The Motivational Editor

Helping Writers Go from Unpublished to Published

pacing

Pacing — What It Is and How to Manage It

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runners, pacing your story

“Pace yourself.”

In my running days in the Marine Corps, I heard this imperative regularly. Perhaps you’ve heard it too. It means managing how quickly or slowly you run your distance. If you plan to run a mile, you don’t run the whole distance at a sprint like you would the 100-yard dash.

You can apply this same principle in establishing the pacing of your story and each scene. Not every scene is a dash; not every scene is a slow walk. Over the full length of the story, the pace will vary. But your story must have a continuous forward progression.

“Nearly all narratives…require forward motion and change over time, whether that change occurs in the narrator/characters or in the reader’s perception of the narrator or characters.” ~ Laurie Alberts, Showing & Telling

We want to know the story is moving forward to an end result.

[Read more…] about Pacing — What It Is and How to Manage It

Those Pesky Dialogue Tags

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dialog 2Oh those pesky dialogue tags.

Said.

Asked.

Replied.

Responded.

There’s a lot of conflicting information out there on what to use.

What’s a writer to do?

In the multitude of manuscripts I read, I see writers employ such things as “Sally smiled” or “Gerald laughed.” In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when the writer uses it as a substitute for “she said” and suddenly the character is constantly smiling or laughing.

Generally, a reader needs to have an identifier every 4-5 lines of dialogue in order to stay on track with who is speaking. So a tag isn’t required every time someone speaks (but I’ve seen writers do just that).

Let’s look at an alternative to the dialogue tag. [Read more…] about Those Pesky Dialogue Tags