Editing Details

I'm doing a bit of expanding and contracting, not really editing, this delightfully rainy afternoon.
In reading ahead of my note "expand this" to find out just what I was telling myself to expand, I found this passage to be a bit... something.
I wonder if it is too far between the action of going to the lower rooms, and the result of going to the lower rooms. Or if its unsatisfactorily infodumpy. I mean, I could expand the heck out of every bit of information, but some things its better to be concise about, establish the landscape and move one to the action so to speak. I feel this is better served as a tell that shows then trying to expand it out into a show that shows (if I am making an sense by the end of this post I win another cupa) and then I wonder if I should include the whole excerpt of her day and not just the part that I'm babbling on about babbling in...

so without further confabulation or adu:

Just before lunch she would visit the lower rooms, where the children were taught. Any of her subjects could send their children to the castle to learn reading, writing, reckoning, and music.

All the village families sent their children till they were old enough to be apprenticed elsewhere. The farmers and herders further out sent the small ones who could not yet help with the family work. These would stay on at the castle, to be tended by Muna’s household staff till their parents could fetch them home again.


She enjoyed these visits, not just from the self-gratification she received knowing her people were growing up to be wise and strong. But also for the chance to get to know them, be seen and loved by them, so that as they matured they trusted her guidance.

Seems okay, maybe 'farmers and herders further away' rather than far out farmers* )

There's nowt wrong with it, but I think I'd prefer the detail of her day. Provided it's interesting and relevant and not just padding...

Well, and now that I've been scribbling at it for hrs on end I think a full rewrite would make more sence than this endless tweaking.

I cant seem to recapture the mindset I was writing from then and feel it was vary scattered and disordered.
:-/ maybe a walk to freshen my brains...

I understand that feeling! I've got myself in a knot rewriting and am giving myself a good break from it to try to regain the feeling I had when I first wrote it.

The above excerpt works well for me the way it stands.

This small piece works for me, but this is like something taken out of context and it is rather short. I think the brevity of it makes it something that can work. There is nothing wrong with telling and it's really advisable to balance your writing anyway.

What I usually look at in a scene like this, is whether I'm giving up an opportunity to move more of the story forward with some show that can be developmental to the plot.

Sometimes something like this is used more like a quick interlude between scenes showing the reader a bit more by telling it to them quick and brief.

In this particular instance you could make this longer by showing more. You could show her going into the room and talking to the children perhaps asking about their family and have her think about how two children who are rubbing shoulders together have parents on opposite ends of the social scale and she could wonder if the parents ever get a chance to rub shoulders like this or if they have even ever met. And this could lead the reader to thinking about how this way the children, even if they end up like their parents on opposite ends of life, will have once rubbed shoulders almost as equals.

But that would extend the scene and you may not have that in mind.

Thanks for all the advice and confidence building. I think the trouble I was having with the scene was from the way I kept rabbiting in and out of the action, and this one was one straw too many for me.
I went through and pulled all the "oh and this about how people feel about her" out and the description of her day flowed better, but then I didn't know where to put the telling, or how to effectively show it.

All this is about a page and a half before the action really picks up and about two to three pages in from the start, where I'm still being all expositiony. So, yes, its in the middle of a longer work, that needs to get just a bit longer I think, as there is lots of tell and not much show.

I went ahead and started a "Clean Page" rewrite, adding in a fully voiced narrator to do the telling, so that I can at least keep track of where I'm telling and where I'm showing. If its a nice voice I'll keep it, and if not it's just one more rewrite on the way to being a well written piece.

@tinkerdan I will probably not show the kids as much here, they are really landscape in the story and dont have much to do with the plot or main lines until much later, and even then it's only tangentially...
@springs I am not sure myself if it is padding or not. I think it's important to see what is about to be lost, let the reader feel the peace before the war, calm before the storm kind of thing... and at this point I'm really unsure if the details are as relevant as the landscape they build up. They are mostly glossed over at present; mornings here, stop off there, lunch with these people to avoid those people, evenings to herself. Ladeda life is good.
then the Oh No moment

in the rewrite I have the day pared down to this

Anila loved the spring. The creeping green look that everything acquired, the bawling of the calves and lambs, the invigorated way her people went about their business… and while her mornings were given up to directing the lives of the people around her, her evenings were reserved for wandering her woods and fields, breathing in the emerging scent of life.

Anila loved her people, in the way a farmer loves his crops, or a herder loves his flocks. She was possessive about them, having watched successive generations grow up under her rule, and shaped their lives for the last hundred years, this was understandable.

Click to expand...

yes, the name has changed. I thought I had changed her name in the OP so if I get nothing else out of this (haha, because I already have) I managed to catch that the name change didnt go through.

super rough cut that I'm decidedly still working on...

Creeping green look is interesting... lots of plants have 'creeping' in their name- Juniper, Oxalis, Snowberry, Spike Rush...