: Re: I have three dead-end chapters. Should I keep them or remove them? The protagonist in my story decides to research a topic. Naturally, I wanted her to encounter some obstacles first, so I arranged

While there might be a payoff coming in the fourth chapter, if readers get frustrated enough on the way there, some of them will bail and never finish your book. So while you can ask your reviewers to forge ahead and read the rest, you can't assume readers will.

Consider one of the following two approaches:

Condense the material. Do you really need three chapters to convey "tried and tried and tried again, getting more and more frustrated"? It sounds like you're getting pretty detailed; I'm imagining specific Google queries, the details of the library crawl, and so on. It sounds like that's too much detail for the weight this element has in your overall story.
Intersperse it with other developments. Instead of having chapters that are only about this search for information, integrate that search into the other things that are going on in the plot at the same time. This character is probably doing other things -- or, if not and if it's not first-person, other characters are surely doing other things that you can talk about. Let the search become a long-running theme but not the entirety of the text for that part of your book.

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: Re: I have three dead-end chapters. Should I keep them or remove them? The protagonist in my story decides to research a topic. Naturally, I wanted her to encounter some obstacles first, so I arranged

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: Should I write "what do the data show" or "what does the data show"? I wonder what the proper way of writing this question is: What do the data show? What does the data show?

: Can I publish excerpts from a letter without permission? It will be my pleasure to cite the author of the letter. I'm looking at perhaps ten sentences out of a four page letter. I have the

: I need to smash a wrist in a grocery store One of my lead characters has to do community service at a grocery store. She has magical powers that will allow her to escape easily, but they

: How to find the balance between research and the obvious I'm embarking on writing my first popular science book on a controversial subject. For sure the writing must be rational, coherent with

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