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In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Star card to guide their discussion. This time they’re talking about pacing, and the tools they use to keep things on track!

Question of the week: What kind of pacing do you enjoy reading and writing? Share your answer here.

Show Notes

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Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain

Transcript

JP: Hello friends. Welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is the 28th of July, 2022. As we are recording. I am your host, JP with my lovely co-host.

Crys: Crys Cain.

JP: Crys, how has your writing and or business week been?

Crys: It has been wierd because the kid ended up having four days off of school in a row one because he was sick. And so I… ooh, it’s just harder. Parents– I’ve heard everyone say they get easier as they get older, cause they don’t need you as much.

I don’t know if that applies to extrovert children as much as it does introvert children, because now that mine can talk and have thoughts and opinions, it feels like he needs me a lot more because there’s no other children in the house to bounce his thoughts against.

JP: Yeah I feel like that sentiment is meant for like late teenagers.

Crys: Yeah, we got a ways to go.

JP: It probably gets easier, because if you think about it, like at this point he’s becoming more autonomous with the external world, but he needs help. He still needs lots of help figuring things out.

Crys: Plus he’s ADHD AF so like a whole other like pile of ” Hey Dude. Um, you know, that you need to like, watch where you’re going?” And I know that’s not just like ADHD kids. It’s just like… extra.

Anyway, I have been getting writing in it’s been frustrating to not get writing in every weekday with with him being home. I did Monday when he was home. Heaven knows how that happened. But I didn’t Tuesday. And then I did get back to writing yesterday.

And yesterday, I think was the first day. It was the first day where I worked on both projects that I have going on the romance and the fantasy in the same day.

My goal right now is to get up to a consistent 2000 words, a. will equal out to about 40,000 words a month if I have 20 working days would I love to get more than that? Absolutely.

But writing words is a muscle just like working out at the gym and you don’t start out with 50 pound free weights. You start out with like your little five pound free weights. So that’s where I’m at.

JP: Wonderful.

Crys: I don’t even know if they make 50 pound free weights. Do they? Like that’s how that’s, how not muscley I am.

JP: Yeah, they do.

Crys: I figured there had to be some buff people who are like, yes, 50. Let me do it.

JP: Like I used to use… i, when I was active in life you’d also use them for squats and whatnot. So they’re not just used for like arms, but you can hold them for squats and stuff.

Crys: One arm. Okay. Fair. Fair. Fair.

How about you? How was your week?

JP: I think it mentioned last time I have COVID. I do have COVID and. The fatigue is a real thing that I cannot wrap my head around.

I have gotten zero words in. I think, two days ago, I thought to myself, man, I need to mow the lawn. And instead, I will leave that as a jungle, because I settled for doing dishes and I got so tired I laid down for an hour and a half after doing them.

So I don’t know what this is, it’s madness, but I think I’m getting better. The concept of sitting down and whatnot, like it’s weird, like it’s tiring and all this madness. So I’ve been trying to do more business related things that can be quick and things that I can just take care of. Even making promos for the show took like a whole day, the other day, I was like, Ugh. But I’m still doing them. So I’m just trying to find the things I can do.

I think today I feel significantly better, so I think I’m starting on the like upward end. So I might be able to get some words in, but I’m really not gonna push myself. I’m glad that this isn’t a chronic thing that I have to live with because this is something that would be a huge learning curve to try and figure out how to get writing in with a full-time job. If this was something I dealt with. Ugh.

Crys: Yeah.

JP: Sympathy all around.

Crys: Alrighty. So our card inspiring our questions this week is the Star. Would you the Star to us, JP?

JP: Of course. So the Star’s upright keywords are hope, faith, purpose, renewal, and spirituality. Reversed, it’s lack of faith, despair, self trust and disconnection.

So the Star comes right after the Tower. Tower was like worst moment ever. And this is really about picking up the pieces. If you think about it in that process.

