{"id":1108,"date":"2007-01-07T14:38:05","date_gmt":"2007-01-07T20:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mercuryranch.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/07\/the-work\/"},"modified":"2019-06-14T09:03:18","modified_gmt":"2019-06-14T14:03:18","slug":"the-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/the-work\/","title":{"rendered":"The Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

PBW<\/a> talks about what a writer owes her readers<\/a> — if anything. Steve wonders what should be included or left out of adult fiction — and asks how to tell. I’ve been working around the house, reading around the blogosphere, and wondering what on earth I might have to say here, when it occurred to me that Steve and Sheila (PBW) were writing about similar (but not the same) topics. Steve is writing about a subset of Sheila’s topic.<\/p>\n

I also ponder what I should include in my fiction. Sex is easy to toss in, but does it really contribute to the work? Is it necessary? It’s easy to think, yes, I need it to make this or that point, but is it really? I’ve been reading some excellent fiction lately with no sex or violence.<\/p>\n

Two of my WIPs have too much “adult content.” When I run the One Pass Revision on them, I’ll be looking for more effective ways to tell the story.<\/p>\n

At PBW’s, I held the view the writer doesn’t owe the reader anything. If anything, the writer owes it to themselves to write the best story possible. In doing that, I believe the readers will take care of themselves — no, every reader won’t be happy, but the writer will have appealed to the best readers for his or her work.<\/p>\n

The questions I ask myself are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Is this essential to the story?<\/li>\n
  2. Is there a better way to handle this without the graphic detail?<\/li>\n
  3. Do I want my name associated with this?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If the answers are “Yes. No. Yes.” then I know I’m ok. If not, I have more work to do.<\/p>\n

    By the way, Rosina Lippi has an excellent take on the question related to “Why didn’t you write the book this way?” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    PBW talks about what a writer owes her readers — if anything. Steve wonders what should be included or left out of adult fiction — and asks how to tell. I’ve been working around the house, reading around the blogosphere, and wondering what on earth I might have to say …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[48,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14604,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108\/revisions\/14604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}