Behind the Curtain - Writing Advice
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In keeping with my 'Behind the Curtain' theme I'd like to reveal a couple tricks that I've learned over the course of the last few years.
I think that most beginning writers struggle a least a little with deciding what level of plotting detail to include in their stories. I know this was especially hard for me because I tend think in a very linear, event driven fashion. In my mind A causes B, which leads to C, and if you pull A or B out, then C no longer has any meaning.
I still think that is true, but it has to be carefully weighed against pacing. B may be vitally important to the story, but if placing B directly after A bogs the pace down to where the reader doesn't feel like anything important has happened for eighty pages, most readers will abandon you and never understand just how important B was in the first place.
Interestingly enough, some of the best writers I can think of don't just have A and B, they've got A1 through A15 and B1 to B12 in there as well. You see, adding in those cause and effect items, helps create a background for why C is so important. Once you establish C as being important, you get all kinds of great responses from your readers, everything from tears to euphoria, when you actually bring C out to center stage.
The key is largely how you go about including A and B into the story. One of my favorite tricks is backfilling. If you're moving along chronologically in a chapter and you feel like both 'd' and 'e' need to happen in the same chapter, I've notice that I often need to get the character from one local to another. The process of getting my character from location one to location two will often stretch the chapter out much longer than it really ought to be. Lately I've instead often found that some of the necessary bits can be backfilled with just a few sentences in the next chapter, saving quite a bit of time and space, while still allowing me to feed the reader that important bit of information.
Of course, like almost everything else when it comes to writing, it's largely a judgment call, but I think you usually want to end the chapter on a high point, low point, or something that otherwise leaves the reader wanting more. Backfilling the necessary, but not as exciting pieces can be an effective tool to accomplish that.
Another tool I haven't used as much, but which I've seen other authors use quite successfully is to have another character explain the information or event in passing conversation, or by another mechanism. One of my favorite examples of this is in Pride and Prejudice.
When Jane goes off to London in the hopes that she'll cross paths with Mr. Bingley, the reader could have been taken along and shown all of the events that occurred over the month or so that she was gone. Instead over the course of a letter, or possibly letters, we're shown that Ms. Bingley is definitely not nice, or trustworthy and that Mr. Darcy knew Jane was there, a point which helps further develop his character.
We find out that she doesn't see Mr. Bingley while in London, and get to skip out on everything that would have remotely bogged the plot down.
The take away for me is that when my test readers tell me that a certain section is moving too slowly, I need to avoid the knee-jerk reaction of saying that nothing can be done about it because the section in question is much too important to leave out.
I'm probably right that it's too important to cut, but the answer lies in finding a new way to convey the information rather than just axing it outright.