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 …
Pacing, Part 1: Welcome to Intermediate Writing! Read More »
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 …
A Song of Ice and Fire: Structure/Word Count Case Study Read More »
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 …
