Right now, I start off with a fairly dramatic event--a flash flood. So, that's my contract with the reader. A reasonable reader would expect some danger and adventure. And I'm not sure I'm delivering on that contract right now.

After the flood, there's, say, a chapter and a half dealing with the aftermath. I'm fine with that. Then there are three and a half, almost four chapters before something exciting happens again. (BTW, my chapters average about 2500 words.) It's a different kind of excitement, though. There are two very emotional things that happen to the MC back to back. Then there are three more chapters before another minor crisis. Then one and a half chapters before going into a more major, and adventurous crisis. Both of these last two crises actually affect a member of MC's family more than the MC himself. Although the MC is involved in both.

After that, though, things move at a more rapid pace. Not always dangerous, but there's something going on, even if it's a love interest rather than a peril. (Although, love can also be perilous in its own way.)

As I go through it, I'm thinking that the pacing in the beginning is just too slow. Those three-chapter pauses are too long. So, I'm going through looking for what I can weed out. But the problem is two-fold. There's a lot of stuff I need to establish for later. And I've also got notes on things I want to add, chiefly getting a little deeper into what the MC is feeling at certain points. So, at best I would expect the revisions to be a wash. I'll probably add as many words as I cut. That may make the intervening chapters more interesting, but it won't get me to the action any sooner.

The other possibility is to find a way to increase the tension in those three chapters. The main problem of the story is established in the second chapter. (It's a result of the flash flood in the first chapter.) But then for several chapters at a time the MC is safe. We know he's going to have to deal with the problem, but he is safe from it for the time being. There is another problem that is being foreshadowed in these chapters. It's really the subject of Book Two, at least as far as it's resolution, but it does play a part in the first book, too. It essentially squeezes the MC into a corner which forces the final conflict of Book One.

After this very long post, the question is, can I carry those three-chapter gaps in the first half of the book by building up the tension of that secondary problem? Is that fair, since it won't come to a head or be resolved until Book Two? Or do I really just have to get out my big scissors and cut like crazy?

An inciting crisis moving toward a second crisis caused by the first crisis is typically in story where tension rises toward climax from posing an overarching question. Artfuly posing questions are what drive the suspense factor of tension. A final crisis is what answers the overarching question.

Saving the second crisis for a second book sounds to me like there's plot gaps in the first novel at climax and ending.

By way of example, an idea-oriented story. The idea goal is to achieve nuclear fusion that produces more energy than the reactor consumes. That ongoing story is a real-world one fraught with resistances, obstacles, and setbacks: antagonisms. First crisis, again, a real-world one, affordable, clean, renewable energy is needed on Earth yesterday, the environment is going to hell in a handbasket and alternative solutions will cripple the economy.

Second crisis, at the moment when the experiment succeeds or fails, scientists realize the reactor is short by 10 gigajoules of inciting energy. A new round of antatonisms poses more resistances, obstacles, and setbacks. But the goalpost is in sight. Real-world so far.

Third crisis, at the moment when the experiment is obviously going to succeed, an unforeseen factor shows that terrestrial nuclear fusion is impossible due to Earth's magnetic field interference. But the reversal of fortune hasn't occurred yet. So a scientist proposes that a superconducting fluid jacket encapsulating the reactor will shield the reactor from Earth's magnetic field. Voilà! denuoement, at least for a first installment in a potential trilogy. There's more crises and antagonisms ahead before a nuclear fusion energy supply becomes a reality.

If you have three chapters where really nothing much happens, you should probably delete them. Maybe you mean the chapters do not have "action" sequences? That could be okay. If their primary purpose is straight exposition, you're risking killing the stories momentum, or delaying it's start too long.

You want all the material in your story to be setting scene, revealing character, and advancing plot. Ideally, doing more than one of those simultaneously. Do the chapters in question do that? If so they are advancing the story and could very well be fine.

There should be an undercurrent of tension there (having dramatic conflict as its source). We should see characters continually acting to overcome obstacles in hopes of achieving their wants or needs--the primary and most efficient means to both reveal your characters and advance your plot. So you should have dramatic action happening almost all the time. It can be far more subtle than a physical action sequence. A conversation can be full of dramatic action, a bar brawl can have none.

So the answer to your question is that it depends on what you have in those chapters. There aren't really any rules governing the required frequency of physical action scenes, but all your scenes/chapters should be as full of dramatic action/conflict as you can manage. You should be able to do that in the context of the present story without introducing threads that will go unresolved.