Old versions of the Star show a naked woman kneeling at the edge of a small pool holding two containers of water, one being subconscious, one being conscious and she’s pouring water out to nourish the earth and continue the cycle. She has one foot on the ground, which is representing her practical abilities and good common sense, and the other foot in water representing her intuition and inner resources and listening to her inner voice.

So this is really a card about just like that revitalization, that moment just after the storm and just finding that renewal in self.

Crys: And what this card made me think of, especially in relation to the Tower, was pacing because this is the breath after the storm, the recovery, after the dark night of the soul. So the question I have for us this week is how do you manage pacing in your stories?

JP: Not well, no. So for me, this is why I like to plot because I can try and figure out how pacing goes. And I have learned a lot through writing Vella episodes and editing Vella episodes, how to get a story that is compelling enough in about 2000 words or less, but still contributes to an overall story that people still wanna go back to.

It’s no longer this like chapter that functions as this glue between two entertaining chapters, but it’s three entertaining chapters. And that was something I never had to deal with when you’re novel writing. Because when you’re novel writing, you can have these moments of breath and whatnot.

And so it’s a different pacing style that has taught me how to reflect back on novel writing. It may not necessarily translate all the time, but at the same time, it has shown me how to function as pacing through plotting. That’s me.

Crys: One of the tools I love, and this is really good whether you are plotting from the start or you are revising and creating a reverse plot and seeing what you have put down on the page, is Scene and Sequel.

This is something that is mentioned in a lot of writing books, but I think it originated, and I could be wrong, with Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Sell, which is one of my favorite writing books. But I haven’t really found a whole lot of people who like it as much because it’s not entertainingly written. It is a bit dense.

I would not recommend it for 99% of new writers because you’re just gonna be like, this is too much. You don’t have the experience to see like how you can apply a lot of those things and it just feels like you’re trying to cram too much into your brain about structure and storytelling,

Scenes are your action scenes there where you are making often split second decisions. They’re the faster pace scenes where there’s not a lot of contemplative stuff going on. Things are just happening. You’ve got choices you make ’em, you don’t have a lot of time to make them most of the time.

And then Sequels tend to be your review scenes. You’re like, okay, we just got out of that situation. Let ‘s talk about our options and figure out where to go next.

I have a half finished outline of, reverse outline, of it’s a Pixar movie… it’s the trolls one with the magic. That’s not very descriptive. Um…

JP: No.

Crys: It’s the two teenage… it’s like urban fantasy, but everybody is a fantasy character like fantasy

JP: On.. Outward?

Crys: Upward?

JP: Upward. It was a word.

Crys: Hold on one second. Onward. Hold on. Let’s see. Trolls, Pixar not the actual trolls movie.

Urban. Fantasy Manor onward. I think that was one of the options you said anyways. Yes. Onward.

And one of the great things, cause I was doing it with Three Story Method, but I was also doing it with Scene and Sequel.

And you can see that with Three Story Method, we talk about the choice. So you have your three plot points for each scene one, which is conflict, which is your inciting incident. Like what happens to, get the scene started. Second one is choice and the third one is consequence. And I think that there’s two kinds of choices.

We’re going on a little sidetrack here, but not too far off the rails. And when you use Scene and Sequel, you can see that there are two different kinds of choices.

There’s a split second choice. And then there is the, let’s talk about a debate about a choice. And that one of the questions we get a lot is Three Story Method editors by clients is do my characters have to lay out all the choices in front of them before they make a choice, every scene?

And the answer to that is no. Generally, you are going to use that kind of tool laying out all the choices in a Sequel, in the refresh scene, in the reflecting on what just happened and deciding actively what’s our best plan and go next when you’re doing Scenes, which I really hate, like how confusing that name is, cause they’re both scenes, but one’s called Scene and one’s called Sequel.

Bear with the confusion for a moment. In Scene scenes, Scene type scenes those are gonna be your quicker, like what is based off of the character’s personality, like what split second choice. Sometimes it’s gonna be as blatant as like I can go left or right. Which do I do? Sometimes it’s do I stay quiet and hide or do I get out?

