: Re: I feel like my book is too small and I’m kind of just throwing all my ideas out too quick. Does this mean filler might be necessary? My book seems like it’s going to be way too short.

@Kevin153

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One of my favourite novels is all of 92 pages, I can and do read it in a single day, it tells a simple "X goes there and does that" story but it has compelling characters and a setting that feels deep and complex without being much explored. Page and even word count really aren't an issue to my way of thinking, but you feel you have pacing issues, that's a major problem.

If an author thinks they're going too fast then odds are their audience is simply going to be lost. So you need to slow things down, the key to maintaining a solid narrative that goes slow enough to be comfortable is to focus on your characters not on the events of the tale. Characters are people, they are therefore, by their nature, messy and complex. It takes a lot more time to explain a narrative from your character(s) point of view than from the exalted heights of author/creator.

From a technical standpoint text explaining the tale from a character's particular POV could be considered "filler" but it's not words for the sake of words; it should (and usually does) create a greater depth of engagement for the reader with the POV character, and hint at greater depths to the world in which the story is set.

For those who are interested that's Andre Norton's Eye of the Monster, my paperback of it is 92 pages.

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