I need to share my Heartless progress. OK, I don't really need to. It's not like I'll die if I don't. So, I want to share my Heartless progress.
I've begun editing chapter five. Fabulous, right? I'm thrilled, believe me. But now, despite my joy in my characters, I've come up to another HUGE decision regarding this MS.
In chapter five, we're with our heroine, learning how her days are spent since becoming a duchess. There are more room descriptions in this one chapter than in all my other books COMBINED. It's shocking, believe me.
In the critical writing world, this is what's known as an information dump. The problem with info dumps is they're boring. The reader usually loses interest at that point and if the dump is long enough, the reader might even set the book aside.
There are times an info dump works but those times are quite rare. It can be a challenge determining when and where to place one. The better, safer bet is to take that information (if it is, indeed, important) and lace it throughout the story itself.
For example, in Heartless, where Leandra's lamenting the horror that is the Egyptian Salon, instead of devoting an entire paragraph to this in chapter five, I could mention her loathing for it later, when she instructs the butler to put Hart's mistress there. (Oops! Not a spoiler. Not really.) Or I could work it in some other way.
So chapter five might find itself shorn down quite a bit, perhaps deleted entirely and rewritten from scratch. Not the type of major edit I'd envisioned when I started out on this path but, what else can I do?
1 comment:
I completely feel your pain. Ireic and Lirth in the King have a similar problem. I haven't gotten up the gumption to tackle it yet. They say knowing about the problem is the first step. They say nothing about the time gap between knowing and doing something to fix it. :) So, here I am working on another story instead of editing. :P I will get to it. :l Promise. :)
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