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@ Lyn Alden
2025-04-22 15:16:36
One of the challenges of fiction is to balance pacing between action and downtime.
My draft sci fi novel is relatively fast-paced, but doesn't push it to the limit as some of those non-stop action stories do. There are moments where characters have more "slice of life" days, or moments of emotion or contemplation, etc. Periods for the characters and reader to catch their breath before something big happens.
However, one thing I try to do is make it so that each of those slower moments serves a *double purpose*. When reading those chapters, the reader's initial takeaway is that it was for character building and so forth, and is potentially skippable. But then later in the novel, some character aspect or worldbuilding aspect revealed in each of those chapters ends up being more important than they realized at the time. Like playing chess against someone and a few of their moves seem random or unneeded, but then it comes together into a surprise checkmate where each move was indeed deliberate to help set it up. That's the goal, anyway.
One of the first-wave beta readers of my sci fi manuscript noticed this, and it was one of my favorite pieces of feedback so far. He felt some of the slower moments could be trimmed in the moment and wrote those moments down, but by the end was basically like, "nevermind, I see now, keep literally all of those."
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