Jacob Szymanski

And a lot of the stuff I'd never really thought about.

For example, a common piece of writing advice is to use clear verbs instead of a vague verb plus an adverb.

For example, you would say, she sprinted instead of she ran quickly.

right you're saving a word and sprinted is much more evocative it's uh it's more clear and to the point but there's all sorts of advice like that that i never really thought about and i'm wondering if you could think of other examples of these pieces of common writing advice that could inform us as people who don't write show don't tell is the the obvious one he was very scared

I think it was in the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown that people pointed out that that entire book takes place over like 48 hours or something.

And they travel to like four different countries.

They never go to the loo or sleep in like 48 hours.

It's completely ludicrous.

And once you hear about that, you cannot unsee it.

You cannot unread it in the book.

But the point is, as an author, you can utilize those pauses in real life

So to maintain the pace of the book, and when we're talking about pace, there is this big, big picture pacing where you want an action scene and a quieter scene, more subdued and something more literary and then go back to an action scene.

It can't just be all action.

Like you said, you can't sprint for 800 meters.

You'll get exhausted.

So will your readers.

And it's important to keep that varied pacing big picture, but also small picture in shorter, less descriptive paragraphs that are more to the point that push the plot.

And then moving along with longer, more descriptive paragraphs to give the readers a break, something a little bit more...

relaxing.

Another bit of interesting reading advice that I thought was really interesting was from British author Martin Amis, where he said to avoid repeating prefixes and suffixes in the same sentence.