I’m working on a series on pacing.  You can see other posts in the series here. … All right, let’s get out a thesaurus and look up dog. pup, puppy, bitch, cur, doggy, hound, mongrel, mutt, pooch, stray, tyke, bowwow, fido, flea bag, man’s best friend, tail-wagger As well as a list of dog breeds. Affenpinscher, […]

I’m working on a series on pacing.  You can see other posts in the series here. … Dear engineer types, I am a poet type.  So I’m borrowing the metaphor from my spouse, who works in IT and does woodworking. Let’s agree to look at pacing as a woodworking project.  We start with our raw

I’m working on a series on pacing.  You can see other posts in the series here. … I’ll get to pacing for engineers in a bit.  First the different building blocks of pacing: Word length. Length of phrases (as marked by breaths or punctuation). Sentence length. Paragraph length. Beat length (the length of each individual

I’m going to give two explanations of what pacing is, one for poet-types and one for engineer-types.  This is an arbitrary split, and you’ll probably need both perspectives at some point. For poets: Pacing is how you start sneaking poetry into fiction, without the heightened sense of language that might tip your hand to the

At some point, the beginning writer starts to notice that different stories are different from each other.  They don’t all seem to follow the same rules.  For a while (and I’ve seen this a lot), the writer tries to stretch “their” system of writing to fit the basics to cover all possible variations.  This is where

When writers first start out, what they’re mainly aware of, writing-wise, is conflict.  This is when you sit down and start writing a scene and go, “This is two people fighting about something, how exciting!”  Let’s call that Level 0. Beginning writers have started to be inundated with English classes; they often have a set

The post about word count and subplots was getting long, so I’ll break this out here: I think George R.R. Martin is writing parallel novels inside each of his books. There is a main plot and a main character to each book.  You can figure this out by counting which POV character has the most

This is a terrible question.  It doesn’t really mean anything other than “on average, we see XYZ wordcounts in this genre.”  And it says nothing about why. Here’s a better question: When do readers of this genre want to see subplots, and what kind? A novel with one main plot is about 40-50K.  For example, The Stepford Wives