their experiences and progression, whereas books about divorce tend to be about the storyline, and what happens to the divorcee and the divorcer, and the occurences because of that.

That was a bad example. A good example is comparing a book about proving ones innocence, to one about living in a refugee camp because the government has scrapped your village to build a mine there.

Which one do you think will be longer? I'll leave it to you to figure that one out.

What you can do is document how things change over time for the characters, and not about the situation, in some chapters to make the story longer. You do not have to do this. Each book is different, and will have to go by different rules.

[x] Lesson 2 learnt: Include a character's progression, if you can
^^ I could not do this in my 1st person novel for obvious reasons! See below. ^^

I have one novel with good narration and characters, and a bad storyline. I could have made this shorter.
My other novel has bad narration and characters, and a good storyline. I could have made this longer.

The trick is to do what works for you, the story, and the portrayal you're trying to give the reader. If what you're doing feels forced, the reader will pick up on this. Nothing should feel contrived.

leah behind a fence books

My 2nd novel is better than my 1st one, though it would not have been if I had made it longer. You have to know which battles to fight.

[x] Lesson 3 learnt: Nothing should feel contrived. Don't do something just because someone else is doing it, if it won't work for your story. If in doubt, get someone who doesn't read fanfiction to read and review your story. There are some people in this world who like anything and everything. Those people are not who you want to get advice from.

I wish I could tell you how I managed to make a novel which is 120,000 words, but I can't. I would love to give someone else the brief for the novel, and see what they would have come up with. You could have done the same things in this answer to write that brief, and made a novel which was half the size.

[x] Lesson 4 learnt: I cannot give you a definitive answer on this question.
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