The Keystone: A Manifesto for a Novel

Why Write a Novel?

One of my earliest memories is learning what a screwdriver was. I took that newfound knowledge and applied it to my mom’s camera.

As I took each part off, I laid it neatly on the table. When the camera was finally reduced to pieces, I began putting it back together.

Then I hit a snag: the shutter spring. It was a tiny torsion spring, almost hair-fine, that had to be bent and hooked into a minuscule hole. It kept slipping from my stubby toddler fingers and pinging across the room. I don’t know how long I spent chasing that spring, but it was longer than it took to take the whole camera apart.

That’s what I was doing when my mom caught me. She snatched the camera body away. “You can’t fix that—it’s a precision instrument!”

Maybe so. But even then, I could see that something complicated could still be made of parts that, individually, fit together in simple ways. That lesson stuck with me. Practically everything I’ve owned since has been taken apart at least once so I could see how it worked.

That’s why I wrote a novel. It wasn’t about fame or fortune—I wanted to understand what makes the things tick. My first novel was an unfixable mess, but interesting. It showed potential, and people I shared it with were intrigued. So I wrote a second, The Keystone, and sent it to a big writing contest, where it landed somewhere around the top hundred out of ten thousand entries.

Still not publishable. But taking it apart and putting it back together—that was the real lesson. I learned something about how novels work, and then I set it aside, satisfied.

---

Why Now?

I’m retired now, after a career spent applying my stubbornly analytical streak to public-interest work—field research, environmental education, public health. But I look at the public sphere today and I’m dismayed. It’s not just the usual cracks in civility—it’s the bedrock itself. The rule of law, even science, seems to be under siege.

And the secret sauce on this shit sandwich is hopelessness. Public discourse itself has been turned against us; the more we try to engage, the more powerless we feel.

I’m retired, yes, but I’m not done. I read and argue online like everyone else, but that’s a poisoned chalice. I show up at marches—that’s better—but I wanted to put my oddball “camera-disassembly” skills to work again.

Then I remembered The Keystone. It’s a farce: a love letter to Hollywood screwball comedy and a send-up of overwrought space opera. I meant it to make people laugh—and that’s exactly what we need right now.

Now, where’d I put that box of torsion springs...

---

The Keystone Manifesto

Sometimes following the news makes you feel powerless. We scroll, we argue, we obsess, but we only feel worse.

In times like these, it’s nice to lose ourselves in an adventure story. That isn’t turning your back on the world—it’s catching your breath. For a little while, we can be someone who has the power and clarity we wish we had.

But could a story do more? After all, we’re not flawless heroes or fearless space captains. So what can pretending to be one do for us after we put the book down and face the news again?

What if a story showed us how the hero got that way—pulled back the curtain and gave us a peek at the messy process by which the heroic sausage gets made?

This is the story of a space opera hero who’s only halfway there. Kate MacClaine can outwit pirates, fly her way out of a collapsing wormhole, and tell you, with painfully accurate precision, what makes you a dangerous incompetent. But she’s unfinished as a human being: brilliant, abrasive, lonely, and yet full of untapped potential. Her greatest challenge isn’t surviving the stars—it’s learning to connect with others and see her own worth.

If you’ve ever looked at the chaos around you and thought, “We ought to fix that”—and then realized that “we” has to start with you—then this is a story for you.

Welcome aboard.

---

So There You Have It

Against the rising darkness, I’ve chosen to light a candle. Odds are it flickers out before many people see it.

But it’s something I can do.

I hope you get to read The Keystone soon—and that it puts a smile on your face.

How to Read The Keystone

The Keystone will be available in Amazon as an ebook in December 2025 or January 2026.  Watch this space for news.

Where is Fancy Bred? Thoughts on Pacing in Scenes

I’m doing developmental editing on The Keystone this month, with a focus on story pace.  This has made me think about what pacing actually is, based on my experiences sharing manuscript critiques. We non-academically trained writers talk about “fast-paced” vs. “slow-paced” as if it’s an objective property of the text, like word count. But what if it’s not? What if it’s something else altogether?

The Reader's Problem

Write a big chunk of a novel and hand it to a test reader. Chances are, unless you’re very experienced, you’ll get feedback like: “The story moved slowly here.”

So you trim that section: cut unnecessary text so the reader spends less time on it. And yes, that can work.  But here’s what bothers me: the story itself isn’t moving. It stays right where it is. What moves is the reader’s attention.

I believe a passage drags when the cognitive effort required to finish it is too high for the reward the reader gets in return.  If that’s true, then pacing problems are really about structuring effort and reward: Does the reader run out of momentum before getting a reward that renews it?

