As I am full of January sloth and seem to have ground to a halt with my re-writes this afternoon, now seems like a very good moment to talk about pace - if I think about it, maybe I'll acquire some!
Pace has elements of structure and elements of style about it. When you are writing, if every scene, every paragraph and every sentence are same length and move at the same tempo, your reader will very quickly start to drift off. You can't depend on plot alone to drive your narrative forwards - as with so many things, it is not just the story you are telling, but how you are telling it which will make it stand out from the crowd.
To keep your novel pacy, you need plenty of variety: you need to alter the mood, the tension and even the language of different episodes so that you create and maintain a kind of internal dynamism.
My hunch is that it is slightly more subliminal than simply contrasting scenes with each other - you would do this by moving from interior to exterior, from subplot to main plot, or perhaps by concentrating on a different character. With pace it's a question of changing the atmosphere and the intensity of a scene,or even a portion of a scene. At its simplest level, just altering the length of sentences from expansive and complex to short and snappy can help to add pace.
If you want to put this to the test, why not try writing a piece that uses a change of pace (rather than, say, a plot twist) as the forward impetus to a story, and see where that takes you?
No comments:
Post a Comment