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I was doing what I thought was going to be a quick once over clean up to Kether Station before I send it somewhere else to be laughed at... I really did. I was cruising through and wincing at some of my sentence level decisions, and then looking at the ends of things to see where I overwrote - what a fantastic piece of advice that is, seriously check out Celia's Post after she came back from the Strange Horizons Workshop.
And it's working out, I'm clipping along, it's all good - and then all of a sudden I'm disquieted. I've hit the second half of the story, and I'm poking at it - a couple places where I do an abrupt drop into a new scene that made no sense, and then a feeling, strangely, like I've lost tension even though it's supposed to be building, and I just can't put my finger on it. But it's something.
And so I run into Charlie (Whom I love, but no longer serve, alas) and I talk to him about it, since Charlie is the Man when it comes to telling me what aspect of my mad writing skillz I need to work on next. I list a few symptoms, as gibbering and inarticulate as I am about these things, but Charlie's good at understanding Chelsese and says, "Can you put it aside for a while and work on a story where you concentrate solely on pacing?"
*click* Pacing? Is that what I'm seeing? If it is, then I realize (that lightning quick mind has to be good for something) that pacing's a problem in LoA, and that's how I bitched it up. And then I hit the next realization:
"Pacing's what I don't know." as I'm frantically thinking, What the hell is pacing? I mean I know, but I don't grok it in its fullness uh oh... and then, "I'm not sure exactly what I'm pointing at when I say pacing."
"Well, that's a problem there," Charlie says. "You need to figure that out."
I do, don't I? that's the next thing. it was sentence to sentence transitions, each one informing the next, and in the middle of Grounding Details and Fabulous Reality, I now have Pacing.
And I don't have a darn clue, gentle readers....
***
Okay, what I can see with Kether Station is that there's an issue between the passage of time and the events that take place. The first half is even and easy - not leisurely, but you do got a sense that time has passed. Twelve hours pass in what I call the "first half" of the story: 4600 words out of 8500. The second half - 3900 words covers at MOST four hours of time, and it's probably closer to three. Worse, most of the indications that any time has passed are glossed over, so a reader might think the second half is a whole lot of stuff crammed into about two hours - and that's part of why it feels like it drags. Seems paradoxical, but I think I am on to something.
The first half of the story mentions time passing - "After an hour of that particular indulgence," or the fact that I say right up front that you know four hours have passed when a certain event takes place. That event is mentioned twice in the first half - one event gets missed because the Protag's off doing something else, and the second half begins at hour twelve when the event should happen, and doesn't...
Then I don't have that event to mark time any more, and I land in a damn tar pit. Everything happens all at once--though to be fair, it is. There's no context for the amount of time, it's action without the structure of time, and it turns into flailing.
I use about a page and a half an hour in the first half, where I'm using almost four pages an hour for the second. and that's part of why it drags, too. And that might be more of what I have to work on, because losing the every four hours event is a part of the pandemonium, whereas babbling on for page after page isn't maybe so smart.
Yeah I know. When I tear the rose apart petal by petal to understand why it's so pretty, I don't muck around. I do feel though that I'm only grasping the corners of what's wrong with my pacing, and what I've said really only applies to the pacing problems in Kether Station, and not in pacing in general.
Charlie asked me which writers I thought had good pacing, and I couldn't answer him. So I'm going to be reading stories with an eye towards pacing. I'll take suggestions, if you have any. I'm going to be looking at my magazines and collections as homework.
I'm thinking pacing is what keeps the events in the story from happening all at once, but I'm not sure how to consciously control pacing as I'm writing - how to make it a first draft skill rather than something I look at after the fact. Any suggestions or advice or insights or cool websites would help. I'm going to be squidding all over this for the next few weeks - Bear remembers when I got Asperger's about Rhetoric. I do that.
And it's working out, I'm clipping along, it's all good - and then all of a sudden I'm disquieted. I've hit the second half of the story, and I'm poking at it - a couple places where I do an abrupt drop into a new scene that made no sense, and then a feeling, strangely, like I've lost tension even though it's supposed to be building, and I just can't put my finger on it. But it's something.
And so I run into Charlie (Whom I love, but no longer serve, alas) and I talk to him about it, since Charlie is the Man when it comes to telling me what aspect of my mad writing skillz I need to work on next. I list a few symptoms, as gibbering and inarticulate as I am about these things, but Charlie's good at understanding Chelsese and says, "Can you put it aside for a while and work on a story where you concentrate solely on pacing?"
*click* Pacing? Is that what I'm seeing? If it is, then I realize (that lightning quick mind has to be good for something) that pacing's a problem in LoA, and that's how I bitched it up. And then I hit the next realization:
"Pacing's what I don't know." as I'm frantically thinking, What the hell is pacing? I mean I know, but I don't grok it in its fullness uh oh... and then, "I'm not sure exactly what I'm pointing at when I say pacing."
"Well, that's a problem there," Charlie says. "You need to figure that out."
I do, don't I? that's the next thing. it was sentence to sentence transitions, each one informing the next, and in the middle of Grounding Details and Fabulous Reality, I now have Pacing.
And I don't have a darn clue, gentle readers....
***
Okay, what I can see with Kether Station is that there's an issue between the passage of time and the events that take place. The first half is even and easy - not leisurely, but you do got a sense that time has passed. Twelve hours pass in what I call the "first half" of the story: 4600 words out of 8500. The second half - 3900 words covers at MOST four hours of time, and it's probably closer to three. Worse, most of the indications that any time has passed are glossed over, so a reader might think the second half is a whole lot of stuff crammed into about two hours - and that's part of why it feels like it drags. Seems paradoxical, but I think I am on to something.
The first half of the story mentions time passing - "After an hour of that particular indulgence," or the fact that I say right up front that you know four hours have passed when a certain event takes place. That event is mentioned twice in the first half - one event gets missed because the Protag's off doing something else, and the second half begins at hour twelve when the event should happen, and doesn't...
Then I don't have that event to mark time any more, and I land in a damn tar pit. Everything happens all at once--though to be fair, it is. There's no context for the amount of time, it's action without the structure of time, and it turns into flailing.
I use about a page and a half an hour in the first half, where I'm using almost four pages an hour for the second. and that's part of why it drags, too. And that might be more of what I have to work on, because losing the every four hours event is a part of the pandemonium, whereas babbling on for page after page isn't maybe so smart.
Yeah I know. When I tear the rose apart petal by petal to understand why it's so pretty, I don't muck around. I do feel though that I'm only grasping the corners of what's wrong with my pacing, and what I've said really only applies to the pacing problems in Kether Station, and not in pacing in general.
Charlie asked me which writers I thought had good pacing, and I couldn't answer him. So I'm going to be reading stories with an eye towards pacing. I'll take suggestions, if you have any. I'm going to be looking at my magazines and collections as homework.
I'm thinking pacing is what keeps the events in the story from happening all at once, but I'm not sure how to consciously control pacing as I'm writing - how to make it a first draft skill rather than something I look at after the fact. Any suggestions or advice or insights or cool websites would help. I'm going to be squidding all over this for the next few weeks - Bear remembers when I got Asperger's about Rhetoric. I do that.
