Pace Your Plot: 200 Techniques & Insider Advice for Pacing Your Fiction

Pace Your Plot shows writers how to manage one of the most important--and challenging--aspects of fiction writing: using pacing within your plot to engage readers throughout the narrative. Approaching plot through the act of effective pacing--thinking of your fiction as a "live" performance with voice, diction, pauses, and a variety of literary devices--allows writers of any genre to create an unforgettable experience for their audience. With guidance from editorial agent and education Jodell Sadler, you can create an authentic voice with an unforgettable rhythmic quality, making moments in fiction matter by illuminating exactly what readers need to pay attention to. This book showcases more than 200 movies, techniques, and specific actions that every writer can take to improve story pacing and create a stronger plot. It creates a larger conversation that moves past the familiar tropes of fiction writing--cliffhangers, sentence structure and variety, foreshadowing, etc.--in order to present the absolute best pacing techniques that writers can use in any genre. By exploring the delicate nature of word choice, word order, placement, you will learn through concrete examples how to force readers to speed up, slow down, take a breath, pause, and more. With examples from best-selling novels, you can pick up Pace Your Plot and learn something to improve your writing--whether you're concepting and outlining your first novel, in the middle of writing your current work, or editing your latest masterpiece.