Color "Map" Exercise Response

         The Faulkner passage I worked with was a veritable rainbow by the time I had finished with this exercise. The only words without a color were conjugations and pronouns. I know Faulkner has a very "dense" style like that, but I think this would be characteristic of most good writing as well. Not only were there a wide variety of colors, but they overlapped quite frequently. Even within one "color," like a long stretch of dialogue, there was action, backstory, and sensory detail. There was an almost total lack of exposition in the Faulkner piece. The necessary details of the story were conveyed within other elements, like dialogue or thought. I like the idea discussed in class of exposition in the first draft as a writer's note to herself, even though this makes the revision process seem even more daunting!
          In my own color map, I noticed there were sentences concentrated with several colors, and then a gap of little color for a sentence or two. So there were sentences rich in action and sensory detail, and then sentences that functioned only as "fillers" or bridges to the next, more interesting sentence. In my scene, there was a lack of taste and smell sensory detail, even though the scene in question would benefit greatly from these, especially smell, as it was emphasize several qualities about the room described without having to state them directly.
        The story, unlike my last one and the stories I've written previously, is in the first person. Thus, most of this story I've written thus far is thought. I'd like to cut back on the backstory in this scene, but to do so I think I might have to change the tense of the story. My plan had been to use present tense to frame the story, at beginning and end, with past tense for the majority. In this plan, most of the story would be backstory, so I'm considering a revision of the tense.