On Pace

Today I want to share with you another example of writing styles. It's all about pace - the speed of movement of your story. Here are two versions of the same scene. One is slow paced, the other fast paced.

First example-

Crack!

The ball went up. Up. Up. Out. Further. Higher. Further.

Thirty thousand fans held their collective breath as time stopped and held them transfixed. Glen clutched at his sinking heart. Still there was hope. Maybe. A mighty west wind had held center field yard unbeatable all afternoon. The ball rose higher. Glen's heart sank deeper.

Surreal, it seemed, as the slow motion play unfolded below. Like clay puppets struggling to scramble, but without actual muscles to propel them with any efficient motion. Fate seemed to mold their motions frame by frame in a stop/adjust/stop/adjust/stop/adjust impossible to believe lackadaisical series of jerky hiccups. Excruciating.

The pitcher's pained face was fixed on yonder far yard. The catcher's mask was off, his stance and body language one that said, "Dammit, I told you he'd hit your heat. He knew it was coming. Why don't you ever listen to me?"

The center fielder made his way back. Back. And the ball went up - and back. But wait - a sudden downward trajectory! Glen's heart pumped again with the glimmer of hope, with the scarcely believable but just-might-be-possible chance. He fixed his eyes westward, his mind taking a snapshot of the backdrop of azure skies spotted here and about with puffs of cumulus, his nose registering atmospheric conditions heavily dosed with scents of beer, popcorn and corn dogs. Then the play. The play that would decide everything. This was it. It all came down to now. With his back against the wall, the player leaped - glove wide, high above the fence.

Smack!

Horse-hide met cow-leather in an eye and ear popping catch that could be heard throughout the entire massive stadium. The fearsome reign of silence that had been lord of the arena began to slowly crumble. The very fabric of the air began to tear apart as thunderous peals of shouts and roars of victory pummeled the heinous dictator and banished it forever into exile.

Glen sighed, let go his grip on his jacket just outside of the heart, and turned to his wife. They hugged, jumped up and down, hooted and hollered together. The impossible had become a reality. The little guys had beat the big bad guys. Celebrations would ring the city's all-night hours alive with the joyous sparkle of a million happy-go-lucky and inebriated townsfolk tonight.

***

Second example-

Thirty thousand held their breath as the pitcher let his heat fly. Smack! The ball flew up and away, streaking out into center field like a laser guided missile on a search-and-destroy-every-heart-in-the-arena mission. Glen grabbed his heart and choked, gasping for not only air but some glimmer of hope. Players scrambled about in a flurry. Center fielder was the last chance, the only possible one to stave off certain doom, an end to what had been the most improbable of journeys all season.

The ball went out and up. Just as it seemed all was lost, the center fielder leaped right at the moment when the ball fell just enough to ...

He caught it! The stadium erupted in waves of disbelief and torrential screams of victory. We won! We won! We're number one! The champions!

Glen and his wife grabbed each other and jumped for joy in a hopping happy dance. Hometown would be party town tonight.

***

Two different styles, different approaches to writing the same scene. And of course you can go anywhere in between. Which style do you like best, and why, and for which kinds of scenes do you think fast pace is better than slow pace and visa versa, especially in the mystery/suspense book genre?

Show and Tell

This is a short tutorial I wrote some time ago for another blog I write for, the Blood Red Pencil. I thought it would be appropriate to post it here as well. It is especially apropos in the mystery and thriller genre - see what you think.

***

Something I’ve learned about effective writing in fiction is knowing when you are “telling” the readers your story and when you are “showing” it to them. There is a place in any good book for both methods, but the “shown” passages are always more illustrative, while the “told” passages are more narrative. They create two entirely different effects. Instead of telling you the difference, I will show you. Here is a short paragraph, an example of a story being told to the reader.

***

Bob walked over to the door. He turned the door knob, opened the door and started to walk outside. It was an icy cold winter day so he went back inside in a hurry and put on his coat.

***

Well, if I’m the reader I haven’t missed anything, I know what’s happening, but the passage doesn’t draw me into Bob’s world, doesn’t let me feel or sense much of anything. Now I’ll rewrite the same passage showing you the story.

