How to Betray Your Own Characters - Narrative Compression, Guilt, and the Importance of Emotional Backstory
Just under a week ago, Locktober ended (and I hope, therefore, No-vember - or whatever slightly tackier name we're giving it now - has started for a great many of my readers!)
But with the end of October came, as it were, the ending of my free Reddit serial The Edge Olympics, which I've talked about a little chiefly in the context of Lysistrata.
(Someone told me recently "nobody else writes Femdom like you do," and I wasn't sure I agreed, but I think, having written a sentence like that, they may've had a point...).
I also posted about the announcement before I started the serialisation, and that I suspect gave away the fact the story was in fact already written. I have to write things out in advance because, as I was explaining to a friend recently, I am often at the mercy of the wildest inspirations and if a new idea sparks something off in my head I'm quite capable of dropping other things I'm working on to try and get something out there, something that's usually harmless, but probably fatal to weekly serialisation!
Unfortunately, of course, writing freely isn't the same as writing for Reddit posts where there is a swingeingly restrictive limit of a mere 40,000 characters per post. Which is just... nothing. It was also something I had completely forgotten about until, having promised to post Part 1 on the 26th of September, I discovered that I had written far too much and I had to start editing down in a rush.
The Reddit serialisation of The Edge Olympics spanned six parts, for a maximum theoretical limit of 240,000 characters.
It eventually came out at 232,778.
And that, as you might imagine, involved a lot of hacking down of what I'd originally written, often to the detriment of what I think were some wonderfully spicy scenes, but also with a necessary loss of subtlety and depth. That hurts a little, because in addition to sapping some of the femdom heat - and by the time I'm saying, effectively, "The original was Too Hot For Reddit" I assume you too feel the loss! - there were more significant issues too.
Poor Dennis lost his entire backstory, the whole Epilogue had to be scrapped, some of Nigel and Martha's connection was weakened, Tash and Andy's romance arc got boiled down to a far more workaday 'he submits and suffers so everyone is happy' than I had quite imagined when I had the space...
...and, in Part 1, the details of Martha, Liz, and Tash's entire relationship got completely flattened.
That is the biggest loss, as far as I'm concerned. The smut was, of course, a sad thing to lose; the greater connection and depth between each couple genuinely improves the text, and does impact how the story reads. But one - superficially quite small - change, a change I had to make because making it saved me over 4,000 characters that I simply couldn't spare from Part 1, had a disproportionately vast impact on all that followed.
I had to do it - I was against the clock, I'd already gutted Part 1 massively, and even after losing the 4,000 characters in question I ended up with a post at 39,112 characters out of 40,000. And really, 4,000 characters sounds like it is not very much, I know, but the function of those characters is important.
As an example, look at what Dickens (him again!) does with 700-odd characters:
"Mr. Ralph Nickleby was pretty sketchy. He did 'business' but nobody knew what. Even though he had a massive house and worked from home, nobody knew how he could afford to"
But I hope we can agree that while the second, compressed, version delivers the same core information, the compression also does something terrible to our understanding of Ralph's character. In Dickens's text, we know there's something off about Ralph not just because the text tells us so directly, but because it (lovingly) belabours it in a way that creates a sense of unease for the reader from the moment his occupation enters the text.
And I'm afraid I made a pretty terrible cut to get Part 1 of The Edge Olympics done, and I have to blog about it because it grates on me so much, and has grated, like a hangnail, for the last six weeks.
This is probably because one of the things I genuinely pride myself on, apart from a steadfast conviction that the male orgasm is massively over-represented in erotic literature and, arguably, society as a whole, is an ability to write female interiority (indeed, Her Ascendant Intern would never work without it!) I like my dommes to be understandable as people first, and as people doing delightful things second; - if indeed I am writing femdom like nobody else I suspect this is part of why!
And so I particularly hate that the Reddit version of Olympics was reduced to describing Martha and Tash and Liz's relationship like this:
"Liz, Martha, and Tash had all been at uni together, and for a while they’d quietly terrorised the campus, the three of them running riot through the various sports societies as they sampled a succession of eager and willing male students, often comparing notes and experiences. Once or twice they’d even slept together – largely in a spirit of curiosity and enquiry than one born of deep romantic passion – and those nights had cemented their friendship more than any shared devotion to study.
