The Writing Process discussion

#OnWriting

Change your pace, sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.

What is your 'method'. Do you consciously vary your pace, does it come natural to you?

Too slow and it’ll bore the reader into closing the book; too fast and frantic and it’ll unsettle them and won’t be a comfortable read.

How do you speed up a pace? How do you slow it down?

I try very hard to vary the pace, although it takes a few re-reads and drafts to get to a "flow," since I work on sections at a time.

It's a balance between dialogue, short sentences and long sentences. I'm not Proust: I can't write three-page long sentences. But I do often have longer ones, that bend and flow, providing perhaps a longer narrative description of a scene, or a person. These are followed by shorter ones. Perhaps several. In this way, you can build tension.

The same is true with dialogue. In my bizarro stuff, there are page-length dialogues with no indication of who is talking, up to a point where each person looks at the other and wonders who is who. But for more "formal" writing, make sure to have a balance between dialogue and narrative, and make sure the reader knows who is talking.

Thanks Martin for your comments.

No matter what the overall pace of the story, it must vary.

It is important to alternate fast-paced scenes with slower ones. That way the reader will enjoy the excitement of the action, but will also get a rest, a chance to recover.

So what makes pace? What’s the accelerator, and what’s the brake?
Action is the accelerator. Whenever something’s happening.

The brakes (or breaks!) are things like description, and rumination by characters.

Let's play a game: try to list two more things for each post, one accelerator and one brake.

I'll start:

Accelerator: Have the narration be close-up rather than having a panoramic vista. Details brings the reader closer to the scene and the mental movie gets more dynamics.

Break: Have a wide viewpoint description - like a camera panning back.