***

Floor boards creaked underfoot. Step by step, across the room. The chill of cold brass felt smooth in his palm as the knob turned. A thunk nudged against the quiet as bolt released from its locked position. The squeak of old hinges cried “please oil me” to Bob as they pivoted. A final push, swing and a step. Whistling arctic wind whipped his face as shivers crept all over him.

Wow. Cold. Bob thought better of his choice of clothing. Slam!

Nippy fingers worked their way through the dark foyer closet, feeling for heavy suede.

***

In the second example, we see, hear and feel Bob’s world. It’s a much sexier read. By comparison, the first passage is more a simple statement of a sequence of events. In fairness, I did not try very hard to write an impactful narrative in the first passage, because I was trying to emphasize a point. There are cases, lots of them, when narrative prose is just the right thing. A fist, knife or gunfight, for instance, often demands a fast, even hectic pace and needs to be told in a hurry. It usually depends on the pace you want your story to move at; which will be the subject of another post.

Lessons from Skydiving

At a Southwest Mystery Writers of America conference a few years ago, Laura Joh Rowland, author of the Sano Ichiro mysteries, talked about the lessons she learned from her new hobby, glass-blowing, and how they applied to writing. I thought, "How cool. Someday, I'm going to do that." Not glass-blowing, but apply the lessons from my hobby to writing.

At that time, my hobby was skydiving.

I don't skydive anymore, but the lessons I learned stayed with me and still inform my writing.

Lesson one: practice is everything. If you want to be good at skydiving, you have to practice. It doesn't require much practice to go out the door of an airplane, anymore than it requires much practice to put words on paper. But, to master body flight, you have to do it over and over again. Likewise with writing, mastery of the complexities of plot, character, and language takes practice. Air time for skydiving, seat time for writing.

You will never hear skydivers talk about a talent for skydiving, because there isn't such a thing. Where would it come from? We are not descended from people who fell out of the sky. If you want to improve as a skydiver, your only option is practice. Now, I don't know if there is a talent for writing but I write as if there is no such thing. That is, I practice. What choice do is there? Practice will improve on talent, if you have talent. If you don't have talent, practice is all you have.

Lesson two: don't be afraid to let go. To skydive, you have to get off the ground, go out the door, let go of the strut. You have to push outside your comfort zone. The same is true with fiction. Good fiction requires letting go of reality. Too often neophyte authors fall into the trap of creating main characters like them. Same age, same sex, same occupation, same hometown, same belief in love and goodness. Boring! In Shame the Devil by George Pelecanos, one character has this comment on a book he read: "In the end, the writer had been afraid. In general, thought Farrow, that was the flaw in most people, a timidity that separated them from those who were strong." Writers who are afraid to let go of what they know, will not be strong writers. Ken Kesey said, "Don't write what you know. What you know is boring. Write what you don't know." Fear to go where they've never been has probably doomed more writers than the complexities of grammar and spelling.

Lesson three: trust the wind/imagination. This is the corollary to the preceding lesson. Skydivers soar on the wind., writers soar on their imagination. Trust it. Whenever someone tells me a character in their story thinks, speaks, or acts exactly like some real person they once met, I know I'll be reading a flat, boring character. The writer is too timid to create something new, doesn't trust his/her own imagination.

Lesson four: planning prevents later grief. Skydivers dirt-dive their maneuvers, rehearse emergency procedures, check their equipment, and monitor conditions aloft and on the ground because, let's face it, if they don't, they die. For writers, a failure to plan doesn't have such dire consequences, but planning can help prevent dead-ends, rewrites and embarrassing errors. You don't want to put several years of work into a project only to have it die. Planning doesn't mean outlining. Even a seat of the pants writer can profit from planning. I recommend making copies of all the forms in Hallie Ephron's Writing and Selling the Mystery Novel. The writing will go a lot easier after you've filled them out.

The main lesson I learned is that the ride is exciting, no matter how it turns out.

For a vicarious skydive, you can read my short story, Drop Dead Zone, published in Mystery Buff Magazine in 1998. It is now available on my website.