Lucid Writing Advice II

Everywhere you look in a bookstore you see books of all shapes and sizes. Tall ones, small ones, thick ones, and slim ones. If you are an avid reader, the size of the book is directly equivalent to your span of interest. To the writer, the size of the book has to do with the pacing.

Seldom do you find the ending at the beginning or vice versa. The pace of the book has to do with how much action is happening and what is essential to the manuscript. Starting a story that has nothing to do with the main topic of the work is quite ridiculous. You should always judge your pace, and the faster the better. But haste makes waste.

When writing vital scenes you want them to be just that: vital. Below is an example of a scene that has been rushed:

Max stood in the center of the sandbox with Big Willy looking him squarely in the eye. Dozens of classmates surrounded them in a corral of hooting and hollering. Big Willy rose his fist in the heat of the action. Max ducked, and ran through a spilt in the crowd. Big Willy spotted his escape, and charged, but tumbled to a thunderous fall on his shoe laces.

As you can tell, the above passage is rushed. We are given no description of why the fight has broken out. Perhaps Max was throwing sand on Big Willy? Maybe he accidentally knocked down his sand castle? Who knows, and we’ll never know unless the pace can be shortened and there is more description. The entire scene went by without an ounce of detail going into the fight. The reader will weep at the fact.

Below is the exact scene, but will a slower pace, and more description of what’s happening:

Max lugged the remaining sand from his phial on top of the sand mound. Big Willy eyed him closely as he was putting the finishing touches on his own creation, a sand castle, a few feet off. Max smiled at the fact of the mound growing to a least his three foot height. But it had to be bigger.

And if we were to connect this passage with the one above, you see that they each flow smoothly, and we are thus given the reason for the fight.

Your writing fantasy or science-fiction, so what if your story as nothing to do with the real world? It should have a lot to do with it. Just because it’s something that your making up, is no excuse for it to be down right alien. Fantasy and science-fiction writers run into this problem all the time, unless your a professional..

Trees sway in the wind, as do grass and flowers. Birds sing in the morning, and rarely in the afternoon. Summer nights are warm, winter nights are bitterly cold. Big cities are festering with high crime, small towns keep mostly to themselves.

Such basics have to be the root of her story. Even if its F/SF, you must always create a believe foundation that will force your readers to believe that such things just might have a chance at happening.

Here is an example of no reality:

Filled the silence? Why is there silence in a forest at night to began with? In the real world, this cannot happen. Surely, there were insect chirping away as Evelyn thread her way through.

Unreality errors can arise when we least expect them, so it is best to observe each scene of your story thoroughly, and rewrite it without prejudice when such instances occur.