Saturday 17 January 2009

On your marks...

Can anyone recommend good articles or books on pace?

5 comments:

KeVin K. said...

Pace exclusively? Nope.

No Plot? No Problem! is good for tactics on keeping up your pace as a writer, though parts of it are silly. (It's specific to NaNoWriMo, but has useful stuff for everyone.)

One of my favorite has always been Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, it has good advice about structure and pace.

For overall instruction on the craft/process of writing you can't do much better than Weinberg's The Fieldstone Method. When I teach writing, that will be my main textbook.

Jenny Beattie said...

Thanks Kevin. I guess I knew there wouldn't be specific books just on pace... but none of my books quite tell me what I need.

I think it might be because I need practice... rather than theory. Ho hum.

Marcie Steele said...

JJ, as you know I'm researching more about the crime genre and I came across this blog. www.murderati.typepad.com.

It's ten authors who each post every ten days and some of the advice is really generic.

One of the authors, Alexandra Kopolof has an amazing back log of posts on allsorts of things.

www.thedarksalon.blogspot.com

If you add her to google reader and flick through the post titles there are lots to choose from so there might be something in one of them about pace, I know there is one on creating suspense? (There is also a post called internet research 31 May 2008 and if you click on that one there are lots of group blogs for all kinds of genres etc) (Sorry am pathetic at linking things)

Might help but might hinder as there is so much to read....

Unknown said...

JJ - might not be what you are looking for but Julie Cohen gave a talk on pacing at the RNA conference this year. here's the link to my report http://lizfenwick.blogspot.com/2008/07/romantic-novelists-association_10.html

lx

Jenny Beattie said...

Thanks guys. I'll check them all out.