Of course physical action scenes can also be dramatic action, I don't want to sound like I'm poo-poo-ing their importance.

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From what's given, I see several issues. If the flash flood is the protagonist's inciting crisis and it's immediately cleaned up with no antagonism and no additional predicament presenting as a result of cleaning it up, tension probably doesn't rise sufficiently to carry several chapters of context development.

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I guess I didn't describe that well enough. The initial problem isn't solved. There's a couple of chapters coming down from the crisis of the flood, but it is the inciting event that causes an antagonism that is resolved at the end of Book One. It's just that that antagonism can't be acted out for several chapters because the protagonist and antagonist are too far apart. (He's not an adult yet, his parents send him away from the trouble for a while.)

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An inciting crisis moving toward a second crisis caused by the first crisis is typically in story where tension rises toward climax from posing an overarching question. Artfuly posing questions are what drive the suspense factor of tension. A final crisis is what answers the overarching question.

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This is pretty close to exactly what happens with the main predicament of the story. How artfully I've posed the questions remains to be seen, of course. But there is an escalation from one crisis to the next until at the end this problem is resolved permanently.

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Saving the second crisis for a second book sounds to me like there's plot gaps in the first novel at climax and ending.

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I didn't intentionally save the other problem for the second book. It's not even really a subplot in this book. It's more like a limiting factor, preventing the MC from taking the easy way out. It affects certain decisions that he makes, but he considers the problem to be manageagle in this book. In Book Two he finds out he was wrong about that.

When the main conflict is resolved, the first book is over--or very shortly after that. But I still had this other problem that I felt needed a book of its own--Book Two.

There's also a third conflict that starts at the climax of Book One, continues as factor (but not a real problem) in Book Two, and then is the main conflict of Book Three, unifying the trilogy. (Hopefully)

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You want all the material in your story to be setting scene, revealing character, and advancing plot. Ideally, doing more than one of those simultaneously. Do the chapters in question do that? If so they are advancing the story and could very well be fine.

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They are certainly setting scene and revealing character. I don't know how much they're advancing the plot. That's one of the reasons I'm having so much trouble cutting. It's not that I'm in love with every word I've written. There's a lot of material in there that I need for later. Otherwise some things are just going to spring up like a jack-in-the-box. There has to be a basis for them.

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There should be an undercurrent of tension there (having dramatic conflict as its source). We should see characters continually acting to overcome obstacles in hopes of achieving their wants or needs--the primary and most efficient means to both reveal your characters and advance your plot.

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An example from an amatory romance. Will Jim's coworker Jenny be available Friday for a date. Will Jim ask her out or talk himself out of asking. If he asks, will she go out with him. Will problems on the date cause misunderstandings or will Jenny find them endearing. Will Jim's purpose and Jenny's consent cause him overconfidence and trip him up, his purpose cause problems that ask to be resolved. Eventually, I'd like to see some bodice ripping or broken hearts. Will they or won't they being the basic overarching question that an amatory romance artfully asks. In other words, a love interest adds to tension by incorporating sexual suspense.

The other side of tension, sympathy, I filter for that by examining whether there's a proportionate, escalating, high-magnitude emotional context relative to a protagonist's predicament or relative to a narrator, and more importantly to a reader. Pity-worthy and noble (pride) are two significant emotional features in many stories. Then once a predicament presents, if it's not already apparent from being portrayed along with the emotional context, fear, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of loss, fear of harm or death, fear of consequences derived from what's at stake.

When sympathy and suspense operate hand-in-hand, emotional context poses questions and questions pose emotion context in a logical, proportionate, intensifying causal progression, causation and tension. Adding antagonism to the equation, purpose and problems also cause emotional context and pose questions.

As far as pace is concerned, filtering for that is a matter of scrutinizing the proportion of increasing magnitude, which is the intersection points of causation, tension, and antagonism. Ideally, they should shoehorn into each other as efforts to address a predicament escalate propotionately.

A mystery's inciting crisis is a murder, a high-magnitude circumstance that can be difficult to surpass if there's nothing else at stake. In the murder is emotional context, and a question. Who done it is the overarching question a detective protagonist seeks to answer. The murder is the entraining first cause and the first source of sympathy and suspense. And the danger and mystery of it all are the proportionately escalating antagonisms compelling the detective to uncover the perpetrator. Escalation toward climax, de-escalation toward resolution, final crisis, reversal of fortune. Unity.

