Tag Archives: pace

Complicated Webs

August 1, 2010 – 7:45 pm

Big, fat, complex, multiple-viewpoint novels have been popular for quite a while, and they have a whole set of problems all their own. Once of those problems is pacing.
The temptation is always to take advantage of a slow moment in the main plot to advance a subplot, and it’s frequently a good idea in many [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , , | Comments (4)

Hup, Two, Three, Four

July 28, 2010 – 11:09 am

Pacing is movement, and movement has rhythm. Some rhythms are fast, staccato beats, rat-tat-tat-tat; some are slow, leisurely swells; and some are a steady heartbeat. One thing is true for all of them:  in order to have a beat, in order to have rhythm, there must be sound and then silence. A single continuous blast [...]

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Walk, Run, or Jog?

July 21, 2010 – 8:14 am

Recently, I was reading an extremely long (quarter-of-a-million-words plus) book that shall remain nameless to avoid embarrassing the author. It held my interest enough to get me through to the end, but it left me curiously unsatisfied, with very little memory of the plot (which is quite unusual for me), and no impulse whatever to [...]

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The escalation problem

September 5, 2009 – 9:34 am

The comments on the last post started getting into endings and the escalation of threat, particularly as related to series books, and I discovered I had quite a lot to say on the subject even though I haven’t written a long-running series myself.
The first thing is that not all trilogies or series are the same. [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , | Comments (10)