Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/17769
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

Original score: 9