Keep Moving Forward

I've been sprinkling different scenes into Descent to "spice it up", most that have to do with showing more of my villains. I'm trying to use chapters from other perspectives to "break up" the chapters totally focusing on Lonlor. I'm doing this for two reasons. 1) Following Lonlor exclusively can be incredibly frustrating for readers, as he is stubborn, hard headed, and at a transition stage right now where he's JUST getting the hang of what is going on. And it only took him 400 pages. WOO! (Character building pages that needed to happen, I swear) and 2) This story involves a lot of other characters that do really interesting stuff while Lonlor is doing something entirely different. I also feel it's a good way to give a breath of fresh air now and then, and give my bad guys a stronger presence. It helps when an audience sees glimpses of why the bad guys are threats that need to be faced.

However, only this morning I found myself plunging into one of those very breather chapters, and after a page I wrote, in all caps: "WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS CONVERSATION. IT SHOULD MOVE THE PLOT FORWARD OR BE TAKEN OUT. DUH SELF."

And it helped me realize that if the chapter, conversation, event, etc doesn't move the plot or the character themselves forward in some way, then why on earth mention it? It's like retelling an event that has happened to you to a friend and mentioning the weather when the story you are telling took place inside and was totally unaffected by the outside.

I can tell pretty quickly when chapters start to go nowhere that they either need to be taken out, or given a purpose that actually ties in with the plot or shows something about the character that is important. It doesn't have to be life changing for them, but it should have an impact (such as factoring in to characters relationships with one another, giving new information, a new obstacle for the character to overcome, etc), otherwise you are forcing reader's to read irrelevant nonsense that does nothing but hold your story back.

Just something to think about, and definitely something I've been focusing on recently in rewriting book 2 of SoF. Has anyone else found something similar in their own writing? Do you notice when you do it, or does it have to be brought to your attention? Can you spot it when you are reading a published book?