One thing that has surprised me in my recent reading is how master writers pace a story in four equal portions. Introduction, rising action, falling action, resolution. Any one section being disproportionately long and the story starts to drag. And, in the past, I confused the climax with the final crisis, but now see the error of my ways.

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One thing that has surprised me in my recent reading is how master writers pace a story in four equal portions. Introduction, rising action, falling action, resolution. Any one section being disproportionately long and the story starts to drag. And, in the past, I confused the climax with the final crisis, but now see the error of my ways.

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That's very interesting. If I parse my story according to that model, my intro is actually about right. So is the resolution. But, assuming that you mark the difference between rising and falling action as the point at which the irrevocable decision is made, my rising action is too long and my falling action is too short. That is the point at which we are no longer building to some direct and final conflict between antagonist and protagonist, but are now acting out the conflict comes a little too late.

Yes, I do mark the difference as the moment of irrevocable decision, or at least that's one way I look at it. The climactic moment, the moment of change, the turn from escalation to de-escalation, but in all, the moment when an outcome is most in doubt.

Off the top of my head, I say three chapters without advancing the plot is too much. One chapter without advancing the plot is too much. If you're not advancing the plot you're probably not revealing character. If you are revealing character than your plot is advancing because your character is acting to achieve important goals in the face of significant obstacles.

For each of the chapters write down what the character is wanting or needing, what is opposing the character gaining that want or need, and what the character is doing to overcome the opposing force. That exercise would reveal any holes (i.e., places where you answer, "nothing") in maintaining continuous dramatic conflict. Fill the holes and weave the exposition as unobtrusively as possible, and beware that readers often need far less of that than we writers think.

Hope that helps some.

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Without knowing what's there in those three chapters, it's hard to say more. If you feel strongly about leaving things as they are than do so. It seems though that your instincts sense a problem, but another part of you is resisting change.

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Actually, that's where part of my confusion comes in. Because my instincts are telling me to ADD to that part. To get more into the MC's POV and describe more of what he feels during this part of the story. I mean I know what he's feeling, but i feel I should let the reader in on it more.

It's comments from a couple of readers that made me start wondering about my pacing. And taken a chapter at a time, with a week or more between, it does take a long time to get back to the action.

And, frankly, while this is an Event story on the MICE quotient, it does have a strong undercurrent of Milieu. And that's not every reader's cup of tea. But the contrasting cultures and the way they relate to each other and the world is an important element of the story.

Two of the chapters in question involve the young MC being left behind with relatives he doesn't know well in a strange place. He's left there partly to keep him safe from the antagonist. But he also learns a valuable new skill while he's there. And he has to cope with a strange environment where many of the rules and expectations are very different from what he's used to. It's mostly his struggle to deal with that that I feel needs to be fleshed out more.

I laughed at first, and then I went back and looked at MY story, and to my surprise, whenever my character wasn't doing something relating to the action, she slept. A lot. She was recuperating from an illness that everyone thought was just depression, but it wasn't, so she had a good reason to sleep, but that didn't make the story any more exciting. So I went back through and I gave her a life that was totally not related to the main conflict. It made her so much more interesting and it made her eventual sacrifice of the life she knew a lot more heart wrenching. It even added a few plot twists I hadn't anticipated.

That's probably not your exact problem, but I throw this out as a suggestion: Could you add a minor plot line that will keep the reader hooked until your main plot line picks up steam? It might add words to your story, but you might be surprised. I'm not sure that mine added very many words, because I was able to explain things the reader needed to know in a more subtle way.

The character finds himself in a new environment. That happens to people all of the time, and humans are remarkably adaptable. So you could ask, what is the problem for the character there? Maybe he hates the new situation, maybe he feels an immense need to get back to the old situation, something like that. Then look at what's keeping him there/stopping him from going back, which should be something significant enough that it's difficult to overcome. Then look at what he's doing about it (which will reveal something about his character). If he's not doing much but moping about things, light a fire under him and make him act.

If those things are at work and balanced, you'll have plot motion. His emotions are a key component to what he wants (i.e., the problem he's trying to beat) and how he acts on it, so you're definitely on the right track there. If we know his thoughts (how he expresses worries, fears, and hopes) we'll understand his emotions. It's similar for his "educational" situation. Maybe he resists the new learning, maybe he embraces it as an action to overcome some other obstacle.

You hit on a key point: you know in your head what's going on with the character, but the reader has to see it on the page to know.