I've been reading Romanitas by Sophia McDougall. I'm a bit iffy about it. It's not the whole "but there are good reasons why Rome fell" (this being a "the Roman Empire still exists in 2004" story) because I don't care to begin with, and I also think that unless the reasons why it didn't are central to your story then they needn't be included. (Sidebar: I am a little frowny-face that there doesn't seem to have been any degree of philosophical advancement. Technological, yes, but slavery still exists, religion is still Roman and the class system remains. I find this, frankly, difficult to get past.)

But no, my problem is more that I'm 184 pages in (and it's a trade paperback) and I really don't feel like I've had 184 pages of story. It's a big novel, but I'm not sure it's a Big Story - at the moment, following four characters in their very insular concerns about the world, it feels like a very small story.

This has led me to pondering a concept never far from my heart: Fantasy Flab. The example I inevitably use when talking about this concept is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and specifically the book where Elayne has a bath for a whole twenty-page chapter. (In reading my own novel, Anthony made a note: "She gets into the bath on page 141. I'm counting.") I suppose, given the selling power and stature of Mr Jordan, I shouldn't be at all surprised that Fantasy Flab is starting to afflict more and more of the genre.

It can be summed up quite simply as: "Does this need to be this long?" Or: "Do we need to know this?"

When I'm giving an editor's report on a novel, invariably my general notes include a paragraph on scene selection and shaping. And however I phrase it in that paragraph, the gist is: Every scene must have a point, preferably more than one. Everything that doesn't serve a point can and should be cut out. The more points you can make every word serve, the tighter and better your writing will be.

Don't get me wrong. In the long writing versus short writing debate (also known as the fat books versus thin books) I stand on the side of the long and the fat. I don't want to read unless it's epic. I prefer to glean the facts from rich narrative than have them told to me succinctly. I see the charm of short writing - the elegance, the stark beauty of it - but I will always prefer the long.

But not that long.

Or rather, I suppose I should say, not long for long's sake. I think reviewers are too fond of phrases like "vividly imagined" and "richly detailed", and they've got the whole fantasy genre thinking that all writing needs fulsome detail. But Jane's trip to the corner store needn't be a whole chapter of vivid, rich step-by-step; it could be a paragraph of sharp-etched prose or, even better, Jane can just start the next scene with a bag of mixed lollies she didn't have before. The art of efficiency isn't dead in fantasy fiction, but it's certainly not being worn thin through overwork either.

The other common appearance in edits that I do is the phrase "Are these details necessary?" in the margins. I am, I admit, a bit ruthless. And as I starting skipping over pages of Romanitas as Marcus sat and thought and paced and ruminated and decided and demonstrably did not move the story forward, I wanted to reach for a pen to write in the margins.

It's a library book. So I scribbled on the internet instead.