Q&A

Holding Still for a Moment

Photo by MIO ITO on Unsplash

I received this question from a subscriber (thank you!):

I want to say thank you for the community of writers you support through the sentence intensives and the Swimming in Style sessions (and shared videos, which are great when my timing doesn’t align to attend them live). I am slowly, slowly improving my writing ...and it is a joy to learn amidst others who are similarly inclined. Your enthusiasm and guidance ...well, it’s just wonderful. Thank you.

Second, I have a question about whether you have come across techniques that allow a reader to enter a space of pause—Ursula K. Le Guin describes it as “hold still for a moment and let there be a rest, a beat of silence...”.

I am practiced with getting a lot of information into a very tight space. I am finding with the longer project work that I continue to load my sentences with A LOT of propositional information and I delight playing with narrative distance and hopping across time and space. All of this makes long project writing a very dense and often difficult read...and I am baffled by how to inject some “white space”—the poetic equivalent—into narrative prose.