Over the intervening years, life and careers and relationships had steadily diminished that connection, and now their occasional girls’ nights out and the odd Christmas or Eurovision party were almost the only time they all got together. Each of them was at least a little conscious of how the old intimacy had faded and jealously protected nights out like this, but the addition of some complimentary shots to 180 minutes of Happy Hour had pushed the conversation further than it normally went, and Martha had gently suggested there must be at least some way they could maintain their own happy monogamous relationships while rekindling that older, deeper connection."
It is (at least, knowing what it replaced, I think it is) abominably flat. It gets the job done, in a cursory sort of way, and frankly - even if this is only true for the woman who wrote it - I do not like it.
In particular, "once or twice they’d even slept together – largely in a spirit of curiosity and enquiry than one born of deep romantic passion" absolutely sets my teeth on edge because it feels so sickeningly reductive and like it betrays what I actually know of their history.
And so, even if I couldn't fit it onto Reddit, I want to at least make sure that the proper version of the text, the one I wanted to have space for, is available somewhere.
And here it is:
"Liz, Martha, and Tash had all been at uni together, and for a while they’d quietly terrorised the campus, the three of them running riot through the various sports societies as they sampled a succession of eager and willing male students, often comparing notes and experiences.
It had been more than that, though. They’d been a unit.
A real unit, a kind of three-woman couple, at first simply in and out of one another’s pockets whenever a loan cheque ran short or course stress got too high, and their intimacy had grown naturally from that mutual dependency. By the time they'd renewed on their shared house in second year they’d been happy to move in and out of one another’s beds, without shame or embarrassment, in spite of the occasional prudishly hostile outburst from former friends unwilling to understand. It had never been planned, admittedly; at first Tash and Martha stumbled into bed, after Martha had suffered a particularly jarring breakup at New Year and Tash had guiltily admitted she couldn’t understand why anyone would ever abandon Martha. And then, a few weeks after they’d sheepishly confessed to Liz that the noises she’d heard overnight couldn’t be explained by either of them bringing a man back, Liz and Tash went out to Schoolgirl’s Night at the Union, and when Tash complained that she’d previously shagged every boy she could see in the joint and couldn’t bear the same unsatisfying disappointments again, Liz had stretched up on tiptoe and kissed her.
After that, all three had found their existing intimate friendship naturally growing into a kind of chaotic, few-strings-attached affection that hovered in a blissful grey area between “adoration,” “intimacy” and “passion” without ever quite being pinned down by precise terms.
Even when Martha had blundered into the living room of their digs and frozen at the sight of Liz and Tash cuddled up on the sofa together, it hadn’t been a problem. She’d stammered out some half-baked apology about interrupting, swallowed as Liz softly called her over… and simply joined them, the three of them squeezing onto the single two-person sofa in a tangle of limbs and warmth and giggles.
They hadn’t needed definitions in those days; they’d all understood one another well enough, and they’d rapidly discovered that, after each of them had spent the preceding 18 months negotiating the complexities of sharing a three-bed, one-bathroom house with the other two and a rotating cast of on-again, off-again one-night stands, they’d also become adept at holding the kind of agonisingly difficult and embarrassing conversations that were sometimes needed to make their arrangement work.
It had. That was the thing that hurt Martha now. Not the odd times when a guy she’d been after had copped off with Liz or Tash, or the pangs of jealousy she’d felt now and then when she’d woken alone and found Tash or Liz had wandered down to breakfast with some new guy Martha hadn’t even heard of. Not the times when she’d come back from a failed date and found them in bed. None of that had hurt, not really. It had been upsetting sometimes - what relationship wasn’t? - but it had never been insurmountable.
They were close enough that almost anything was fixable, that nothing truly hurt for long, because they’d been young, and happy, and trusted one another, and even after graduation they’d stayed close, delighting as each of them found a longer-term partner…
…and all the time, life had eroded their connection, so slowly Martha had hardly noticed it happening at the time. Not until she’d got an email from the Uni alumni office inviting her back for their year’s 10th anniversary. And then she’d realised.
None of the past, fleeting pangs of jealousy had truly hurt her then.
Not like the distance between them hurt her now.
Over the intervening years, life and careers and relationships had steadily diminished that connection, and now their occasional girls’ nights out and the odd Christmas or Eurovision party were almost the only time they all got together.
After everything they’d been through, after the joy and experimentation and affection and trust - the thing that hurt was simply time.
Each of them was at least a little conscious of how the old intimacy had faded and jealously protected nights out like this, but the whole thing had been dwelling on her mind for months now.
