Applying What I Learn

I decided to try writing chapter one of my new novel with mixed results - it passes the Bechdel test but came out a tiny bit too melodramatic.

Thinking about what went wrong, I remembered the earlier link about Vonnegut's advice:

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Part of the reason I had melodrama was I was trying to be super clever and hold back critical facts while having the characters obliquely refer to them.

Vonnegut's advice provides me both with a challenge and a template for fixing this chapter: write a version in which I stop trying to be clever and trust the audience with the information to make sense of the scene.