Advice on proposed story pace and premise

[Lori_the_Hoosier]

So, after nearly 8 years, and a lot of psyching myself up, I decided to toss my hat back in the ring and publish (eventually...) a story idea I've been thinking about for a while, based on and inspired by qhml1's version of 'Let Go', a story of a female CEO who fires her own husband, and tries to win him back. I've followed the basic story premise fairly faithfully, just played with the reasons and the aftermath of her actions but now I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew, especially in the way the story is paced the way I've written it.

I keep getting the feeling I've put too much in too soon and basically info-dumped the story, so I guess what I'm asking is for one of you guys to please take a look if possible, and comment and suggest where you think the story needs expansion, contraction, re-pacing, and what's missing and where in the story, and what is excess wordbrush and needs to be excised. I'm 23.3k words in and nowhere near finished, but it feels like I've painted myself into a corner a little, and I need some advice where to backtrack to and rewrite to get me out of it.

I'm too close to it, it all seems either just right or windy and wordy, depending on whether I've had a good or a bad day, so outside disinterested opinion would be much appreciated. Hubby refuses to look at it, he reckons he's happy in his marriage and he wants to stay that way, so other, unbiased adult opinion seems most appropriate; any takers? Some guidance, real opinion from actual writers, would be most appreciated.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Flicked you a PM.

 

[TxRad]

I underhand tossed mine.

 

[gunhilltrain]

With 23K words already and more to come, would this work better as a series than a stand-alone story? It's a judgment call about where to draw the line. You could release a chapter every week to ten days. I think the longest series I have is nine chapters. (One chapter is a stand-alone chapter in the middle - it has a title, not a number because it is out of sequence. There is a note to the readers telling them where it fits in.) I forgot the total word count, but I think it's just above 30K.

 

[SimonDoom]

This may or may not be helpful. My advice is just to finish and publish the story, solicit feedback on the feedback forum, and go from there. See what happens.

I think it's fairly common for writers to get stuck on their first story. They get deeply invested in it, and since, once published, it will be the only thing that represents their artistic abilities, they get overly concerned about not making a mistake.

My general advice to someone who hasn't published a story and is stuck on a long story is to write a different story -- a short one. That's what I did. I was writing a longish story to be my first Literotica story and interrupted it to write a story of only about 4000 words that took me 24 hours from conception to submission. It was liberating. Not a great story, but it was my first, and I just did it. Then I finished the longer story and published it a week later.

So that's my grand and wise advice, the Nike slogan: Just do it. Ask questions afterward.

Also, add a link to your submissions page to your signature in your posts.

 

[TxRad]

Lori, check your e-mail. You have a story and a finished one at that.

 

[8letters]

With 23K words already and more to come, would this work better as a series than a stand-alone story? It's a judgment call about where to draw the line. You could release a chapter every week to ten days. I think the longest series I have is nine chapters. (One chapter is a stand-alone chapter in the middle - it has a title, not a number because it is out of sequence. There is a note to the readers telling them where it fits in.) I forgot the total word count, but I think it's just above 30K.

I just published a 52K story (14 LitE pages). It's my fifth I/T story with a 4.8 rating or better. It's statistics are no different than the other, shorter highly-rated stories. I've gotten several comments stating they liked the length of the story.

I didn't publish the story as chapters as I didn't think the structure of the story suited it. The first half of the story is all set up and the second half is one hot sex scene after another. If your story doesn't have a structure that fits breaking into chapters, I wouldn't do so.

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

This may or may not be helpful. My advice is just to finish and publish the story, solicit feedback on the feedback forum, and go from there. See what happens.

I think it's fairly common for writers to get stuck on their first story. They get deeply invested in it, and since, once published, it will be the only thing that represents their artistic abilities, they get overly concerned about not making a mistake.

My general advice to someone who hasn't published a story and is stuck on a long story is to write a different story -- a short one. That's what I did. I was writing a longish story to be my first Literotica story and interrupted it to write a story of only about 4000 words that took me 24 hours from conception to submission. It was liberating. Not a great story, but it was my first, and I just did it. Then I finished the longer story and published it a week later.

So that's my grand and wise advice, the Nike slogan: Just do it. Ask questions afterward.

Also, add a link to your submissions page to your signature in your posts.

*nods

You’re a great writer, you already know how to write. No need to overthink things, just jump in. As your high anxiety friend who frets over every word said and written, and frets always about whether anyone else will “get” my writing: push the button and publish so we can all pat you on the back! Looking forward to reading it!!!!

 

[HeyAll]

Feel free to contact me if you want.

But I agree with the philosophy that most people's beginnings could be trimmed out or reduced.

 

[8letters]

So, after nearly 8 years, and a lot of psyching myself up, I decided to toss my hat back in the ring and publish (eventually...) a story idea I've been thinking about for a while, based on and inspired by qhml1's version of 'Let Go', a story of a female CEO who fires her own husband, and tries to win him back. I've followed the basic story premise fairly faithfully, just played with the reasons and the aftermath of her actions but now I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew, especially in the way the story is paced the way I've written it.

I keep getting the feeling I've put too much in too soon and basically info-dumped the story, so I guess what I'm asking is for one of you guys to please take a look if possible, and comment and suggest where you think the story needs expansion, contraction, re-pacing, and what's missing and where in the story, and what is excess wordbrush and needs to be excised. I'm 23.3k words in and nowhere near finished, but it feels like I've painted myself into a corner a little, and I need some advice where to backtrack to and rewrite to get me out of it.

My advice on pacing:
* Start your story with an interesting scene, preferably with a lot of dialogue. Don't have paragraph after paragraph of info-dumping
* You want to give adequate story-time for changes in character's behavior. Something happens, the main character's behavior changes, time in the story goes by, and the next something happens
* You should gradually unpeel the onion. Tells us casual things about the character, time goes by, tells more about the character at a deeper level, time goes by, go down another level of depth. Don't explain everything all at once
* I usually have a storyline that's not related to the two main characters getting together. For your story, let's say it's the CEO's company has been awarded a challenging project with a tight schedule. Alternate the CEO keeping track off and intervening in the challenging project with her wooing her husband back. That gives the feeling of time passing more effectively than say, "Two weeks later..."

 

[Lori_the_Hoosier]

Sound advice all, thank you all very much; I think I'm going to sit in a corner and navel-gaze for a while, there are definitely parts of the story, especially the beginning, where it feels derivative, and as it's riffing off a well-loved story from a respected pair of authors, I don't really want to be seen as just reiterating their story, changing a few details and calling it my new story; I don't like the idea that people might see me as some kind of pseudo-plagiarist, so a premise rethink and a different approach is definitely in order. Will relented, read it, and commented that it's like 'the curate's egg', I had to look up the reference, which was 'good in parts...'

So back to the pen and paper for an edit and rewrite that tells a coherent story instead of just rambling along, punctuated by 'signficant' events or dialog.