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How do I write publishing-quality filler?



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Thu Aug 11, 2016 10:52 pm
Lumi says...



So my writing can be described as dense, dark, and depressing. I need to master filler and fluff in order to strike a form of balance, and I'd like some resources to go into that attempt.

Note that comedy isn't difficult for me--it's just not sustained filler and fluff.

So how do you guys do it? Or do you at all? Do you think there's a threshold of density in writing where filler and fluff isn't necessary? Or should the reader/watcher always get a break?

If it isn't remarkably obvious, I want an open discussion about it. ;P
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Thu Aug 11, 2016 11:11 pm
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Rosendorn says...



Alright, my opinion is going to be a little... odd, from the context of this. Because you're correlating "filler" and "lightness". You're correlating "fluff" with "give readers a break."

They're not the same things in my book.

I firmly believe a book should have no filler within it. But that doesn't mean that the book is dark throughout. A good story is constantly advancing the plot and characters; if you're writing something with the purpose of 'filler', then you're going to end up with weakness.

So from that angle, you're approaching plot balance wrong. It's not about "I need filler to make it my plots aren't totally dark" but more "I need to show my characters reactions in a variety of situations from lighthearted to tragedy."

Lightheartedness is characterization. How they react to it, what causes them to cut lose, why they laugh— those are all deeply revealing things about a character, and a relationship. Who causes, why, and how they get into happy moments help readers and authors think differently about characters, and make it characters can't be cardboard.

The main critique on "gritty" reboots is they don't characterize enough because there's not enough fun in the character. If you ignore the fun a character can theoretically have, then you're ignoring a whole side to their personality that renders them flat.

So, no, there shouldn't be filler in a story. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be fun, either. It just needs to be purposeful fun.
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Thu Aug 11, 2016 11:18 pm
Lumi says...



I feel you, and I generally approach that goal of having reader-taste fun in the form of character blots that generally are just good for one giggle, then the reader moves on.

I think Danny Dawson is a good example? He's a ridiculous character in his shortcomings, but he's grounded deeply in loving and needing to make his friends and family/crew happy. And that's a thing that recurs and makes him a strong leading man, but also a tragic lightning rod for failure.

So the lack of education, the general boneheadedness, etc. It's the cornerstone of any giggle-shots when he's involved.

But I have read and enjoyed filler in novels that served no purpose whatsoever (though I wouldn't do that because every free moment is a place for lore drops).
I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much
as I will drown everything you have inside.
-Shinji Moon


I am the property of Rydia, please return me to her ship.
  





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Fri Aug 12, 2016 3:59 am
Werthan says...



[akzent]Do not use ze filler. Filler ist not very efficient. Filler ist a vaste off mine time. Vhy shoult I vaste mine time on a book viss filler vhen I can reat a book vissout filler. I VANT 100% PURE BOOK VISS NO FILLER! I SHALL AKZEPT NO SUBSTITUTES![/akzent]

(OK, sorry if that was a bit silly, but that's probably what your readers will be thinking if you have whole sections of the book where diddly squat happens. That's different than having sections with little to no tension. I'm pretty sure filler is just low-quality writing.)
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde

(And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth)

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Fri Aug 12, 2016 5:07 am
Lumi says...



Eugh, cut that accent and burn it.

It's easy to blacklist a term when you're unfamiliar with works that you invest hundreds of hours into--but whether or not you define filler as low-quality writing, there's some beloved filler out there, particularly in screenwriting.

Rosendorn and I were discussing this earlier on Skype: how filler works well in cutaways and small-dose scenes. The knee-jerk reaction is simply in regards to the term itself, which people seem to horribly misunderstand.

Which I get. Some writers grew up wanting to write like Victor Hugo, and others, like me, wanted to write in a room with showrunners. In my sect, filler is not to be hated in the least. It's to be molded into something admirable and given purpose.

And the fact is, if you can't take an aimless scene and give it purpose, doesn't that imply that you need more exercise as a writer?
I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much
as I will drown everything you have inside.
-Shinji Moon


I am the property of Rydia, please return me to her ship.
  





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Fri Aug 12, 2016 5:35 am
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Werthan says...



Lumi wrote:
And the fact is, if you can't take an aimless scene and give it purpose, doesn't that imply that you need more exercise as a writer?


If it has purpose, it's not aimless...
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde

(And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth)

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  





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Fri Aug 12, 2016 7:30 am
Lumi says...



Syntactically, that's untrue.

In this case, let's assume there is a scene wherein a character who's been benched from the main story wakes up from a nap and describes, mentally, the things in her bedroom. There's no plot aim, goal, or achievement from this scene since she was only taking a nap, and is only describing things in her bedroom.

However, the purpose, which is layered deeper in the psyche of the writing, could be a number of things. If the character has a prior exposition to a troubled childhood, describing the items in her room could evoke a feeling of nostalgia and looming mistrust of the reader's environment. If the character has a disposition to memory loss, notes the items in her room, and later recalls them as a relevant point, then the scene achieves the description of aimless with purpose.

