I hate Chapter Nine of my book. Have I mentioned that? If I can just get past it, the book smoothes out. The problem with Nine is that it has a huge block of exposition that chokes the story. It's like I've picked up a ruler and started lecturing my readers about the Develenon Empire and its cities and politics.
When you write a play, you give your environment exposition -- the set directions -- right up front. You tell the director and set designer how the set should look and then you forget about it. The rest of the play is action and dialogue. It works because the audience never sees those directions. They just see the set.
Many older books used a form similar to that. You'd get several pages of exposition, and then the action would start. For that matter, older plays did it, too, usually with a couple of servants talking and explaining the backstory to each other and to the audience before the main characters entered. French plays were known for this.
Modern plays don't do that anymore. Audiences won't sit through it. Likewise, modern books don't do it ... much. This seems to be a particular failing of huge fantasy novels. I just started one in which the first eight pages (!) are filled with nothing but a well-written but tiresome description of the countryside and castle. I confess to having skipped a couple pages of it.
I start my book with a fairly large info-dump, but those of you who have read the first chapter probably didn't notice it, or at least no one has mentioned it to me. I was able to hide the exposition in the action. The circus's flight from the doomed town of Duntann allows me to tell my readers a lot as well as keep the action going.
Nine represents a turning point in the book, where the story leaves the road and enters a city where the circus will face greater danger. It's a new environment and hold new perils. But the reader needs to understand those perils, needs to experience this city as it is a foretaste of the ancient city that circus eventually travels to.
Nine is also the beginning of the new material that replaced the old. It has to join the old with the new. Of course, I went back to the earlier chapters and added new material all along so that this new material doesn't come out of thin air, but Nine still carries a burden.
Oh, I hate Ten, too. Eleven, I can handle and enjoy, and all those that follow (12-25) seem to work okay. But Nine is trying to kill me, and Ten is waiting to bury me.
3 comments:
Can you make Chapter Nine smaller and spread the scenes of the city into Chapter 10?
Or maybe you could have one of your characters get lost in the city or separated from the group, which would give a nice sense of peril and danger. Getting lost in the bad part of town would also provide some great action scenes and hold your reader's attention while you describe the city and the dangers in it.
Or you could send someone in to scout out the city, which would give your character a chance for some serious action scenes as well as help hold your reader's attention while you describe the wicked city.
Or you could start sending me some chapters to proof so I'd have a better sense of what was going on and not just send random suggestions. (ahem) I'm still waiting. :)
While we usually think a book developing a life of its own is a good thing, you've given a great example of the book simply going too far. Chapters getting together and conspiring to do you in is not good. Time to fight back!
Hey, chapters conspiring to do you in is better than what I apparently am facing. I have several small projects that have no life in them because there is no promise of a grade or imminent publication. I am a ho. You, sir, to extend the metaphor, really like to, um, do it for doing it's sake. And I don't know how you do it. ... OK. I've outted my lack of self-motivation. I am off to the Sonic for some corndogs now.
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