How revealing should we be?

No, I'm not reprising Nipplegate in honor of the Super Bowl. I'm worried about how much to reveal to my reader and when to reveal it.

I know we've talked about this before, but I'm in the middle of revising a suspense novel where I made the very interesting decision to tell the reader everything that every bad guy was doing as he was doing it and what he was thinking while he was doing it. It has created a book that my editor described as being like watching a chess game.

I've now pulled every scene from the bad guys' points of view and put them in a separate file. I'm going to print everything out and figure out what goes back in and when and where it goes back in. I spent a lot of time and thought on these bad guys. I know a lot about them. I'm thinking the reader doesn't have to know quite as much.

The whole question is how much to reveal and when to reveal it. Do I keep their identities secret? Do I obfuscate who does what? Or why they're doing it? I don't know. I hope my exercise in separating out the threads works because this puppy is due Friday and that's just not that far away.

Revising Part Deux

As I've mentioned, I'm revising Dead on Delivery, the sequel to Don't Kill the Messenger. It's been a fun book (once the horrid misstep with the Maenads, etc., got cleared up) and the notes from my editor were far from onerous.

But I hit a spot on Sunday where something was wrong. I knew the smart next step for my heroine was to do something that in the original she doesn't do for another sixty pages or so. Neither my agent nor my editor brought it up and for a moment I was tempted to just let it be. I mean, if it didn't bother them, why should I move it? Especially because there's a deadline looming and another book that needs to be written and my son needs a haircut and my mother hurt her arm and the cat is licking at his leg in that weird way again.

I actually left it and moved on. Then, with my head hanging in shame, went back and moved the scene. It's going to be a pain. It's going to cause ripples for the next one hundred pages or so that will have to be addressed. It would have been so much easier to leave it, but I just couldn't. It would have shamed me.

It was one of those moments that I have to ask myself for whom I'm writing. Sure. To an extent, I'm writing for my editor who signs the checks and for the readers that buy the books (please, please buy the books), but I think in the end, I'm still writing for me. I'm still writing for the joy of being as storyteller and part of that joy comes from pushing myself to be the best storyteller I know how to be.