Improve Your Writing with Pacing and Rhythm

A writer's number one priority is to hold an audience's attention. Entertaining, informing, and persuading are all secondary (they'll never see the pearls if they don't stick around). Your voice and style make your work individual, while holding attention is a mold into which you pour your unique voice, views, and personal understanding of a subject.

Fortunately, there are tangible techniques at your disposal for creating this mold, allowing you to keep your readers' attention once you've gotten it. Following are 4 solid writing tips for better pacing and rhythm, the glue that holds an audience, whether for a few paragraphs of copy or an entire novel.

One Governing Principle

The human mind craves variety. This is the one immutable rule over any writing anyone ever does. For everybody. Always. It's the basis for every technique a writer keeps in his or her bag of tricks. Line length, therefore, is paramount, and the proper application of varying line lengths will satisfy the brain's need for variety. Avoid patterns. Anything too repetitious becomes tedious. Think of the written page as terrain. You'll breeze through a hundred pages of terse sentences in no time-and won't remember a word of it. Or, on the other extreme, a series of long, meandering sentences will bring the onset of lethargy and your reader will be nodding off by the second page. A rocky, uneven landscape filled with hedges, rabbit-holes, and other surprises will keep a reader alert-and loving every word along the way.

Rhythm And Cadence Set The Pace

Apart from line length, there are several techniques for slowing and speeding up the pace. Short sentences in succession feel choppy to the reader; they slow things down. This slowing effect builds tension. Fragments and single words are fair game as long they contribute to the overall meaning. Long, flowing sentences speed the pace and are especially useful when withholding crucial information until the end of a sentence, a great way to apply pressure and keep the reader guessing so you, the writer, can make a thoughtful decision about revealing that important tidbit you're holding back, while at the same time toying with your reader, propelling her onward as she wonders what it could be awaiting her at the end of that long, meandering passage, until she discovers-at last!-the end of the sentence, and a payoff.

Create different rhythms using alliteration and word repetition. Alliteration uses sound to make a pleasant cadence, while at the same is pleasing to the mind's ear. Look at Vladamir Nabakov's alliterations in the opening paragraphs to Lolita, all those L's rolling along and the dit-da-dit-da-dits give a real sense of longing the narrator feels for his illicit beloved.

Word repetition is less dramatic than alliteration, but is also a useful device for adding and layering subtle differences in meaning: because words are rather slippery by nature, slipping in an alternate sense of the same word expands your ideas, enabling readers to slip along with your experimentations until you decide to give former definitions the slip and settle on one that is just right. It takes imagination, and should be used only when it complements the ideas you want to convey, but the result can lift your prose and surprise your readers. Start with a few repetitions and add more as the skill begins to feel more natural.

Paragraphs Are Your Readers' Garden

Treat paragraph length the same way you treat line length. Remember the principle I stated earlier is always in operation: variety. If all paragraphs are the same size-boring. One long paragraph after another?-daunting. A combination of long and short paragraphs and everything in between is pleasing to the eye. With practice, you'll learn to prune your paragraphs, allowing one sentence to grow while cutting back on another. Beauty will spring forth out of your imagination.

Look for all my writing tips and visit them often. Just click on my byline above to find more. In all my years of writing, I've found that I learn the same things over and over, and every time I do, I get that 'aha!' moment all over again. Like music, art, and athletics, writing is learned over a lifetime-and it provides a lifetime of reward.