#WriterProblems: Chapter 4

Kids,

I'm about done with revising Chapter 4.   It's the first Chapter I've gotten to that needed some major renovations and while I was glad of the opportunity to make it better, it's now turned around and presented me with a whole new set of problems.  

You see, I seemed to have a surplus of meetings in my last draft and part of my revision process includes making sure my characters have something to do other than sit around and make momentous decisions that propel my plot forward.  Meetings, even dramatic ones have their places but they're somewhat passive to me.   Unless you're dealing with something like the final courtroom scene of A Few Good Men ("Did you or did you not order the Code Red?" "YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!") they tend to make things a trifle boring after awhile.  The primary goal of these revisions is to cutback on the number of extraneous characters and make sure that the important ones have enough important things to do.

This was an excellent point of feedback that rocked my back on my heels a little bit until I sat down, thought about it and realized that it was absolutely correct.  Sometimes, the story and the scope of what I have these characters doing in my head doesn't translate all that well to the page which doesn't do you, the hopefully soon to be satisfied readers all that much good- unless I get all Talosian about it and start pulsing my forehead veins at you to make sure we're all on the same wavelength. 

BUT:  back to Chapter 4.  So, my biggest thing with Chapter 4 was taking out the meeting.  It served its purpose in my original draft but it jumped the gun on a dramatic moment that I had planned and in doing so, removed all juice from said moment.  The whole scene fell kind of flat and took up tons of space to really and truly not propel my plot along all that much and for an added bonus, it muddled it up some more.   So I scrapped the whole damn thing...

What I ended up with instead was a chapter that jumped around a bit.  I'm okay with that part-  these are all characters that you've met before and this Chapter helps you, the reader, get to know them a little bit better but instead of watching them sit in the meeting, I show them reacting to what happens in it.   What's making me queasy is now that I've taken out the meeting I'm wondering if I need to put it back in again which I really, really, really don't want to do.  (It wasn't my best writing and it really didn't help propel things along all that much.)  What I'm left with flows better than my original draft of Chapter 4- it moves quicker (or at least it feels like it does to me) and it propels our characters and plot along without getting bogged down in unnecessary amounts of detail and minutia.  (Another failing I'll cop to as a writer.)

I don't know.  I'm going to have to ponder this some more.  One of the cardinal rules of writing is 'show, don't tell' and in this Chapter there's a meeting that I'm not showing you.  But another piece of advice I've heard (from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut when he gave a lecture on campus back in the day) was 'start as close to the end as possible.'  What it seems like I'm facing then, is a clash of these two rules.

I don't know.  I have one more piece of Chapter 4 to get set up (ironically, it's a scene from Chapter 7, I think, which in the original draft, I told the reader about but didn't show them- in this draft, I'm bumping it up to show the reader so I can do more interesting, exciting things in Chapter 7.) Maybe when that's in place, I'll have a better idea of just where I stand on Chapter 4. 

In the meantime:  onwards!  I want to be over the halfway mark of these revisions and looking towards the finish line (if not completely done) by the end of the month!  The sooner I figure all of this out, the sooner you all get to read it.

UPDATED, 8/7/13:  Yeaaaaaaaaaah, I thought about it.  Read what I had.  Shortened up the meeting and put right back in there, so this entire post sort of made itself moot by the morning after I had written it.  On the upside though, Chapter 4 is done and locked in.  So there's that.