Or if it’s a, like more of a verbal scene, if it’s an argument, like what kind of, do I act aggressive, likely in this conversation or do I hold back? There’s a lot of options, but there, you’re not gonna lay all of your options out in front of you and then make a choice that slows down the pacing.

It’s very useful when you’re in a Sequel type scene and you need that slow down that discussion before you move on to the next Scene type scene.

And another fun thing about this is that you’ll often have several Scene type scenes before you get to a Sequel scene. So you’ll have several fast-paced Scenes before you have the breath scene and they’ll often increase in conflict before you have the breath scene, the Sequel type.

JP: Yeah. One of the tools that I used for the Vella that I’m re contemplating how to use during the novel is, with the Vella there was this idea that every few episodes there’s gonna be like a haunting cause it’s a paranormal comedy. So some type of haunting, some type of office scene where everyone’s together and then some type of world building, external, like dealing with the city kind of scene and that these would happen roughly around the same time.

And those would be like the little pillars that I want to keep hitting every few episodes just to bring in variety and bring in a pace. When you think about that whole Scene Sequel thing, like my scenes, those high actiony kind of scenes are the ghost hauntings.

Those sequels are really the like deconstruction the moment where we’re all sitting together in an office and maybe there’s a different type of problem there, but it’s this different tone. And then the wild card scenes where weird things happen, but it’s not really involved with either of those two and it pushes the plot forward.

With novel writing, that’s gonna be a little different because when you think about Vella it’s, it could be something that’s ongoing forever, but I still think that there’s something there that can help with pacing when writing novels and thinking about okay if I’m writing a story about three characters who inherit a house and they become witches, like we can focus on scenes where they’re together.

We can focus on scenes where maybe the plot moves forward. We can focus on a romance scene. But we. Look at how each of those pieces aren’t forgotten and aren’t left out for several chapters because that’s where your pace gets all messy. When you mentioned something early on and then it never comes back until later in the story.

So if, I think if I think about maybe like three topics that I just wanna hit every few chapters I will make sure that I’m kinda keeping that pace and moving that story.

Crys: Yeah, I like that. The other thought I had is you were talking about these pieces that you wanna hit is the MICE quotient, which are plot thread types. And I won’t go into them because it would take a whole nother episode minimum. But when Mary Robinette Kowal teaches about this and I recommend searching MICE quotient Mary Robinette Kowal, you’ll find a lot of YouTube videos that she’s done or even podcasts on Writing Excuses.

You’ll find that she talks about anyone who’s familiar with coding will be familiar with nesting segments. So if you ever looked at HTML and that you have like your paragraph and then within your paragraph, you might have this section’s gonna be bold. This section’s gonna be italic.

They start and end, and they nest. When you have a paragraph and then a. You never end the paragraph and then the bold you do them enclosed. So paragraph, bold, end bold, end paragraph. And she says that plot threads are very similar that you need to close them in the order.

You open them to get the most emotional satisfaction out of your readers. And I think that’s part of pacing.

JP: Yeah, a hundred percent agree.

Crys: Excellent. One of the things I wanna do as I’m writing more low stakes calm stories is I wanna start deconstructing what those look like. Because one of the things I think people struggle with is that we are taught very clearly how to keep the pacing high and intense, like in a thriller or an action story.

But with a slower, calmer story that doesn’t have a lot of high highs, it’s just a lot of deep feels. We don’t necessarily know instinctively how those stories are supposed to be paced.

I’m an analyzer. Like I wanna pull it apart and say, okay, here’s what it can look like. It’s not always gonna look like, but here’s what it can look like. It doesn’t have to be Die Hard.

Here’s what it can be. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. Here we go.

JP: Yeah, definitely.

Crys: Dear friends, I’m curious. What kind of pacing you really enjoy reading and writing? Because I feel like that changes throughout our lives and just what we need in life. And I’m really curious what everyone is really enjoying right now.

Thank you for joining us this week. We’re about to go record our business episode for our Patreon subscribers, which is “How do you keep belief that you’ll ‘make it’ before you see the proof?”.

You can join us for those over at patreon.com/writeawaypodcast