But that's me being pedantic about someone being pedantic!

I do think filler scenes are valuable. I'm just interested to know how folks pull them off personally.
I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much
as I will drown everything you have inside.
-Shinji Moon


I am the property of Rydia, please return me to her ship.
  





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Fri Aug 12, 2016 2:10 pm
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Audy says...



@Lumi I feel like it all depends on how we are defining 'filler' and which genre or medium we are discussing.

For me, the scenes you are describing are valuable precisely because they do serve a purpose in a novel for the very reasons you are stating, reasons of versimilitude, believability, and character growth and worldbuilding. For this reason, I do not call those filler scenes.

How do we go about creating low key scenes that enhance versimilitude of our world without it coming across as forced, unreadable or nonenjoyable, is a delicate balance to strike and a decent question to explore, I wonder if this is more of in the vein of what you mean to ask?

Victor Hugo or not, novels need to move forward. From page to page to page. Each technique we use as novelist serves this forward movement, whether its to help a reader escape on a runaway train (worldbuilding/versimilitude), to kickstart a reader's curiosity (plot) or to entice a reader with a reward at the end the way you lead donkeys with carrots (character growth/development). If there is a scene in your novel that feels like it's aimless or purposeless, I think a good rule of thumb to follow is: does this advance, does this move forward? And if the answer is yes, by definition, it is probably not a filler (? At least by my definition).

All of that to say, when I think of filler scenes, i think of the definition of filler that is used in anime, where there may be episodic scenes or self-contained subplots that do not advance the overall story, nor develop characters...Pretty much episodes you can skip over without losing anything. I think they are more there to pad things out, which make sense considering where we are more likely to see filler, ie the bulk of what makes up sitcoms. Where the goal is "let's see how long we can keep this going" with an ending in far sight, compare that to defined story arcs that build to an established end.

Your point about screenwriting's relationship to fillers are spot on. Television is a totally and completely different medium from novels though. Until the advent of netflix, we do not normally bingewatch tvshows but watch them either daily or weekly in self contained sittings. It would be an interesting thing to look at created-for-netflix shows and compare them to created-for-tv shows to see which one utilizes fillers most (my guess is not the binge- watched shows). Which brings me to my point, a good filler is entirely dependent on the quality of the character/actor, the quality of the world, and the quality of the overall story and whether that filler fits into that world (we may enjoy a padded out self contained subplot in a slice of life piece for example, or in a procedural or episodic adventure etc) fillers in those instances become more forgiving. And i agree there is some value because sometimes we dont want to run or get swept up in a binge, sometimeswe just want to sit in place and get a beg/mid/end self contained piece of story within a larger context of a world/set of characters we've become accustomed to following.
  





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Fri Aug 12, 2016 4:30 pm
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StellaThomas says...



To follow on from @Audy, I'm reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens at the moment which was originally serialised. It's interesting because the writing just seems episodic and I feel like there's a lot of filler going on. Pip goes to a clerk's house for dinner. Pip tells a convoluted lie about what happened at Miss Havisham's house. The plot advances at a steady, slightly slow pace, with all this stuff happening around it. It's actually quite annoying. But the same way Netflix binges are different to watching serialised TV, reading the novel in one piece is different to the way Great Expectations was published, with a chapter a week which in rural England at the time would have been read out in a public place for those following the story but who couldn't read. It's basically the same format as modern TV, which is pretty amazing.

Anyway, I digress.

Writing filler is fun in first drafts, but the thing is that as your story develops, so should your character development and subplots. I have really struggled with the middle part of Unruly in every past draft, and there was a lot of filler that involved the main character being poisoned, silly character bickering etc etc. In the last draft, my protagonist gets help from a rival in a pursuit which was a bit of filler in and of itself, but it gave me the idea to have a solid subplot of the two of them working together - which led to a plan to imprison another character and have him set free. The filler now fits the story a lot better, it progresses characters and it progresses plot. And it bulks out the middle portion of the story, which was what I was always trying to do, but now it doesn't seem awkwardly separated or forced.

I think it's okay to start out something as writing filler, but the best filler will become something else. For my other novel Silk, I wanted to write a Christmas segment, just for the lols. The Christmas chapter ended up being one of my favourite parts of the story, it's full of character moments, developments of relationships and some of the key moments of the novel now happen there. I guess it counts as 'filler' or 'fluff' as it's a bright spark in what is otherwise a rather bleak story (I blame Dickens, again, and by extension, all of Victoriana). But it is now an integral part of the story. And you won't know what filler will fit perfectly and what won't until you've written the piece and looked at the novel as a whole.
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Fri Aug 12, 2016 6:01 pm
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Lightsong says...



I didn't know the exact meaning of filler so I looked it up and LOLed to what I found.

noun
1.
a thing put in a space or container to fill it.
"these plants are attractive gap-fillers or ground cover"
2.
a person or thing that fills a space or container.
"supermarket shelf-fillers"


Honestly, I think filler isn't bad if it still makes the readers curious. I struggled reading To Kill a Mockingbird because of the overload of information I received.

