Pacing in Your Writing

Cary gave us some tips on pacing today:
Biggest distinction: what the story is focused on.

Fast vs. Slow

Emotions, thoughts,

Fast: background fades away. You will cut a lot of adjectives and adverbs - use descriptive verbs instead.
i.e. was a glorious, beautiful sunrise. --> The sun had lept into the sky.
Slow: wider view. You take in details around you, backgrounds, scenery, overall view of characters.

Transitions: Don't jump between fast-paced and slow-paced. Try to build up to faster-paced sections, and build-down to slower sections.
i.e. including details that give the reader a sense of foreboding makes them expect a faster-paced scene. After an intense, stressful scene there might be a sense of relief, and at that point it is natural for the pace to slow down.

Also, it can be helpful to think about the tone of your scene, and how that affects how you write it. See our post on Tone.

More on Scrivner!

Hey guys! Hope you're all getting some writing done this weekend :)

If you are, please take a look at Scrivner. It's such a useful program. I just realized that I had planned a scene to take place in November and then realized it was thanksgiving week and I'd need to rearrange my scenes. It was SO much easier to do in Scriver than it would have been to try to rework in a single word document or in multiple word documents.

Here's a new blog from writer Gwen Hernandez (who wrote Scriver for Dummies) that gives you lots of how-to and tips on using Scrivner: The Edited Life.