In Today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* A Musing on Practice and Pacing
* The Writing
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly. That is dedication.” Cecil B. DeMille (per 1440 Daily Digest, Jan 21, 2025)
“Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.” Francis Bacon (per 1440 Daily Digest, Jan 22, 2025)
A Musing on Practice and Pacing
Oh, and on practicing pacing.
I talk a lot about pacing here at TNDJ, but it’s impossible to stress its importance enough.
Below is a brief article I wrote a couple of days after I started writing Blackwell Ops 35. For whatever reason, I didn’t publish it until today. And it’s more of an introspective musing than an outright article. A little of my personal thought process.
Maybe you’ll pick up a helpful note or two or maybe you won’t. Shrug. I never know what might be helpful and what you’ll consider fluff or useless information.
Anyway, I read over the article this morning and thought this might be helpful, but it’s more of a musing than a full article:
I Practice What I Preach
and what I’m preaching today is Pacing.
Here the word practice carries a double-entendre. I don’t mean only that I write into the dark (practice by putting new words on the page). I often also practice new techniques or strive to improve on techniques I already know as I write.
That’s how I learn and improve my craft over time. It’s also what I recommend for other writers.
Both new-technique and improve-your-technique practice sessions most often start with a conscious thought. Yesterday (six or seven days ago as I post this) as I sat down and reached for the keyboard to start adding more words to the novel, three thoughts occurred:
1. Because I’ve practiced so much and for so long, I’m pretty much a master at pacing.
Meaning I’m good at speeding up the pacing when necessary (primarily during action and other kinds of conflict or high-tension scenes) and slowing the pacing to let the reader ‘rest’ when necessary.
Controlling the pacing, like the intentional use of punctuation, is how you direct the reader through the reading of your work.
I’m also pretty good at sensing What kind of pacing to use When. All of that is a result of having continually practiced pacing as I put several million new words on the page since early 2014. But that reminded me…
2. I can also always improve my mastery of pacing—meaning I can improve on the pacing of my characters’ stories—and the Blackwell Ops series is the perfect venue in which to do that.
Just as different genres require different pacing, the different POV characters in the Blackwell Ops world each have their own unique personality and their own way of telling a story—to include their own preference for pacing. And that thought led to…
3. The POV character in this novel is less patient than some, not to mention less open about his personal life.
So Blackwell Ops 35 presented the perfect opportunity for me, the recorder and then presenter, to practice cutting some of the slower-paced “rest periods” to the minimum and increasing the faster-paced periods to the maximum.
So having settled on what I wanted to practice (and my creative subconscious having been notified), I promptly forgot about it.
I cycled back over the fledgling novel, and when I reached the white space again I Just Wrote.
Remember a while back when I mentioned you’re both the writer (recorder of your characters’ stories) and the presenter? Pacing goes to both roles:
- The character’s pacing goes to your role as faithful recorder.
- The final pacing—how the reader will experience the story after you send it out into the world—goes to your role as presenter.
Okay, that was the end of the musing. I’ll write at least a short story today (for the Challenge) and hope to start the next novel today too. And I also intend to carry forward my practice on pacing.
The Writing
Early yesterday morning as I cycled through (and copyedited on the fly) what I’d written the day before, I encountered maybe the most intense chapter I’ve ever written. (Again, goes to pacing.) Even my own pulse rate increased as I read it, and that was the second time I’d seen it. (grin)
Also, the novel wrapped with a word count that was short of my daily goal of 3250 wpd. So I was going to write the short story for this week’s Bradbury Challenge.
But I was tired, so I didn’t. However, my wpd average for January remains above 4000, so it’s all good. This is why I keep saying it’s good to have words in the bank.
Talk with you again soon.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 800
Writing of Blackwell Ops 35: Seldem Dunn
Day 1…… 3796 words. To date…… 3796
Day 2…… 3389 words. To date…… 7185
Day 3…… 4085 words. To date…… 11270
Day 4…… 4234 words. To date…… 15504
Day 5…… 4543 words. To date…… 20047
Day 6…… 5362 words. To date…… 25410
Day 7…… 2494 words. To date…… 27904
Day 8…… 4626 words. To date…… 32530
Day 9…… 2380 words. To date…… 34910 done
Fiction for January…………………… 85373
Fiction for 2025………………………. 85373
Nonfiction for January……………….. 21610
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 21610
2025 consumable words…………….. 106983
Average Fiction WPD (January)…….. 4065
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 2
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 3
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 106
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 274
Short story collections……………………. 29
Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.