What I Learned at School Last Night

Tuesday night is my school night. It's the night I eat my dinner early, give the cat enough cuddles to make sure that he doesn't want any more during the class then get back in front of the computer.

So what did I learn at school last night?

We talked about pace.

Things like:

You can influence pace through:

• Action
• How you cut your scenes
• Dialogue
• The use of summary over exposition
• Your word choice

You can speed things up by making everything now, now, now. Stick to the action, keep the details to a minimum. Slow things down by adding description - think Thomas Hardy who can go on for pages about fields (oh joy). 

Dialogue is another good way of speeding things up or slowing things down - and as we found out tonight in another seminar they held to make up some time, dialogue should expose as much story as it does about the character. 

Then there is word choice - think about using onomatopoeia (crap, I can still spell that correctly without a spell checker).

Also think about what you need the reader to take notice of.

And all of this means I need to do a big rewrite of what I've written. 

The think about school is I get so pumped up with ideas it's all overwhelming.

Then tonight we listened to a conversation with Toni Jordan about planning. More gems to put into the writers bank.

There is a lot more to this writing a novel lark that I thought.

Still, it's one of the things keeping me sane at the moment.

Onwards, she cried. 

Today's Song: (Brought to you by the 30 Day Song Challenge)

Day 20: A song that has many meanings to you