The Writer's Problem

Much of the usual pacing advice—trim adverbs, start late, leave early—is easy to follow. You don’t have to think too hard; you apply it mechanically, like following a checklist. And that can work: for many scenes, these simple fixes will help get the reader through the story.

That's because the usual rules of thumb reliably reduce reader effort.  But mindlessly applied, they do nothing to preserve reader delight, much less add to it.  If you're not careful, you can reduce a dramatic scene to something like an AI summary of a rambling Zoom call.  The limitation of the usual pacing advice aspiring authors get is that it is algorithmic -- not diagnostic. We need to diagnose before we start prescribing medicine.

Your job as a writer isn't to get the reader through the manuscript as quickly as possible.  It's to deliver on the promises you made in the back cover blurb.   For that reason we *have* to focus on the subjective experience of the reader trying to get through the text.

If a Scene is Bad, it Had Better be Short

Cutting is an excellent thing for us amateurs to consider, because we often write scenes that don't offer much reward for the reader's effort. We write scenes that beg for mercy-killing. Cutting a great scene down might improve in some way, but it won't improve the pacing.

Your Manuscript is Easy for You, So it Always Feels Well-paced

I think this explains why amateur authors almost never detect pacing problems in their own work: you already know what your manuscript means, so it's easy for you to read. One of the best ways to learn about balancing effort and reward is to critique other writers’ manuscripts. Approaching someone else’s story opens your eyes to where you struggle to stay engaged, and then you can discover why.

Ultimately you will need test readers' help with your manuscript, but their time is precious. Before sending a manuscript out for critique, scan your scenes for “walls of text” or info-dumps where the reader is asked to do a lot of mental work for little reward. Especially look for places where effort is demanded for no reward -- e.g. pointlessly rambling passages, or continuity errors. Your manuscript benefits the most when you make good use of the test readers’ gift of their time.

Slow = Bad; Fast = Good?

Finally we have to ask: is slow necessarily  bad? No. Nobody complains about a slow good scene.  They will complain that bad scene packed with action is "slow", because their progress through it feels like a slog, and trying to pick up the pace by stuffing more of the stuff that's creating the problem into the scene will only make that slog harder.

Making that bad scene better means making it easier and/or more rewarding; that sometimes results in a scene that takes up more space on the page but feels shorter to the reader.

Sample Rewrite

Here's a very brief sample rewrite that illustrates my ideas.  To setup, this is from a rom-com space opera about a neurodivergent-coded space captain struggling with her feelings for her ex-husband, who she's just kicked off her ship:

This too was spotless. He'd stripped the bunk and left the folded sheets and blankets on top. She remade the bunk and climbed into it, inhaling his lingering smell. That brought her back when she'd first known that smell. She was hardly more than a girl but she'd had the whole galaxy at her feet.

A passage this small isn't a pacing problem, but page after page of this kind of writing, where the reader is forced to supply all the details for himself, wears the reader down, and they start skimming.  Now here's my solution to the problem, and it's not to further cut this tiny snippet down, it's to make it huge:

This too was spotless. He'd stripped the bunk and left the folded sheets and blankets on top. She remade the bunk and climbed into it, inhaling his lingering smell. Soap. Archie preferred unscented soap, something Kate noticed almost immediately when she first met him. Plain soap was one of her favorite smells. Beneath that a faint, sweet-sour-proteiny hint, like fermented milk. And then something spicy — cardamom? Was that because he liked cardamom in his coffee?  Instantly, she was back on the flight deck of the shuttle where she met him, and there he was.  She’d thought of him back then as a strange *man*, but to her eyes right now he was just an adorable boy. She wanted to cradle his cheeks and kiss him on the forehead…

Is this better? I haven't workshoped it yet so I can't be sure. But I think so.  You shouldn't thoughtlessly apply my advice either.  If you're writing pulpy adventure story, you don't want it to sound like literary fiction. Remember: your job is to fulfill the promise you made to the reader when he picked up the story, whatever that may have been.

Takeaways

• Pace is felt, not counted—reader momentum sets it.
• Control momentum with two levers: effort and reward.
• Cut what asks too much and gives too little.
• Reward is subjective—match it to your genre.
• Never trade delight for brevity.
• Sometimes longer reads faster—embrace it.
• Diagnose before you prescribe—understand the scene first.

What do you think?

So — what do you think? Is cutting always the best solution to what a reader identifies as a pacing problem? Do you have any examples of writing where you’ve improved pacing, or have pacing issues? If you post them  (not too long please), maybe we'll take a stab at work-shopping them.

Art for Whatever's Sake

Prehistoric cave painting (public domain, via Pixabay)

Paleolithic people painted cave walls to ensure success in the hunt. Egyptian artisans decorated tombs to provide sustenance for the departed. Medieval monks illuminated manuscripts with dragons and griffins to break the monotony of copying texts. Modern retirees take up painting not for profit, but for the pleasure of creating.

