I have three dead-end chapters. Should I keep them or remove them?
The protagonist in my story decides to research a topic. Naturally, I wanted her to encounter some obstacles first, so I arranged the starting chapters like this:
First frustration > Second frustration > Third frustration > Success
(She researches on the Internet and fails, researches in the library and fails, tries at her university's department and fails. And finally, just as she's about to give up, she finds someone who helps her.)
I did this because I wanted to 1) show her frustration 2) show that no one was taking her seriously.
But the majority of my readers are saying that they are dead-end chapters, that maybe I should delete them.
Should I? Or maybe they think this because they haven't reached the fourth chapter yet?
EDIT (based on Monica's answer):
It's not about the research all the time. For instance, in one of the chapters she encounters an "ex-lover", in another she gets fooled by a librarian, and in the last she is laughed at in class. And I reveal some stuff about her and her thoughts.
Not sure if this is enough to keep the reader interested, though.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/17767. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
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While there might be a payoff coming in the fourth chapter, if readers get frustrated enough on the way there, some of them will bail and never finish your book. So while you can ask your reviewers to forge ahead and read the rest, you can't assume readers will.
Consider one of the following two approaches:
Condense the material. Do you really need three chapters to convey "tried and tried and tried again, getting more and more frustrated"? It sounds like you're getting pretty detailed; I'm imagining specific Google queries, the details of the library crawl, and so on. It sounds like that's too much detail for the weight this element has in your overall story.
Intersperse it with other developments. Instead of having chapters that are only about this search for information, integrate that search into the other things that are going on in the plot at the same time. This character is probably doing other things -- or, if not and if it's not first-person, other characters are surely doing other things that you can talk about. Let the search become a long-running theme but not the entirety of the text for that part of your book.
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(Disclaimer: I'm not a writer…)
Is it possible that some readers don't see the point of those chapters because they don't have a lasting effect on the story?
If so, then the solution may be to give them a lasting effect on the story; most obviously, on the main character. Show her frustration increasing with each failure. Perhaps show some collateral damage that that has on her life outside this particular quest. Or maybe she gains some useful knowledge or experience from each failure, that she can use later. Or you introduce important characters or ideas.
However you do it, I'd suggest making those chapters necessary to the story somehow; to reach the point later on where the story would be different (and not as good) had they not happened. That way, readers may come to forgive the lack of progress on the main plot-line.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36782. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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