Dealing with specific timeframes

[Ireth]

I'm looking at the outline for my WIP Summer's Pawn, and seeing quite a problem with it. It takes place within a timeframe more than double that of the prequel (~24 days as opposed to 10), and most of that time involves the protagonists travelling through Faerie with no real sense of where they're going, encountering various friends, enemies and forces of nature along the way. All well and good, but how do I fill in all that time without making this book twice as long as the prequel, or more? The prequel is 85,000 words, and I wasn't hoping this one would be any more than 100,000 at the very longest, and only if absolutely necessary for the plot.

I don't want to skim or gloss over too many whole days in which interesting stuff could potentially happen, nor do I really want to have nothing interesting happening at all for days at a time to warrant the skimming. Nor do I want to have the climax happen any sooner than 21 days after the protagonists set out on their quest to find the fugitive princess, since that is the deadline they were commanded to meet. The climax will happen right when their deadline is up, and the antagonists come to take the protagonists away for the punishment that was decided on if the protagonists failed to meet their deadline. (There's a twist in there, but it's not entirely relevant to the original question.)

Any ideas on how to keep my book from becoming a doorstopper that's way out of proportion to the book before it?

 

[Chime85]

Thats a tough one, and something I often try to work around in my own wip. Consider the environment or the circumstances your characters are in. If for instance they are climbing a mountain for six days, you can write a passage about their surroundings and that they are lost and having a naff time of it; now you have set the scene for those six days.
Use dialog to nudge the reader into how the characters are feeling about the situation when they meet other characters in your story. Eg: 'I'm glad I found you, joe, please say you have fresh water. Me and jane have been in short supply for over a day, and we're desperate.'
Really rubbish dialog there, but you get the idea, it cuts out a paragraph or two about your protagonist (and jane) running out of water and puts it into a piece of dialog that can go well or not so well for your protagonist.

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[Ireth]

Thanks, Chime. I'll work with that and see how it goes.

 

[Chime85]

No problem, Ireth. Hope it all goes well

 

[Lorna]

To me it wouldn't be a question of length of time as much as amount of material. You've already set your time frame, mentioned there is going to be a sequence of events through faerie. What's going to make up your word count is choosing the events.

For example, some books such as Joe Abercrombie's The Heroesis set over three days and constitutes a whole novel. Other books, take a writer such as Dickens, can span over generations. What makes the word count is the number of events, how much detail they're described in and how many perspectives are included.

If you choose your events and persepectives wisely you shouldn't have problems with exceeding your word count.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Stories are life with the boring parts removed.

Maybe they are spending most of those 24 days travelling, but the majority of that time is going to be spent... walking. Even if it's through a strange environment, eventually you start getting used to it.

The number of interesting events that happen (and are depicted in detail) needs to be as large as the storyline and character development demand; anything beyond that is superfluous. You say you don't want to miss "potentially interesting" moments, but it's entirely up to you how many of those occur. Fifty scenes that don't move the plot or characters forward and just serve to show how Interesting this place is will get boring after a while.

 

[ThinkerX]

Nor do I want to have the climax happen any sooner than 21 days after the protagonists set out on their quest to find the fugitive princess, since that is the deadline they were commanded to meet.

Hmmm...change the commanded deadline? Say from 21 days to 12 or even 7? Less time to fulfil the quest means less blank time to be accounted for.

 

[Ireth]

To me it wouldn't be a question of length of time as much as amount of material. You've already set your time frame, mentioned there is going to be a sequence of events through faerie. What's going to make up your word count is choosing the events.

For example, some books such as Joe Abercrombie's The Heroesis set over three days and constitutes a whole novel. Other books, take a writer such as Dickens, can span over generations. What makes the word count is the number of events, how much detail they're described in and how many perspectives are included.

If you choose your events and persepectives wisely you shouldn't have problems with exceeding your word count.

Good point. ^^

Stories are life with the boring parts removed.

Maybe they are spending most of those 24 days travelling, but the majority of that time is going to be spent... walking. Even if it's through a strange environment, eventually you start getting used to it.

The number of interesting events that happen (and are depicted in detail) needs to be as large as the storyline and character development demand; anything beyond that is superfluous. You say you don't want to miss "potentially interesting" moments, but it's entirely up to you how many of those occur. Fifty scenes that don't move the plot or characters forward and just serve to show how Interesting this place is will get boring after a while.

