Pacing

As you probably know if you've read my blog even once this whole week Atlanta has been in the grips of a winter weather crisis since Sunday night. Things are nearly back to normal today, but there is still plenty of ice on the road. It only lasts this long because unlike any northern city I have ever lived in Atlanta does not have the infrastructure to handle winter weather, such as snowplows and salt trucks.

Anyway before I go on bitching about the weather any longer it got me to thinking about writing. Even though I spent 16 hours at work on Monday, and another 12 on Tuesday, this whole thing kind of felt like a lull in my normal, boring, over-scheduled life. The girls have had school off all week. Kelly's Longhorn Steakhouse where she works has mostly been closed. So I've been the only one really leaving the house at all, even our poor puppy Nesta has reverted to peeing in the kitchen from time to time because her back yard kennel is full of snow and ice.

Point is I wanted to try to relate this all to writing. Anyone who has read the Hunger Games knows that pacing can be so good as not allow you to put a book down. Anyone who has read the Lord of the Rings (and before you flame me I promise I am the biggest Tolkien nerd in my town, hell probably in my state) knows that between long awaited parties and a night spent at the lodge of Tom Bombadil and River's Daughter, pacing can really drag a story to a point where ... well I'm not exactly sure how to describe what happens in LOTR, because I still love those parts, but I imagine if Tolkien was not the first author I ever read as a child things would be different. When I read a book nowadays that takes hundreds of pages to get going, I get bored.

I know I have this problem in my WIP. The original draft was over 300,000 words long. Actually it was longer than that, but 300k is plenty long to make my point. I had entire chapters of backstory flashbacks, and the description setting up nearly every scene went on sometimes for pages. Now, I know I'm a decent writer, in fact I'm a better writer than I am a storyteller, so it took me a long time to figure out that even though a passage may be "good writing" it still needs to go. Maybe after we're published we can get away with Tolkienesque description, but lets get that debut novel to the shelves first.

I've since begun to re-write my WIP into a first person perspective. This has done wonders for the word count, making much of the description unnecessary, but I'm pretty sure I still have issues with pacing. I don't mind if my tale has some slow parts, not every book can yank a reader through at breakneck pace like Suzanne Collins' masterpiece, but I just want to make sure that it doesn't get so slow, for so long, that the reader decides to put it down.

Thank god my crit group kicks ass and should be able to help me fix this where needed.

Have you ever had issues with pacing in your novel? Do you think about it when you outline? Or try to focus on it while you write the first draft? Or, like me, do you have to concentrate on fixing it during revision?