I've had over a decade long love affair with romance novels. Everything from Jean Auel to Jane Feather, Amanda Quick to Cathy Maxwell. After all that reading, I've developed a theory about filler. To me, there are three different kinds of filler: landscape, war, history. If you ask my mother-in-law, she'll say that excessive love scenes are filler, but it'd have to be some pretty convoluted and drawn out love-making for me to skim past it. So here's my breakdown:
1) Landscape. Don't get me wrong. I think the right amount of description of the characters' surroundings is pivotal to the emotional and physical fluency of the story. Page after page of descriptions about the grasses and flowers of the hills, extended direction on the proximity of certain landmarks to the hero/ine's ancestral home, detailed analysis of the chemical makeup of the rocks and cliff=not in the mood anymore. If I need to know which mushrooms in an English forest are safe to eat, put the characters in a situation where they have to forage for food.
2) War. I get that sex and a little bit of violence is a scintillating combination, and that facing death makes a man want to celebrate life (i.e. have sex) but detailed descriptions of battles, fields of wounded men bleeding and crying out, even excessive torture scenes leave a bad taste in my mouth. When done well, violence in a romance novel lends to the depth and breadth of the reader's emotional experience. And certainly, even in a work of romantic fiction we can't exclude other realistic elements of life. Ignoring that thousands and thousands of men died in the conflicts between England and France in the 1800's would be irresponsible. But page after page of battle descriptions makes my eyes glaze over.
3) History. I love history. I love how history can enhance and shade the pertinent details of the characters lives, adding a tangible richness to the plot. History helps make a satisfying, complex story. Unless it reads like a graduate-level thesis. I don't need paragraph after paragraph explaining the succession of kings, the effects of wars and why who started what. I'm already there, ready to believe that the Hero is decended from gods if you want me to. Just give me a good story.
So what about you? What kind of filler has you skimming pages? Any author that is particularly good at avoiding filler?
Next post: my favorite villain.
I so agree. It's a writer's job to make it interesting and the good writers manage it. My pet peeve was always descriptions. More than a sentence of description tends to make me jump ahead. I like writers who sneak in the scenery as the character moves past it. Otherwise, it's just to boring.
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