Just enough to make you interested

There is something about that blinking cursor on a blank page that is absolutely torturous. Something about the idea that is buzzing about in your skull, but for some reason refuses to show itself on the page in front of you. It just hides in the corners of your mind, only to show itself again when you are the most inconvenienced by it. Or when it is impossible for you to capture it and wrangle it on a page.

 Most of my writing exercises are parts of stories, snapshots of things taken out of the context of a larger work. But I feel like so much is lost when I write that way. There is no build up, no reason why the reader should care about what is going on. I have been watching a lot of shows recently where something dramatic happens and I am so involved in what is going to happen next. But not because of what is happening at that moment. It is more because I understand the connection between the characters and know their history. That makes the moment much more than if I were to just turn it on and see that moment without the context of entire story.

Unfortunately, for the build up I want, I feel like so much more has to be established and that takes lots of time and effort and writing. And then there are times when I feel like I go too far back. For example, I remember writing something and being told that the first two chapters could go and I should have started at the third. But I thought that laying the foundation would be important for understanding what was going to happen later on in the story. However, the person reading it wanted to get straight to the action and found the first two chapters to be very slow.

And it is not the first time I had done that. There was a story that I wanted to write and climax was going to happen when the main character had to fight his rival. Of course this fight happens when he was an adult, but I wanted to start the story when he was a child. I felt it needed to start there for the reader to understand how the situation at the end came to be.

But is there such thing as too much? Too much foundation, too much explaining of things, too much setting of the scene that the point of the story totally gets drowned in factoids and the reader gets bored. Where do you find that happy middle ground where you have told just enough to get the reader invested in what you have to say?

Anyway, those are my thoughts for this morning.