Getting to the point

Holy abusive Batman! But we get your point...

I wrote a lot today, and I have next week off work so I am hopeful that I will finish Book 6 by this time next week (cross your fingers kids!) but I am struggling with something I am sure that a lot of writers struggle with – getting to the point.

But maybe I’m struggling with the opposite of what everyone else is struggling with – I know the point – I want to get to to it, but I have to write all this exposition for that point to make sense. Get it? No? Let me explain:

I want Portia to discover the hidden compartments behind the fireplace in her apartment at 221 B Baker street, but now that I know I want that to happen, I had to write out the scene where she discovers it. So four pages later, she has been working in her attic for an hour, trying to find a good disguise for her the case she is on, and she notices the wall is an odd shape up here… different than the same wall down on the floor of her apartment. She of course gets down there as quick as she can, and after a bit of physical exploration discovers the hidden compartments (described below in my post on the diorama).

Those four pages were hard to write, and I had to keep reminding myself NOT to rush to her discovery, but to play it out, to lead the reader there while giving everyone (Portia, me, the reader) something to look forward to.

The number one complaint from people who have read books 1-3 so far is that there is not enough detail in the writing, that the ideas are great, the cases fun and interesting, but that there were a lot of opportunities to insert depth and exposition into the scenes I was writing about. I’m going to have to go back to those books and ADD more detail, but while writing Book 6, I am trying to anticipate (almost wrote pre-anticipate there but that’s not a word) the complaint that it lacks detail.

Do you have trouble writing detail, or do you have the opposite problem: taking too long to get to the point?

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