azdak

Of all the elements of writing, the hardest has to be bloody plot. There seems to be a rule that any given section will either not have enough plot, in which case it will be soggy and lethargic, lacking forward momentum, or it will have too much, and be indistinguishable from an info-dump.

I've just read Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog, which seems to me to suffer from exactly this problem. It makes me feel better to know I'm not the only one, but it doesn't help with finding a solution. Perhaps I should re-read the opening of Strong Poison - the judge's summing-up strikes me as a masterly handling of the 'excess of plot' problem.