There are many reasons to make art. The idea that it exists to earn cash is relatively new and, for most us who create, largely irrelevant. There’s nothing wrong with making a few — or even a lot — of bucks from your work. But when money becomes the primary focus of art, expression itself is reduced to a commodity, and artists, mere cogs in a machine that serves the ends of commerce.

Art also exists as part of a web of communication linking artists with one another as well as with their audiences. Writers who read Flaubert were moved to become the realists. Painters who attended a certain exhibition in Paris emerged as the Impressionists. Every artist works in dialogue with those who came before. Perhaps the only act of pure individual creation was when that very first person realized that dabbing ochre on a cave wall could conjure the world onto a flat surface.

So write that novel. Draw your dog’s portrait. Start your day with a poem. Do the best you can — but don’t worry if it’s not original enough to impress a critic, or polished enough for someone to buy the rights to. Share fearlessly. And if you’re not competing with a working artist for their livelihood, borrow what you need to. Add your thread to that vast and ancient web of creativity that stretches back to the first cave painting — or the first yarn spun around a campfire.

“Critical Feeling”: A Method for Supportive Manuscript Critique

What Is Critical Feeling?

Critical feeling is what I call analyzing your emotional responses to a text with the same care you’d apply in critical thinking.

Instead of reacting — “This is boring,” “I loved this,” “I got lost here” — you observe your feeling, identify what in the text triggered it, and describe that connection in neutral, precise language.

The goal is to help the author understand how their writing affects readers, not to pass judgment on whether that effect was “good” or “bad.”

At its heart, critical feeling treats emotion as data, not verdict.

---

Why Use It?

Most critiques fall into one of two traps:

• Reaction-only feedback: pure personal taste without analysis.
  “This dragged.”

• Detached technical feedback: pure craft vocabulary without empathy.
  “You need more scene anchoring.”

Critical feeling bridges the two. It:

• Honors your authentic response as a reader.

• Offers clear reasoning the writer can act on.

• Maintains respectful distance, keeping ego and judgment out of the exchange.

The result is feedback the writer experiences as collaborative rather than evaluative.

---

How to Practice Critical Feeling

1. Notice Your Reactions

Pause when you feel something — confusion, delight, impatience, admiration, resistance, curiosity.
Record it neutrally:

“I began to lose focus here.”
“I felt tense at this line.”
“This section made me curious.”

2. Identify the Trigger

Look for the specific feature that created that reaction:

• Word choice or rhythm

• Point of view distance

• Pacing or logic of movement

• Tone or dialogue

• Sensory detail (or lack thereof)

Ask yourself: What in the text produced this feeling?

3. Translate Feeling into Cause-and-Effect Language

Frame your insight as a connection, not a complaint.

“I felt unanchored here because the description stayed abstract before I knew who was experiencing the scene.”
“I felt emotionally close to the protagonist because the narration used concrete sensations and quick rhythms.”

4. Offer Options, Not Orders

Suggest possibilities, not prescriptions.

“You might try grounding this moment in a specific sensory image.”
“Some writers handle transitions like this by focusing on what the character notices first.”

That keeps critique collaborative rather than corrective.

5. Close with Strengths

Always end by naming what’s working — especially what creates a positive emotional effect.

“Your clarity and rhythm carry the story confidently.”
“The mood here is genuinely tense in the best way.”

That helps the author feel proud of their successes and open to refining the rest.  This is so worth  doing that you should not give in to the temptation to skip this, especially if your reaction was negative. So make an effort, dig deeper, even stretch the truth a little if you have to. Couching a critique in purely negative terms will get it ignored, or worse: it will make the author quit. Our objective is to help the author do a better job.

---

Example in Practice

Instead of:

“This section was slow. I lost interest.”

Try:

“My attention drifted because the passage focused on abstract ideas before I had a concrete image or sense of movement to follow. Once the scene became specific, I reengaged.”

That’s critical feeling in action: genuine response → analytical reasoning → practical insight.

---

Principles of Critical Feeling

Principle	Description
Feelings are data.	Emotional reactions are valid clues, not judgments.
Detach from ego.	Support the text, not your taste.
Trace cause to effect.	Link the reader’s experience to the writer’s choices.
Stay constructive.	Frame critique as guidance, not correction.
End with strength.	Reinforce confidence while inviting growth.

---

Closing Thought

Critical feeling asks you to read with empathy and precision at once.
It’s not just about what you felt, but why you felt it — and how the writer can use that insight to strengthen their work.

When practiced well, it turns critique from judgment into something that will encourage your author to improve.