![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I have been getting through a dinner conversation between a bureaucrat and a construction boss for what? A week? It took me 2300 words to have the bureaucrat observe the construction boss's crew getting off work, accost the guy, eat dinner, and have the conversation. But the conversation is done. Next, the bureaucrat is walking around outside and sees some kids engaged in questionable activities (fencing?), and takes that information back to the security chief at the refugee camp, so that will be another couple-few hundred words spent on the one afternoon's adventures.
Pacing is everything. Pacing is hard.
I wish I could remember how I crammed all this stuff into thirty pages before. Worse than the threat of prolixity -- that's not all that scary after all -- is the local pacing, the juggling, fitting these things in like pieces of a jigsaw puzle, seasrching for more more many more metaphors to describe the problem. It's okay if the episode is fifty pages instead of thirty. It's not okay if the detail becomes tedious, or the transitions are too soft or too abrupt, or if sufficient information isn't fitted in, or if the order of events just doesn't make sense.
Pacing is everything. Pacing is hard.
I wish I could remember how I crammed all this stuff into thirty pages before. Worse than the threat of prolixity -- that's not all that scary after all -- is the local pacing, the juggling, fitting these things in like pieces of a jigsaw puzle, seasrching for more more many more metaphors to describe the problem. It's okay if the episode is fifty pages instead of thirty. It's not okay if the detail becomes tedious, or the transitions are too soft or too abrupt, or if sufficient information isn't fitted in, or if the order of events just doesn't make sense.