Pacing myself
I’ve been writing a novel this spring; I may have mentioned it earlier this year. This ‘write straight through’ thing might work for my undisciplined brain, I think. The course I’m vaguely following along with recommends five writing days per week, writing 500 words per day. I am — unable — to pace myself that way. Since it’s gotten warm and nice outside, and I have to water the community garden boxes in my courtyard, and I’m trying to up my overall fitness level, morning writing is out, and writing in the evenings is catch as catch can. I end up doing 1000-1200 words on a day I can just sit in front of the computer for a good chunk of time, but then that leaves me a bit wiped out when I do that sort of thing too close together. I end up putting off starting the next chapter because I need a “break.” Not that I really do, but that’s what the foot-dragging part of my brain (that wants to call writing ‘work’) tries to convince me.
Self-assessment so far (very tongue-in-cheek, I promise):
Pacing (words per day): C
Consistency (5 days per week): D-
Stick-to-it-ness: B
4 Chapters per month: needs work (lol) 10 out of 16
According to the course, I’m technically over halfway through my novel (at the end of Chapter 10). (Pause for a small, slightly incredulous party). I counted my words up at the end of chapter 10, and in total, I have slightly north of 26K words.
It’s been going pretty well — I’m working on Chapter 11 this week. I’m a bit slower than my two other writing group buddies, so I have to pick up the pace (hah!) so I don’t run out of chapters for table reads before they finish with their novels. Good thing I have a few days off this week!
Pacing a novel
This is new for me, and since this is the first draft of a first novel, I know I’m making tons of mistakes that I’ll get to correct in further drafts. A couple of weeks ago, I went through and charted out my chapters and how they mapped on to the first week of events in my story. I think it took me two to three to four chapters to get through an ‘in-story’ day, and so by the end of chapter 9, I was only on Day 3. [Sotto voce: practice eliding time; I need it badly.]
The two books I’ve held in mind as I’ve been embarking on this journey are Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong (I started my book with a funeral, in part because I’ve always loved Menolly’s sad send-off of her mentor) and Tad William’s The Dragonbone Chair (overall the type of large multi-point-of-view story I want to write at some point — not necessarily this book just yet). As I’ve gotten further with the writing, and started thinking more about the pacing challenges I’ve created for myself, I started rereading The Dragonbone Chair. In the twenty-some years since I read it, honestly, I remember the main character (Simon) being in the castle for the first half of the book. Perhaps it was the impatience of youth back then, but this time, when I reached the point when he fled, I was only 30 percent through the ebook. The Dragonbone Chair is a great example of slowly building up the ‘wrong’ things that the protagonist stumbles into as a matter of being a young, day-dreamy person who shirks his work for following his nose and poking into odd areas of the castle. That first 30 percent of the book covers not quite a year in Simon’s life (I think). Things keep getting successively worse in steady fashion, until boom: life falls apart.
Contrast that with Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which I re-listened to again recently. The action in this YA novel covers a week or possibly two weeks at the most. The reader is thrust (rather horrifically) into the action immediately, and the present day chapters are interspersed with flashback chapters (sometimes in other POVs) that gradually fill in what exactly has gone so wrong in this warped world.
One’s a marathon, and one’s a sprint. I love them both and so, as I truck onwards with my book, I’m already musing on how better to work on pacing issues in the second draft. While I’m not writing a Tad Williams-esque doorstop of a book, I do think Chapter 10 is maybe one-third of the way through the book, so I’ll probably end up with 30 chapters to actually get to the events that I need to include. I probably need to think more about pacing like a marathon on the next draft. These are the pacing guideposts I’m keeping in mind as I keep onwards and write on.
Challenge
What are your biggest issues with pacing? How do you pace yourself when writing? Do you physically pace when you’re working through a sticky spot? What books have caught in your memory with respect to their pacing (or lack thereof)? Tell us below in the comments.
For a challenge, choose one of the senses of pacing (or all, if you wish) to lay on your stock characters. Feel free to let them break the 4th wall and complain to you about your writing pace, the pace of their story, etc.
Random jumble of ideas:
- pacing in a locked room
- pacing a friend in a race
- attempting to outpace (the big-bad boss in your story)
- and so on…
Aim for 150-200 words.
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