Chapter 2 revisited

It has been a few days since I have started editing chapter 2. For the first few pages there were little difficulties but after three pages or so I stumbled upon one. On that page I start 'telling'. As a writer you always have to make a choice between showing and telling. If you pick showing that means that you will depict a scene, conversation or action which will 'show' things. In this action you can encrypt information. You can do the same with telling but you would basically tell the reader about it (for instance; 'for five years a war had been raging over the continent'). Both ways are effective on its own but in some cases it can be really ineffective too. That is the problem I am facing right now.

Chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 2 have been 'showing' for the most part. Then, on the third page of chapter 2 I start telling. A lot. Telling can be an effective way to speed up the story a bit but in this case it is just plain annoying. I could try to twist the telling around a bit to make it more effective but in the end I decided that the best way was to continue on with showing for a little more and just involve more information in the showing. So I decided to let two characters talk to each other about the situation they are in to let the reader know what is going on.

But that takes ages and if I have to do this more than once it is going to take even longer! Yesterday I went to grab a coffee at the mall near my home and sat down to write. I decided that, since I have never done that before, it might be a good time to write down what personalities each of my characters has. It's not that I have never thought about it, but I have never taken the time to write it down. As I am now doing a final checkup it also means that some characters need to have some more depth. In some cases it was very easy to write down the characteristics but there were too many characters which were still kind of blunt and only had a space to fill, so to speak. They didn't have anything that would make them stand out from the rest, and that is exactly what they needed.

Pfff. I wish things would go a bit easier. With the weather being this hot and so little things on my mind (hurray summer!) it gets hard to force myself to focus on the book. It's not that I don't want to, but it something I need to be very focused about. Especially now that it is not going as fast as I would want it to it's becoming more of a burden than something else.

Drinking coffee elsewhere did seem to work though. I might have to do that again, maybe that will get me working!