I've just finished my first novel, and I've been sharing it with family and friends. One thing I didn't expect was how varied and contradictory much of the feedback would be - some people love things that others detest.
But, I've gotten one consistent criticism from several different folks. This is that there's one section that fails to hold their interest, where the pace of the story slows down. When first hearing that, I was convinced that this part wasn't actually that long, that the stuff that happens there is all important, that I just need to punch it up to keep the tension going. As a scientist, though, I decided to collect data. I divided the book up by changes in location and counted the words between location changes. This is obviously not a perfect proxy for pacing, but I figured it would be a good first-order approach. I divided these section word counts by the total number of words, and produced a book timeline graph that shows how much of the book I spend in each location. Here it is:
Can anybody guess which section people thought was dragging?
I was suitably chagrined. I think this might be a helpful technique for others. Aside from seeing that I spent nearly 20% of the book in one chunk at one location, it was also interesting to see how the other parts fit together, and how much time I spent in each place. The high value just before the end I'm not so worried about, because it's the climax of the book. The other sections are all relatively short, which suggests to me that I'm keeping it moving OK.
So, now I have to figure out how to slim down by maybe 8,000 words in one section of the book. Not easy, but at least I can see there's a need to do it.
Has anybody done anything like this before, or have other cool tricks?
A bigger version of the graph is here, if anybody wants to see it better.
But, I've gotten one consistent criticism from several different folks. This is that there's one section that fails to hold their interest, where the pace of the story slows down. When first hearing that, I was convinced that this part wasn't actually that long, that the stuff that happens there is all important, that I just need to punch it up to keep the tension going. As a scientist, though, I decided to collect data. I divided the book up by changes in location and counted the words between location changes. This is obviously not a perfect proxy for pacing, but I figured it would be a good first-order approach. I divided these section word counts by the total number of words, and produced a book timeline graph that shows how much of the book I spend in each location. Here it is:
Can anybody guess which section people thought was dragging?
I was suitably chagrined. I think this might be a helpful technique for others. Aside from seeing that I spent nearly 20% of the book in one chunk at one location, it was also interesting to see how the other parts fit together, and how much time I spent in each place. The high value just before the end I'm not so worried about, because it's the climax of the book. The other sections are all relatively short, which suggests to me that I'm keeping it moving OK.
So, now I have to figure out how to slim down by maybe 8,000 words in one section of the book. Not easy, but at least I can see there's a need to do it.
Has anybody done anything like this before, or have other cool tricks?
A bigger version of the graph is here, if anybody wants to see it better.
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