The Power of the Pause: Using Time and Distance to Your Writing Advantage
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I once wrote a novel in 72 hours for the 3-Day Novel Contest. It was a feverish weekend of putting aside all obligations (except attending a friend’s wedding) and hardly sleeping, but I wound up with 262 pages. I was done, wasn’t I?
Writing a book is rarely done in a single sitting — and even when it’s physically possible to write that much, that doesn’t mean the book is ready to publish. Good books require pause: to percolate ideas, to reflect, to revise, and to improve the language on the page.
Today, let’s look at the two most important (and invisible) components to writing a book: time and distance. The power of the pause may just rejuvenate your stalled manuscript or improve the one you’ve just finished. Here’s how.
Time
While it’s important to sit down at your keyboard to do the work of typing words onto the page, the amount of time it takes to get 500 words written will range vastly from writer to writer or from writing session to writing session. Many people say the daydreaming portion of thinking about what you want to write doesn’t “count” as writing — but it can certainly help the writing be more efficient.
The only reason I was able to write a novel in three days was because that story had been burning in me for ten years. I’d thought about those scenes so many times, they played like a movie behind closed lids by the time I sat down to transcribe what I was envisioning.
Thinking about the story — and revisiting it — gives your creative brain the chance to try different configurations, notice details you might have overlooked, catch plot holes or inconsistencies you didn’t see when furiously typing words. Whether it’s a 3 a.m. lightbulb moment or dusting off a story you wrote years ago, the time since you last looked at it helps give you fresh perspective.
So, find ways in your writing habit to create time to think, to brainstorm, to ruminate. Re-read your work after a couple of weeks (or even a month) and see what stands out as needing work. Where do you find your attention waning? Where does the phrasing cause you to stumble, and where were your ideas less fleshed out?
By budgeting time in to reflect, you’ll often be able to make many improvements that you couldn’t have seen in the moment.
Distance
Like time, writing also improves with distance. You may have heard the feedback that you’re “too close” to your work. What does that mean?
Writing is often an emotional endeavour — especially if you’re writing about personal experiences — and while a writer should strive to capture those feelings on the page, they can cloud your judgement. When you’re so deep in the writing, fussing over thesaurus alternatives to a specific word choice or lost down a research rabbit hole to get that historical detail just right — you might miss the larger question of “is this important to my readers at all?”
When you’re too close to your writing, you may lose scope and clarity. Think of any school report where a teacher circled a long string of pronouns with an exasperated note of “who??” You may have glossed over important information, like explaining who “Valeri” is the first time they appear on page. This rushing can also have mechanical ripple effects, like run-on sentences, dangling modifiers, or missing words.
Or you may have spent the last 4 pages going into the propagation cycles of silver spruce trees when you’re supposed to be writing about how you got your first job. When you’re in the flow of writing it might take you off in a new, unexpected direction. Digressions, info-dumping, and tell-not-showing exposition are all signs of losing scope of the larger picture.
It’s important to periodically take a step back and look at your book as a whole. Your chapters should guide your reader through your message or story like climbing stairs to a grand view. Each one should connect with the ones before and following, and each should take just as much time as it needs to propel the reader onward.
With a bit of distance, you can assess whether your writing has wandered off course, whether certain sections are unbalanced, or whether you missed including some crucial information for the reader to understand your storytelling.
Pause
Add time and distance together and you get the power of the pause. Some writers might fear that if they let themselves pause, they’ll lose the spark for their project. Rather than halting your momentum, pausing is an important restorative breath so you can renew your focus.
What that pause looks like will vary between writers. It might involve switching from writing mode to reading mode, and poring back over what you’ve written so far. It might mean trying some writing craft exercises to test out techniques that might solve a problem you’re having in the book. It might be getting some alpha feedback from a trusted writing group to temperature check your efforts thus far.
Reflect. Review. Digest.
Your book lives inside you, and if you give it the space to resonate, you’ll be able to see its final form more clearly. Jot down the ideas that come to you during the pause: changes you want to make, sections you want to add in or revise, clarifications you can implement.
For my novel that I drafted in 72-hours, I spent the next six months reviewing that first draft, revising the text, fleshing out scenes that I had rushed through in the need to stay on track, and building a glossary to accompany the worldbuilding. The finished version was so much stronger for taking that pause.
For some writers, “done” never comes, and what you really need to aim for is “good enough.” After all, you can still loop in outside feedback and editing professionals to take your manuscript the last steps to the finish line.
But if you’re feeling burnt out or creatively frustrated, you may just need to embrace the power of the pause so you can regain clarity on what your book is meant to be and what you need to do to get it there. Only by taking the time and distance will you be able to dive into revisions with a clear and efficient plan.
Astra Crompton (she/they) is an eclectic writer, editor, and illustrator with over twenty-five years of publishing experience. Her work has been published in anthologies, table-top RPG books, magazines, and in several novels. They have also successfully completed NaNoWriMo six times and counting. Astra is currently the Editing & Illustrations Coordinator at FriesenPress, where they manage, coordinate, and vet FriesenPress’s industry-leading editing and illustrations teams.
