Quick pacing hooks readers, deepens the drama, creates and increases tension. How to pick up the pace: 1. Start story in the middle of the dramatic action, not before the drama commences. 2. Keep description brief. This doesn’t mean using no description, but choose one or two telling, brief details. 3. Combine scenes. If one scene deepens character by showing a couple at dinner and a few scenes later they have a fight, let them have the fight at dinner. 4. Rely on dialogue. A lot of the story can be carried by spoken conversation. Readers seldom skip dialogue. 5. Keep backstory to a minimum. The more we learn about characters through what they do now, in story time, the less you’ll need flashbacks, memories and exposition about their histories. All of these slow the pace. 6. Squeeze out every unnecessary word. This is the best way of all to increase pace. There are times you want a longer version for atmosphere, but be choosy. Wordiness kills pace and bores readers.
Paraphrased from Writer’s Digest magazine, January 2006, “Pick Up the Pace.”
Memorable writing that sparks imagination. Lean in. Hear the writer’s voice on the page.
BEE-ING
By Su Shafer
I have become a stone.
A gemstone. Labradorite
Or Moonstone maybe.
No – an Orca Agate
From the Earth, with an affinity with water.
I am a stationary object.
My unruly legs have taught me
The power of stillness,
How motionlessness invites presence
In each moment.
Today I watched a bee visit
All the flowers in my patio planter.
Her tender attention to each one
The pollen pantaloons on her legs
The song of her wings,
Humming as she went from floret to floret
Trailing in the air behind her as she flew off.
Her busy work reminds me
There are no small lives.
I think of her and her sisters
Bustling about in the hive,
Content in their purposefulness.
Unlike my quiet house
There is no stillness in a hive
Even when they pause for a brief repast
Of bee bread and honey.
Su Shafer is a creative crafter, fabricating bits of writing in poetry and short stories, and other bits into characters that appear in paintings or sit on various bookshelves and coffee tables. She lives in a cottage on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, where the tea kettle is always whistling and the biscuits freshly baked. One never knows who might stop by to share a rainy afternoon. And all are welcome!
Memorable writing that sparks imagination. Lean in. Hear the writer’s voice on the page.
From The Roots
By Su Shafer
I need to let go of the uncertainty
That I am anything else but a dragon.
Just a little dragon
A little wood dragon
Hatched from a little crystal egg
As green as the nest of moss it was laid in
Carefully built in the cool leaf mould
Gathered in the crook of Granny Maple’s
Gnarled old roots.
There is a fire in my heart
But wood dragons are careful
Creatures of the trees
Where fire is seldom welcome.
Shy as a brown creeper,
Hiding in plain sight,
Few people see me
And the ones who do
Can hardly believe it.
Su Shafer is a creative crafter, fabricating bits of writing in poetry and short stories, and other bits into characters that appear in paintings or sit on various bookshelves and coffee tables. She lives in a cottage on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, where the tea kettle is always whistling and the biscuits freshly baked. One never knows who might stop by to share a rainy afternoon. And all are welcome.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .”
“The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls
“I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a dumpster.”
“Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus
“Back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought; back before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeleine Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over.”
