Showing and slowing

 I'm continuing with my edit of the re-write of my 2009 novel this week,  And one thing I'm noticing is that I'm still not bringing enough depth and description to scenes.

The 2009 draft of this novel was very skimpy, only around 76,000 words.  My re-write has already got it up to 98,000 words, but I'm expecting it to go to 100,000 words by the time I've finished.

I have always underwritten scenes.  I'm so keen to get to the action of the scene, get the characters talking, that I just plonk them down somewhere and start the dialogue.  I've done exactly this throughout the 2009 novel.  As a result, that manuscript has no richness.   It ends up being a series of disjointed scenes which are linked together by jump-cuts.  And that gives the narrative a jerky feel.

My recent reading of other writers' published work has shown me how much richer their narratives are.  They include detailed descriptions of the places their characters are in.  I tend to plonk mine somewhere in a city.  So in my edit I'm addressing this by slowing down.  I'm asking myself which parts of the story really need to be told, and which need to be shown in all their richness.

Where scenes need to be shown, I have to put myself mentally into the character's mind and see through their eyes.  I have to physically walk them through that place.  It's like controlling a puppet, but one that can see and think.  The character takes ten steps to his left.  What can he see now?

Perhaps he's just entered a park. Parks feature strongly in the novel I'm editing.  My first draft just mentioned a park with lots of mature trees,  The slowing down makes me ask questions like: How big is the park?  What specific types of trees can my characters see?  If there are lush flowerbeds, what colours are those flowers?   Yes, I really do have to force myself to think about these basic details.

I suspect many writers would find these details spring easily to mind when they create the scenes. For me they don't.  I'm not technically aphantasic, but I do sometimes struggle to visualise my settings.

So when my characters approach an important building I have to slow down and ask myself, What is it made of?  Stone.  Good, that's a start.  But what colour is the stone?  Are the stone steps in front of the building worn down with age?  All that detail has to be laboriously pulled out of my mind.

The same goes for my characters' emotions and internal dialogue.  I read somewhere that you need to make characters' emotional reactions to things larger than they are in real life.  They need to react to things much more than the average person does.

This too I have to slow down to do.  Unless something really angers me, I'm generally a calm person.  So I have to slow down and consciously think through my characters' emotions and reactions.  I have to actually sit there and ask myself: "How would they react to this?" It isn't instinctual.  It usually has to be thought through.

So I'm finding that a lot of slowing down is going on in this rewrite.  I often find myself walking through the gates of the park and asking myself what I can see there.