Kinda putting this out there for thoughts. I’m especially curious, since this is a communist forum, how dialectical materialist perspective could play into an understanding of writing and how to do it more effectively. If anyone wants to venture thoughts about that.

In particular, what is on my mind right now is pacing. Because pacing is, as far as I can tell, the thing I have most struggled with. When I write longer fiction, I have a tendency to be brief - the opposite of people who write 200k words and have to cut it down. I don’t think this is inherently a bad thing, but I do think in my case, there’s a recurring problem of this happening because I’m going through events in the story too quickly.

Not allowing enough breathing room for them to happen in.

My theory for why this happens goes something like this: I’m a pantser or flashlighter (I tend to figure out the story as I go along or have only a vague idea of where I’m going) and because I tend to judge what should come next based on feel, I have a tendency to get immersed in the story and lose track of time. But this immersion may be a double-edged sword. Story beats that can read quick after the fact seem long to me in the moment because of the way I’m lingering in them to work them out.

It’s like the very immersion that allows me to feel out what comes next also gives me a misleading idea of the overall pacing of the story.

But the other question is, what even is good pacing? Do I even know and would do better at it if I was a plotter? (Planned out the story beats and then fleshed them out.) I suspect plotters would tend to have an easier time with managing pacing because they have a more zoomed out view, but it’s not like it’d imbue them with knowledge of what works well on its own.

And then the other thing is, there are different styles of going into depth in a moment. One author might go deep into the POV character’s thoughts. Another might talk about the trees for five hundred pages (oh, Tolkien…). So it’s not like there’s one agreed upon way to let a story breathe and some people don’t like some forms of it. I get bored with the tree talk myself. But this is the other thing about my own writing. I don’t want to bore the reader or myself and so I am motivated to not linger overly long.