Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: writing pace, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 2 of 2
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: writing pace in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
Pace is, quite simply, a pain in the arse.
Pace is how fast a story is being told. It's annoying because it's not easy to explain WHY something is paced too fast or two slow. The only way to figure it out, as far as I can tell, is to read a lot of books, then print out your manuscript and read it like a book, noting down the places where the story is getting boring (pace too slow) or you blink at half a year's gone by (pace too fast).
With my last book, 'Season of Secrets', my pace was mostly too slow - mainly because I set myself targets like 'write a thousand words in a day', with the result that I frantically wrote a load of rubbish to meet my deadline. Editing then mainly became cutting, which is a wonderful process - my target then became 'delete a thousand words a day', which is frankly easier and gives one a wonderful sense of freedom as the story emerges from all the dross, shiny and streamlined. I've deleted about 20,000 words from both of my first two books, neither of which is longer than 37,000 words in total.
With the latest book, however I set myself the target of finishing sections - write two sections per week, I told myself. This has resulted in lots of ridiculously short sections, which are paced far too quickly.
I now just need to add stuff - which I have no idea how to do. Aargh! Help would be gratefully received!
I'm a few thousand words into my new "big idea". A simple synopsis for the novel already exists, so I know something about where I'm going. Some people advise that this is the time to go with the flow. Just get that first draft written at a cracking pace! Write, don't think! Scribble out the unconcious text.
That's not how it's working here. I am taking slow careful steps of the opening chapters, finding the dry path across the moor. I am watching for the brief moments when the story itself - not the skeletally lean synopsis - reveals itself. It's when a host of tiny ideas and questions and all that wonderful word stuff comes flashing into my mind. I need to catch each one before it disappears. This very slow writing pace lets the emotional plot as well as the factual plot grow and echo in my head. At least that what's I'm hoping.
I go over each paragraph time and again. I expand lines into paragraphs, paragraphs into scenes. I change telling into showing, build in snatches of dialogue, cut this or that, move ideas around. It is very enjoyable, almost as if I'm placing minute pieces of bright glass into a mosaic, watching the pattern take on beauty and shape. Yes, I have to keep the free and dreamy state, but I have to focus on the miniature details too.
A version of the "Three Pigs" I tell has the first sister building a house of flowers and grass, the second one of twigs and leaves, and the third a house of iron. The first two houses are the most immediately beautiful, even to tell, but I must get that iron into my writing too, or my whole story won't be strong enough to stand.
.jpg?picon=1806)
I know exactly how you feel. Deleting is gloriously easy but adding - aargh!
So true - because you don't write with gaps in, so there's nowhere obvious to add things wihtout causing massive disruption. Good luck, Sally!
I call this process 'thickening', like adding flour to a sauce or a soup when it's too thin. Not quite sure what I do but generally I can extend conversations, or put in a chat somewhere between two people, a scene that's extra in between two other existing scenes. Only very rarely is a thickening of descriptive passages needed. I go through the ms annotating it and saying things like 'more anguish' in the margin! I too like deleting but it doesn't happen to me often. And sometimes it's easier when deleting to get rid of an entire subplot or something from the beginning to the end of a book than fossick around deleting bits....that sometimes works.
Have fun!
yes, I know, it's really difficult because I find I've written with a kind of surface tension in the narrative, and getting in through it feels extraordinarily difficult. But I do find I get there in the end. I think maybe the thing is to focus on the story rather than the form, if that makes any sense? Be OK with pulling your section apart completely and giving it a new shape. I agree with Adele about extending conversations, but also putting in some detail of observation, something that will add to the narrative or the tension, like, for example, a detail noticed by the person whose p of v it is, that actually gives more insight into their feelings at that time. That way your descriptions have narrative drive built into them, rather than being a lengthy self-indulgent excursus!
What's wrong with self-indulgence? Love it! And that's why I write, you know. If I want to indulge someone else, I'll bake them a chocolate cake.
I tend to do this most with action scenes or high tension scenes which I always under write. I tend to think about descriptive detail ( not necessarily more description just specific vivid making stuff) emotional content and sensory detail. I tend to think of it as fattening up rather than thickenng but it is basically what Adele is talking about. What do you need to add to make the reader feel they are really there and getting what the character is getting?