Tag: pace

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Motivation and the Writing Life, Uncategorized

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

One cool thing about blogging for over ten years is that a lot of the posts form a sort of unexpected diary.  I was glancing over some older posts and came across this one from 2010.   My son and daughter would have been 13 and 9 when I wrote it.  I spoke of our bike ride on a nearby greenway and how we were biking so erratically (my daughter was still on a little kid bike) that a jogger kept passing us over and over again.  He was going slow and steady and despite our occasional bursts of speed,  kept overtaking us.

I made the observation that this was how my writing life worked.  I didn’t go fast enough to get burned out but I didn’t go slow enough to get overwhelmed with the length of the project.Continue reading

Balancing Pace with Reader Inclusion

Writing Tips

Balancing Pace with Reader Inclusion is a blog post by Elizabeth Spann Craig

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Sometimes in my stories, I want to pick up the pace, especially to move the mystery along.   I’ll quickly move through a scene, summing up something that’s happening–a party, a walk that several friends are taking, a picnic–to get to what I think of as ‘the important part’…whatever that might be at the time.

One of my editors at Penguin would frequently type notes in Track Changes at these spots: “Could you expand on this  scene and let the reader see this happening? I think they’d enjoy being part of it.”

The truth is that showing takes time. It takes time to write and read.  But my editor was right: there are parts that I shouldn’t rush through as a writer, even when I feel the pace of the narrative needs to pick up.

For a while, I just gave completely in.  Let’s say we’ve got a carnival going on as a good set-up for our protagonist to be able to casually speak to another character in the story (this character supplies information of some sort for our protagonist).Continue reading

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