Maybe it’s my background in journalism or maybe it was my training in documentary filmmaking in which my professor drilled into us, “There should be peak and valley and peak and valley, but don’t stay in either too long,” but I live and breathe by pacing. Whether it’s my writing or someone else’s, I cannot abide a scene that drags. You gotta keep that stuff tight, concise. Yes, that dialogue was so witty and deep but it dragged the scene down. How can you tighten it up and still give it more power? Honestly? I often think this is why I have such trouble making word count (and why I dropped an English degree for journalism), I just want to say my character has shoved her way through the door into her office in the morning. I don’t want to talk about the window trim. Because I’m not taking up thousands of words and dozens of paragraphs with details and inner dialogue, I have to come up with action instead. One comment I have always received about my work, from Filter: Book One of The von Strassenberg Saga to Dacie Mae: Midnight Under the Magnolia is, “It reads like a movie.” It’s ironic, then, this quote, because I have the pacing but it isn’t paying the bills. Yet. 😁 If you get bored in your own scene, tighten it up. I can guarantee someone who didn’t write that scene will get bored even more quickly.
Gwenn Wright 