Pace vs. Prose

I recently (like ten minutes ago) read a post on a writer’s site about this subject, and it spurred me to examine my own thoughts on pace & prose, and where and when to use them. This is what I came up with:

There’s a time for pace, and a time for prose. Each is merely a tool used to carve a path. Here is an extreme example:

Say your mc is currently racing against the clock – dodging bullets, pedestrians, rush hour traffic, and two or three heat seeking missiles – in order to save a hog-tied damsel who has a bomb strapped to her chest. The clock is ticking, so there’s no time for shit and shenanigans. Prose has no place whatsoever within this portion of a story.

Okay, say the mc made it there ten seconds too late and the damsel is naught but a black powder burn on a patch of pavement. Now is the time for prose; he laments, he cries, he tosses out that rubber he’ll never get to share with her and her sister Babette, he swears blood vengeance upon the person responsible, and does it all from beneath a heavy fog of prose.

Pace:
anger, lust, rage, excitement, fight, flight, character interaction (i.e., dialogue, phone conversations, sports, etc.)

Every golfer knows the term ‘You drive for show, but putt for the dough’, and here’s where it applies to you and I as writers. You’ve got the reader’s attention with the chase, the crazy cabbie who spoke a language you thought only trekkies knew, the barking dogs, errupting flames, shattering glass, the falls, the ever-present tick of the clock, and now you need to slow down and allow the reader to take a gulp of air while their heart stops racing.

Enter Prose:
Scene and character descriptions, back story (if any, but not huge chunks at once, cuz the last thing you want to do is have the reader forget where they are in the story), character inner monologue – their hopes, dreams, petty piss-offs – and setting.

None of this is according to some book. This is how I do it.