Descriptive words to slow down the pace of the story?
Is it true that to slow down a story, you add descriptive words in place of an action?
I feel like the pace my story is going at, I'll finish it in less than 200 pages. It just doesn't feel right to end it so short.
I just made the MC meet the MV and I feel like the last time the villain was mentioned he was fighting an angry pack of wolves, and he was unfamiliar with the surroundings and culture he was in (he's an alien).
So, at this point he had just gotten a group of his men and found a hover scooter for each of them. And they somehow already found the MC.
Like, do I expand on the villain's thoughts and feelings to better slow the story, or do I keep it how it is?
With nothing to do, Haku took the chore of exterior design, and lifted the sloping roof, repainted, and replaced the decks boards with wood that he cut out of the forest near the house. This happened fairly quickly and only took him a few hours to complete. Haku wiped his forehead on his arm, removing the majority of the sweat that culminated there. His ears picked up a distant noise and he swerved on his heels, making a full 180 turn.
Motorized humming emanated from the East and several hover scooters rode up to the house. The guy in the front dismounted his scooter and lifted his visor up, his face was completely alien. Haku got a closer look at him as he confidently strode up to where Haku was. His features were all off, they were pointed and sharp, and his eyes were too...discolored. They were a bright turquoise that were filled with life. Haku was skeptical and pressed a button on his watch, notifying KoKo that something was wrong.
“Cute house,” the man said, almost sarcastically. His voice was soft and angelic. It filled Haku with dread, though, because he knew that wasn’t an ordinary human quality.
“What are you?” Haku asked, not caring that it was inconsiderate to ask that.
“I’m really glad you asked that, human.” The man started, he took his helmet completely off now. He had ears that were pointed at the top, not in a ‘birth defect’ sort of way. “I am what you would call an Elf, young one. I am Prince Vincent.” He bowed towards the very confused Haku.
“I come from my home planet, Morbus, to reactivate our interdimensional contract. It was a lawfully bound promise to keep each other thriving. Your NOVA went back on their word to help us, and now my home is dying,” while the man was speaking, Haku noticed a hint of fangs in the stranger’s mouth, his hair was the same color as his eyes, and his eyes looked reptilian.
Haku had a memory of his father mentioning NOVA one time, apparently, they control the workforce and careers for able citizens around the world. They were also the lead sponsors for the earliest space explorations. That will explain why there are otherworldlies here.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/33130. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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I should think your villain is not well developed, or your hero is not sufficiently motivated. What has the hero been doing all this time, and why does s/he see the villain as a threat? What has the villain done that s/he knows about and is willing to take the risks of a battle to stop?
When the hero meets the villain for the first time, they are generally not successful in any attempt to thwart them. (In real life maybe, but in fiction it does not make for a good story). The hero must struggle or the victory is empty, like the victory of successfully laundering a load of shirts.
If your natural inclination is they meet quickly, say due to the technology of the alien or something, then you need to have that meeting result in a stalemate, or (non-lethal) defeat for your hero. In fact, in most stories we expect your hero to have a series of more defeats and losses than wins, and your villain to have more wins than losses, so the final victory of the hero means something.
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One way to break down a story is intention versus obstacle. The intention is what the protagonist must accomplish, and the more necessary the intention is, the better.
At the same time, the obstacle is what prevents the protagonist from realizing their intention, and just as necessary as the intention should be, so insurmountable should be the obstacle. It doesn't hurt for the reader to think the obstacle is completely impossible to overcome, at first.
If your protagonist is realizing their intention(s) too quickly, then probably you have not made the obstacle(s) as strong as they should be. As the parentheses in my previous sentence suggests, another approach or outlook is to have smaller intentions as part of the larger overall intention, and likewise smaller obstacles that block the success of the smaller intentions. That is how a serial TV drama stays interesting over (hopefully for the writers) over 100 episodes. You could use the same technique with chapters.
Either way, it's best to make things really impossible for the protagonist.
At the same time, one piece of advice I've heard lately that makes a lot of sense to me is to write out your whole first draft before you do any edits or rewrites. Get it all out there and then you have something you can look at as a whole and figure out where the real issues are. This also helps prevent a problem of constantly rewriting the first 100 or 200 pages and never getting to the ending. And you still may have a lot to learn about your story that will help inform your rewrites.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33132. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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