Red Széll

chapters but sometimes you need to pull back and actually just have something that's a bit lighter that you know nobody sprints

for 800 metres.

There is a variation in pace.

Well, nobody sprints a marathon, and a novel is a long work.

You have to have variation in pace.

You have to have... You have to give the reader time to be able to gather their thoughts.

I think sometimes there's a temptation in novels to forget that...

the characters sleep and shower and go to the loo.

And I think you need to remember that in the pacing of your book, that actually it can't be full on whether that's emotional intensity or whether that's action intensity or descriptive intensity.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Bad prose confuses unintentionally.

And I'm struggling to unpick that sentence.

There's a lot of intent in good prose.

The author, I think, will sit down and he will go...

what is this paragraph intending to say?

And if he or she has deliberated over the sentence or the paragraph, you will tell because it will communicate what is meant to be understood clearly.

I mean, what I always used to do was I used to get my computer narrator voice to read back

Every paragraph that I'd read.

And in that really dull, automatic voice, it's an absolute killer for bad prose.