Find the right pace. Prompt #70

In Adair Lara‘s book, Naked, Drunk, and Writing, she talks about pace.

“Add more images where you want to slow us [the reader] down, fewer when you want to speed up. This is called pace.”

In a writing workshop, Adair said, “To slow down, give more detail, give unexpected detail, detail that moves story forward.”

Today’s writing prompt is either, or, or both.

Either take one of the story starts below (these are from Adair’s writing class) and keep writing, using detail to slow the story down or minimize detail to speed the story up.

As Adair writes in her book, “The more important a scene or character, the more image and detail it gets.”

OR: Have fun writing a scene with too much detail. Tell us way more than we need to know. Write a spoof on how to write too much detail.

Use any of these lines to get started:

I had to try something different so I . . .

All the time I was thinking that . . .

The turning point came when . . .

BOTH: Write using too much detail. Rewrite the same scene with much less detail.

Photo of a collection of a smallish grouping of a partial compendium of a few of the print books using the paper method of publishing that have been produced by proud and able and hard-working students of classes of the writing kind taught by the amazing Adair Lara.

Books published by Adair Lara’s students.

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