Red Széll

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.

It will highlight bad prose really badly.

If it sounds acceptable in that Stephen Hawking voice, then you know you've nailed it.

If you can understand, you know, if you come away going, oh, I understood that, then you know you've nailed it.

Totally and utterly immersive.

It's where I actually forget that I'm reading or being narrated to and I am part of that story.

I can almost visualize myself on set with the rest of the characters in the book.

And I think there's something that we haven't actually talked about that authors need to do to augment that.