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Sparseness: yet another disturbing trend with Christian speculative fiction — 3 Comments

  1. This is a plague in pretty much every kind of fiction right now. MFA and college-level writing programs stress stark, spare fiction, and that trickles down to local writing groups. My own agent was highlighting things in my book saying, “You don’t need this description” and “BORING!” when it’s just immersive stuff. Oh, and, “Take out ten thousand words” because that way the book is cheaper to print. (“Which words? What part feels wordy?” “Oh, it’s all tight, but you should still get it down to 80K.”

    • Thank you, Jane.

      I agree. I think a lot of it is due to the requirement often put out there by traditional publishers to make many shorter books. I’ve written before about the blight of books arbitrarily broken up into a trilogy. In many cases it would have been better to just release it as one great book instead of three much lesser books which frustrate the reader.

      Plus, for fiction at this point, huge amounts of our sales are ebooks. No cost for extra size except for maybe a small download charge at Amazon.