Way too much angsting in my fics!

I have a big problem that's bloating my fiction to unreadably large levels: my Unreliable Narrator main character winds up angsting (even to the level of Wangsting) SO much in my prologue stories that my second prologue (my first one, the origin story, was actually a decent length, less than 1800 lines with the extra-space line breaks) ended up ballooning from what SHOULD have been about a similar length (maybe between 2000-2500 lines, still including the extra-space line breaks) to somewhere slightly over 5000 (and even then, I ended it more abruptly than I was originally going to, just because of this bloated-length problem).

Part of that is because my stories are so dialogue-heavy, but considering the origin story was a rather manageable length, I just kept ending up typing new (and lots of repeating) ways for my main character to engage in about a hundred lines of crying and wailing.

Mostly stuff intended to signify personal growth, but since these are intended to be combinations of story, action, AND more than a little bit of sexual content (which I'd also woefully included too little of so far), let's just say that my original intent was lost amid the walls of text.

While I'm not exactly in a "delete a whole bunch of lines" mood, I would appreciate some ideas as to how to streamline my future fics with this character (she eventually gets better enough that my "main" stories don't have nearly this problem—at least, they shouldn't.

SO, the TL;DR version: huge walls of dialogue, filled to the brim with crying character development, needs to be streamlined (but not exactly cut out, since it's a first-person narrative) so I can include (LOTS) more action and (a least a little) more sex.

Um, just cut some of the crying parts? Seriously I can't think of any person in their right mind who likes to read about a weepy protagonist.

After a certain point crying stops being character development, it just becomes melodrama. I think you realize that, hence the title.

edited 28th Jan '11 10:29:24 PM by melloncollie

I would prefer to condense (into more palatable, if possible, chunks) rather than outright cut out.

Any ideas on how, as opposed a simple "Well, it's like this..." Fade to a short time later... narrative transition (which I find to be clumsy anyways except under some circumstances)?

Make your character less expressive, more concise.

Get his point across in a sentence, rather than two pararaphs.

I do.

But I understand the need for a character who isn't Wangsting all the time, I have a similar problem with my novel protagonist and his Byronic Heroic Self Deprecation.

edited 29th Jan '11 10:48:38 PM by americanbadass