And perhaps that was why, when the addition of some complimentary shots to 180 minutes of Happy Hour had pushed the conversation further than it normally went, Martha had gently suggested there must be at least some way they could maintain their own happy monogamous relationships while rekindling that older, deeper connection."
The thing is, I know that some readers might feel the two passages are doing the same. If you look purely at the basic narrative function then you could even argue that the full passage as I originally wrote it is doing more than is strictly necessary, and if that is what you think then, well... I think you and I will probably not get on well at parties unless we stick to safer topics like Politics and Religion.
It is, strictly speaking, delivering more information than the immediate plot needs: for lean, stripped-down narrative efficiency, for the purposes of saying "there's three women, this is why they might go for this premise, right, let's get to edging!" then I accept the Reddit version works: they were great friends, they slept together, that actually made their friendship stronger. Great.
But for understanding them, for really having a sense of what Martha and the others have lost, and how it was lost not because they stopped caring or because it didn't work or because they fell out, for really getting the feeling that the only thing that has forced them apart is time and to realise how very much harder that can be to repair than an actual falling-out... In short, for comprehending why Quality Control matters and why the ending makes sense, and - god - why Martha makes the offer she does at the start of Part 6 even though it clearly hurts her...
...you need detail.
All the Reddit version really tells you is "these three women are close, they are partly close because they slept together sometimes and that made them closer, but that was in another city, and besides the story's starting". And then, because that was all I had space for, I did something that I actually, genuinely, hate.
What happened was, in some ways, like the old joke of "evening out" a wonky chair by cutting a bit off one leg, only to find it's now wonky the other way and you have to cut something else.
Because I had to cut out most of the detail about the way Martha and Tash and Liz's past relationship had worked, and that meant pretty much reducing it to "once or twice they even slept together".
But that was wonky in a different way: it raises the question 'wait, what? That seems... important? Isn't that important?' in a way the original text explicitly didn't. So I then had to explain why that didn't immediately matter to the story, and I didn't want to keep cutting bits off legs - so I did the traditional thing everyone does at that point: folded up some convenient padding, and crammed it in to level everything off.
(If there was anything else to cut, I would've - but I only had 1,000 characters spare, even after compressing no end of other stuff - for example, the boys took far, far longer to accept, originally; Nigel's suggestion of Gold was meant to have been in response to Martha casting him a pleading look... all gone already).
In the end it seemed to me that the only way to both explain "this is why they are comfortable accepting the premise" was to say "they'd slept together sometimes," and the only way to then fix that cut was to wedge in the clumsy-feeling hand-wave, "but, like, it didn't really count? Don't ask questions".
I cannot properly express how much I hate that; I have a newfound sympathy for all those authors who saw their books adapted into films and despised the result so much they got their name removed from the credits. (But also, hi Netflix! 6-part prestige series? Call me!)
What bothers me isn't just that I had to flatten out what they'd done, and what they'd meant to each other - I had to flatten out what they'd lost.
Yes, their real history takes up more characters than I could spare within the post limit. No, it isn't the most efficient way to tell the story, if what you look for in your prose is the bare-bones Ryanair experience of literary femdom erotica*.
But I like to write stories where you understand the characters. Where you can, even as a reader, feel with them. Otherwise I don't really see the point.
Hence, I suppose, shouting a little bit into the void with a post like this. I don't think anyone else minded the compressed Reddit version of the women's history (or if they did, they were too polite to say so), but I minded. A lot.
And I mind because no, what Liz and Tash and Martha did at uni isn't the point of the story, it's not the focus. It's not even really part of the immediate mechanics of the narrative engine. But it's part of who they are. It matters to them, whether or not it's on the page right now. And it matters to how the reader interprets the character now. You can't tell until you know what isn't there, of course. But knowing what I took out - it changes the entire feel of the story.
This is a valuable lesson, I think. Cuts and edits happen, obviously they do. Often, they have to. But cuts can have disproportionate effects - hugely disproportionate effects - if they compress context. Because there were lots of other things I cut, as I said. Some big, some small, some sizzlingly hot. But this one, this passage that tries to explain what the three of them have lost before I start to show the different things the Olympics helps them to gain? This one's the edit I most resent myself for making.
And so I feel, ridiculously, like I owe it to them to show their history somewhere, even if it has to be here, and not in the post body itself.
*flat cage: standard; nub upgrade £50; £30 per extra cm.
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