Technically they're on horses for most of the story, but your point still stands. Travel = boring. XD

Hmmm...change the commanded deadline? Say from 21 days to 12 or even 7? Less time to fulfil the quest means less blank time to be accounted for.

Hmmm.... possibly. They're searching through an entire country (equivalent in size to Great Britain + Ireland) for one person, so they need a decent amount of time to go from place to place. Realistically they'd probably need more than three weeks, but the Fae can be a-holes a lot of the time. And the point is somewhat moot, since they end up finding who they're searching for well before the deadline anyway. They just don't know it until the climax. "Holy crap, it was you all along?!" type of deal. XD

I might shorten the deadline a little bit to a nicer multiple of 3 (3 is an important number in Celtic mythology, after all), like 18 days instead of 21. Or 9, if I felt like being really mean. XD

 

[ThinkerX]

Hmmm.... possibly. They're searching through an entire country (equivalent in size to Great Britain + Ireland) for one person, so they need a decent amount of time to go from place to place. Realistically they'd probably need more than three weeks, but the Fae can be a-holes a lot of the time. And the point is somewhat moot, since they end up finding who they're searching for well before the deadline anyway. They just don't know it until the climax. "Holy crap, it was you all along?!" type of deal. XD

I might shorten the deadline a little bit to a nicer multiple of 3 (3 is an important number in Celtic mythology, after all), like 18 days instead of 21. Or 9, if I felt like being really mean. XD

Couple things I find myself wondering about here:

1) Why did the Fae King pick mortals from another world to track down his daughter in the first place? Seems to me he'd know her far better than mortals ever could. Or did he think them linked to her running off somehow?

2) Was the deadline arbitrary? (Fae King being a jerk just because, well, he is jerk) OR Was it because the runnaway's appearance is absolutely needed? (Major annual ritual or court get-together).

This also gets into the 'why did the kings daughter run off in the first place?' bit. From what you've mentioned before, it seems as though she is way to smart not to have had both a plan and a specific destination in mind from the start, one that would give her some sort of edge into remaining free.

 

[Ireth]

1) He picked them because they were already under arrest for harboring a fugitive, a Fae who had aided in the princess' escape from prison. The Fae they harbored is going along as their guide. Also these three mortals were the princess' friends as of the previous book, and at least acquainted with the Fae they wound up harboring.

2) Not an annual ritual, but King Madoc wants his daughter back, like, yesterday. She's guilty of treason, and after she already escaped prison once before she could be sentenced properly, the King is losing his patience. The fate he has planned for her is not a pretty one: the Fae would think it worse than death. Both Courts are involved because of the sheer amount of power that would be needed to carry out the sentence and seal the princess' fate.

To the princess' credit, she DID have a definite plan in mind when she broke out of prison, but things went pear-shaped and they were nearly caught, which ultimately resulted in them both getting waylaid, and the princess' companion finding his way to where the mortals were and sheltering with them. The princess herself is still on the run, but she's not taking any chances.

 

[ThinkerX]

Must have really been something for the king to accuse his daughter of treason. Were the charges trumped up or legit?

Must also have been quite a plan if she thought it could negate a 'worse than death' sentence from both Fae courts.

King must also have quite a hold over the renegade fae with the mortals, seeing as he too is likely looking at a fate (sentence) similiar to that of the princess. Slow acting poison, perhaps? 'Without the antidote, this will kill you in eighteen days! So return before then!' Or maybe the magical equivilent of such?

 

[Ireth]

They were legit. See the spoiler below.

It was more of a "not get caught at all" plan rather than a "negate my sentence" plan.

The renegade Fae doesn't have THAT bad of a sentence coming to him, since he only helped the princess escape her prison rather than doing something like what she did to get locked up in the first place (spoiler: fratricide, which doubles as a regicide since her brother was a prince).

Then again, the princess' father might change his mind and decide the renegade does deserve that fate worse than death as well, especially since the mortals and renegade in question have no intention of actually bringing the princess to her fate, and instead want to help her escape said fate by any means possible (short of killing her). If the king does change his mind, it could make for a pretty downer ending. I can't see how they can work it out without someone dying, regardless of who it is. :/