On Writing:Pacing

I worry about pacing. I think I have gotten too tangled up in my writing. 

Live Write Thrive published 3 Ways to Ramp Up Your Fiction Pacing and Tension. These are:

1. Don’t chronicle every single action.
2. Pay attention to rhythm.
3. Infuse your pages with conflict and emotional narrative.

The post gives excellent advice on each point. For me it was good to see my self-education validated. 

From reading, I knew 1 and 2. Rex Stout makes a point about #1, although I cannot recall the exact novel. Tolstoy - unexpectedly - is given to succinct dramatic scenes. Reading plays taught me not everything can be shown. While Proust and Theodore Dreiser  taught me different lessons about sentences. Proust sings and Dreiser plods. My own writing comes closer to Dreiser's.

As for #3, this we should all know from our reading. Yet the actual concrete crystallizing of this idea came only after I read about writing. I fear I do not know how well I pull this off.

sch 5/27/22