"In fiction you have emotional drag"

Thursday 9/24/26

Letter.

...

You'll be taken aback by what I've done with "Fitty." It's in part the result of "What the Mouse Knew." I've applied what I figured out there to "Fitty." I'm still working. But it's been like bringing "What the Mouse Knew" and a bit of "First Responder" to bear on this other story. The end of "Mouse" is about the best thing ever done (all of it, really) and it looks like the most natural thing there could be, but it took me forever to figure it out. That story and the process of getting it right added to my abilities.

The first section for revised "Fitty" was recently 1700 words (I'm guessing rather than checking, but the last version you saw was probably 700 or so), now it's 900, which are quite a bit different than the 700 the section once was. That 700 words had to go to 1700 words to eventually get made into these 900 words. It wasn't just adding and subtracting words, either. The words changed. A lot changed. Such has been the process.

There's this thing you want to do where you get into your offense, so to speak, fast, and you go fast, but that fast resonates as long and deep at the same time. You feel as the reader like you've been in there for a significant amount of time, rather than just a few minutes. It's similar to an airplane landing and the spoilers on the wings go up to create drag. In fiction you have emotional drag. The section is coming in "hot," if you will, and she's moving fast, but as an arrow goes in one direction, there's an arrow going in another, and they balance each other out. 

There are all these different kinds of pacing happening at once, like they're superimposed. There's time pacing, plot pacing, emotional pacing, a conscious sense of pace, a subconscious sense of pace, etc. You're doing these different things in different parts of a reader's brain and it all winds and swirls together. That's writing. 

Now there are these millions of people delusionally and disrespectfully calling themselves writers and they have no idea what writing even is, with pretty much no one having a clue what it can be. Nor is anyone going to from what's slapped out there and/or lied about by this system. It's all just people putting words after each other--and usually having AI do that for them--and thinking that's how it works. That isn't it at all. That's no more it than shucking corn or sitting on an anvil. Putting one word after another is just about the least of writing if you understand what can be done in this art form. 

Dr. Pettigran was impressed by Carlene’s vocabulary. She jotted down these words on her pad. Her pen sounded like a feather of olden times. A plume scratching across foolscap. Carlene imagined being in a room with Charlotte Brontë as she wrote. Scratch, scratch, dip, scratch. No matter how frightened Carlene had ever been, thinking about Charlotte Brontë helped. Villette. The connoisseur’s choice over Jane Eyre. To be able to read it again. Carlene’s green hair struck Dr. Pettigran as a whimsically elfin choice for a twenty-eight-year-old high school English teacher. She’d developed a profound fondness for this unique individual and would be sad when their time reached its end.