Saturday 2 July 2016

Tension. Action. Detail. Tactail?

I was writing a section where my main character, who was on the run, came back to his home town. I was juggling with the amount of detail to put in and I was not overly sure I had the balance right.

I started like this:







As you can see, lots of detail and, I hope some atmosphere.

Next, there was the matter of moving the plot on. The reader did not really know what was happening. This was a deliberate choice as I wanted to demonstrate the chaos in the character's head. Once the plan became clear to him so the reader would know. A subsequent paragraph had more narrative, chronological detail:


I needed to move this on so when I developed it a bit, I got to writing this:
 
 As you can see, more action, trying to develop what the character was going through in order to involve the reader. However, there is still, I hope, detail enough to build up a picture.

So did I achieve what I wanted?

The point of this blog post is to reflect the balance I was trying to establish. When I write, there is an echo chamber in my head- quite simply I don't have the self-assurance to decide that I have been successful. I feel I am slowly developing the ability to be a better self-editor but I know that I am not there yet. As this is developing, I was rather hoping that a set of objective eyes would give me a few pointers.
Thanks in advance.