If you would like one more suggestion from me, here it is. Get on with your story and get it finished. Then put it away for a while ...months, if you can. When you go back to it with fresh eyes, you will find it easier to discard stuff that doesn't need to be there. You will also find your own attention dragging at the draggy bits, and you'll feel refreshed, not regretful, when you dump them. I cannot overemphasize how important this period of distance can be. If you try too hard to get it perfect, right after you've written it, you'll end up just tinkering with words. You need perspective, and you won't get it without distance. Sometimes huge swaths of prose need to go, but you won't see this till you've had a break. Once you get your story finished, the emphasis may change anyway. I'd say keep going and worry about 'fixing' this part of the story later.
Yes, thanks again. I finished it in Feb. Polished it in March. It has been left a little now. I was starting to plan my next when after missing the long list of the CWA, that I started the swap and got back into it. I will do a little more tinkering while we're swapping and then I'll leave it a little longer before I submit again. I understand what you're saying. Ta.
I understand you're grievance. For me I'm very likened to using dialogues to tell the story. It's for me a very out of body experience and you get unique opportunities to characterize people through their speech patterns. Which is something I highly value. But that comes from my background as a comic book lover. Having a story be told with little dialogue takes skill but isn't hard to do. It all comes down to pacing imo
Well @DeathandGrim, at the start of the thread I referred to people not having the patience to read a slow-burn story in this fast food world. While comic books were one of the inspirations for pop art - surely they are the epitome of fast food with respect to literature? I’ll confess to having not read a comic book for years, but aren’t they as much about the artwork as the dialogue? And in a book, the narrative replaces the artwork. So, I’m going to disagree with your assertion that a (good) story with little dialogue takes skill but isn’t hard to do. My story is an out of body experience, hopefully in reading as much as it was to write, in that it is getting into the mind of an obsessive and conceited character who hides his contempt for others. There is plenty of dialogue when the main detective is involved. I reveal the character of the detective and the dynamics between the two mainly through dialogue. Pacing does appear to be my problem – for some of the people who have read it. However, generally I would expect to be able to tell a story faster through narrative than dialogue – so I suggest that dialogue can be as heavy going as narrative. Having said that – I have added dialogue. Perhaps I had originally fallen into the 1st person trap of too much introspection.
