Not paying attention to the pace of your novel(Or short stories or poetry) can make or break your writing career. Did you see what I just did? I interrupted you and slowed the pace of this blog post. Now let me start over to speed things up.
Slow pacing kills good writing.
Fortunately there are several techniques to increase the pace of your writing.
Using short sentences and frequent paragraphs will help speed up your pace while at the same time making your writing look better on the page. But we will cover how writing looks on the page in another post. Quick exchanges of dialog. This means cutting out all inane conversation. Salutations, introductions, pleasantries, and most importantly the word uh. Jumping ahead in time and switching scenes. We don't need to know where the character parked or how she got to her car. Just end the chapter and start a new one with her driving. And the final step, cut the flab. Beefy writing slows down your reader and makes them skim. Below is a short list of some words that can make your writing flabby, delete them.
Very
Quite
However
Almost
Entire
Entire
Successive
Respective
Perhaps
Always
There is
Now there are exceptions to the flab rule. You want to keep the adjective when it peaks the readers curiosity and also when it conveys an exact image to your reader.
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