Block Buster
Ideas To Thwart Writer’s Block
One of the easiest ways to make a scene more punchy and pacey is to simply reduce the word count. This takes practise, and if you really want to trim the fat, it usually takes several passes.
There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story that Ernest Hemingway entered a competition in a newspaper to tell a story in six words or fewer.
His winning entry was thus:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Whatever the truth regarding the tale’s origins, it demonstrates how a story can still punch you in the gut without any unnecessary words.A nice way to develop this skill is to rewrite the same scene repeatedly, with progressively fewer words.
I’ve recommended the use of a random picture generator before.
https://writingexercises.co.uk/random-image-generator.php is a good one, or you can just use Google Images.
First select an appropriate image. It could be a place, object or person. See what grabs your attention.
Using the image as a prompt, describe what is happening in the scene; include feelsing and emotions, if there are people. Pay attention to sights, sounds and smells. A couple of paragraphs is enough.
When you are happy with what you have written, take that scene and trim it down to fewer than 100 words. What are you going to cut out? What are you going to keep?
Now take it and cut it to fifty words. By now you have to make some hard choices. Decide what absolutely has to stay. Do you need to rewrite sentences to lose words? Can you get rid of ‘invisible’ words like ‘and’ and ‘the’? Can you use punctuation, such as commas or semicolons to tighten the prose?
Can you trim it to thirty words and retain the essence of the original?
Of course, the word counts suggested here are only guidelines, and if your initial description is significantly shorter or longer than 100 words, adjust the subsequent targets accordingly. The main thing is that by the time you’ve gone through it three or four times, your original piece is a half or a third of its original length.
If you want to practise this some more, Google ‘Flash Fiction’. These are challenges to write a story with a very strict word count. They are great exercises.
Next week, we will do the opposite of this activity. Stay tuned!
Do you have any tips for increasing the pace of a piece of writing?
Feel free to share here or on social media.
Until next time,
Paul
