fic talk: fluff, and shedding

[sword_logic]

title courtesy of cat. reading through part i of S11 au is making me realize how much fluff is in here. not the trope, Fluff™ (though... yeah, gotta have some of that), but the "inserting formless content" kind. the lovely kind on aurash's big ol' fluffy belly that she's shedding everywhere.

i don't know if i want to assign this change a value judgment by calling it "growth," but i definitely feel like my writing now is a lot more... i don't know, utilitarian? streamlined? minmaxed? (we spent 2 hours straight earlier today trying to do 1 raid encounter and my brain is jello.) i guess – right now i place more weight on things that are strictly necessary to the plot, the relationships, etc. rather than including things that were fun to write or Trope Fulfillment or "i liked this so i'm going to try to make it work even though it might not." there were a number of encounters in part 1 that i'd honestly probably mercilessly chop if i were writing it now; e.g., the first time wash and maine fight through a federal army base is something i find unnecessary to cover in as much detail as i did.

on the flip side, though, i like that this fic runs very nearly day by day, and i like showing that — and that, by nature, requires some padding. i practiced what i've preached earlier today, which is to say, my favorite peer editing exercise when i was teaching was to tell each pair/group to swap essays and do a one-sentence summary of what Editor thinks the one main point of each body paragraph is. the point is, if Editor thinks your paragraph is about something utterly different than what you'd planned... you've probably got some work to do. so, tl;dr, i went through and bullet-pointed the major, broad-strokes plot points from each of the three parts — and i was really surprised at just how deeply i had to fish for part i. i ended up with:

• the Instigating Incident, exposition, etc.
• wash switching from "meta" to "maine" (this is debatable, but is major enough to their relationship that i felt it justified as a plot point.)
• finding the encrypted comm
• decrypting the encrypted comm + the following combat encounter

...and boy shit, there's a lot that happens between each of those plot points that isn't strictly necessary. does that mean none of it is valuable? no, of course not. but in retrospect, some of it definitely could have stood to be more deeply related to the plot. i think if i do go back for serious revisions to part i, that's what i'll focus on. it's what i'm doing now for part ii: tightening things up, making sure all of my threads and breadcrumbs are properly in place with enough lead time, and balancing out Relationship Business. this is the shedding part of my bad title metaphor.

and now i'm back to fretting about whether this chapter is going to be Good Enough which is a complete waste of my energy, so i'm going to stop that train of thought right there and go back to making revisions. onwards, upwards, etc.