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#writerscoffeeclub 12/25: Should anything in fiction be off-limits?

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    #WritersCoffeeClub 25 NovWhat are some tips you can share to avoid 'clunky' phrasing?Everybody's suggesting reading your work aloud, but I disagree: prose fiction should not focus on replicating speech, but on conveying meaning. It's a separate art form from the spoken word and should be treated as such. Splitting long sentences so that they're readable aloud is a shibboleth of modern editorial fashion that focuses on accessibility and market share, meeting the needs of "young adult" readers.
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    #WritersCoffeeClub Footnote: "Destiny" tends to show up more in fantasy than SF. On my to-do list is a hard-SF Chosen One narrative—our protag knows from an early age they're not like the other kids in the hive. Only as they near adulthood do they learn that they're a member of a rival eusocial hominin subspecies, and they've been created to infiltrate a neighbouring hive and kill and replace the queen ... Like, "Hellstrom's Hive" meets this whackiness in ants: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09425-w
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    #WritersCoffeeClub Oct 20 - What role does death (or undeath!) play in your work?I write genre fiction and it is *surprisingly hard* to write a novel in which nobody dies; death tends to be trivialized or used to advance the plot and seldom traumatizes the survivors.To which I say, to hell with that!(Current WIP massacres with gleeful abandon, but it's SF set in a future with lossy mind uploading and replay, so they've effectively got mechanised reincarnation. Societal whackiness ensues.)
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    #writerscoffeeclub Oct 16. How much does your working vocabulary change between works? One of my editors once observed, "every SF or fantasy author redefines the English language from scratch in every novel". It's about more than just calling a rabbit a smeerp: we assign new meanings to existing vocabulary.(The working language may be standardized within a series, but between stand-alones and series works I have to purge my autocorrect and spelling checker dictionaries!)