As I said in my last post, I’m going to discuss things I’m looking for during the third draft. The first thing is pacing.
I found during my read through that (as I expected), I liked the second half of the novel more than the first half. One of the reasons was the pacing. The first half is fast — too fast. The second half is a little slower, and far more enjoyable.
Now I’m not looking to slow down the book too much. There’s definitely a delicate balance to pacing — too fast and the reader gets lost, too slow and the reader gets bored. So I need to slow the first half down, but not so much that it’s too slow.
It’ll be interesting to see what I can do with it, and changing the pacing will require a straight reading of the draft once it’s completed. Indeed, if I end up needing to do line edits on a fourth draft before it gets to my beta-readers, it’ll be because of the pacing issue (most likely).