But yeah, that's what I think about filler. Maybe it doesn't help advance the plot, but it helps answering some questions. Maybe it's a conversation between two characters who aren't involved in the large scheme of thing, but their exchange is so exciting, so entertaining I can't help but to continue reading it. Because I myself as a reader that time is not choosing what page I'm going to read, I have to read them all until some parts bore me to death, forcing me to smash the book to the wall.

Anyway. I'm pretty sure my recent chapter of The Last Light Companion [Chapter 3.1] (this is also considered shameless advertising - check it out! ;)) can be considered as a filler chapter, in the sense that I'm focusing on a side character who is doing something that is not related to the plot (or the main one, at least) but would prove to be important further on.

At the end, I just have to set my range of readers and wonder if my filler can sate their curiosity. It doesn't have to contribute the plot, but it must have something akin to the first sentence of the novel - it must pull readers in to think, 'Oh, god, I need to read this to have a peace of my mind!'.
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Sat Aug 13, 2016 6:53 pm
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alliyah says...



I skimmed the responses above - so I apologize if it was already said above, but I had an English professor who suggested looking at your writing as though it was in a movie or viewed through a camera.

If you constantly have the camera's lens acting as one character - with no "scene shots" or you were always very narrowly focused and never panned out to survey the rest - it's too intense for a reader or gets boring. For similar motivations for wanting to vary sentence length/structure I think "filler" or moments when you "pan-out" of what the general content is about, is really important. I don't think it's fair to just say that filler is useless content - but is maybe just parts that are "less-dense".

But I think this is also a really personal decision that will say a lot about you as a writer. For instance, Anton Chekhov said "Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." While that might have worked for Chekhov in his short stories - I don't think the same concept can really be applied in longer fiction. I think maybe you ought to write the way you enjoy reading and what comes naturally to you - as far as balancing "filler" and dense-content - because if you try to do it another way or add in miscellaneous "filler" characters, jokes, or scene shots - I think it may come off as unnatural.

You describe your writing as "dense, dark, and depressing" - so I think that the "filler" shouldn't change that overall tone, but should provide a moment of relief for the reader, or maybe a light-hearted moment that gives the reader insight and hope for the characters.

Like I said before, I don't think that there's some formula or even a "correct" way to add "filler" - I think most importantly though the filler ought to come across as genuine and still come naturally from the author. If it doesn't feel natural for you to write it or for your characters to experience it, then that will come across to the readers too.

Best of luck!

~alliyah
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Sun Aug 21, 2016 1:10 am
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Megrim says...



I don't know if I have much to add to this discussion, but I think the argument is mostly semantical. "Filler and fluff" and "publishing-quality" don't belong in the same sentence, but that's just because of what "filler" means to the industry, not how you're using it. Actual, true, honest-to-god "filler" is going to get axed by your critiquers, your beta readers, your agent, and your editors. Every time you run through, all that fluff is going to get preened away, weeded out one layer at a time, until the finished product is taut and clean.

But it sounds to me like no one's talking about ACTUAL filler, as in empty meaningless prose that bulks up your wordcount without offering much else. Rather, the impression I get from the OP is that you're referring to "scenes and sequels" or maybe a pacing issue--those quieter, slower moments that focus on different things, and give the reader a chance to come up for air.

Something that hasn't been brought up is there are important genre distinctions. People are throwing around names like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, but are YOU writing classical literary fiction? Or are you writing genre fiction? And among genre fiction, is it YA or adult? A thriller is going to read VERY differently to a cyberpunk. Even within those categorizations, you still have differences! Urban fantasy has different common styles to epic fantasy, for instance. So it's hard to talk about this sort of thing in broad strokes because it's so context-dependent. Writing principles are the same fundamentally, sure (be engaging, be efficient, don't waste the reader's time, etc). But there's going to be variation in the acceptable limits for things like pacing, descriptiveness, learning curve, and all that jazz.

I THINK what the discussion is getting at, is essentially the "sequels," that follow the "scenes." There's some writing book or other that made that terminology famous but I can't remember who wrote it. The scenes are where stuff happens (big action scene), and the sequels are where we feel the consequences and catch our breath (take stock of who was hurt, figure out what happened, take steps toward what they'll do next, etc). And like, amid your big epic save-the-world plot, there are those scenes where the characters are sitting around the campfire laughing about their cultural differences or whatever--while they don't advance the PLOT, they advance character and setting, so I'd argue those are NOT filler.

IMO every scene should advance two of the three (plot, setting, and character). Bonus if you can get all three. Everything doesn't have to be go-go-go all the time, but those slower, quieter, lighter, and/or more personal scenes (should) still do stuff for you. If it's truly aimless, as in it could be deleted from the book and NOTHING would be affected, then, well, you *can't* make that "publishing-quality" in genre fiction.
  








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