By Zada Stephens
Have you ever started writing something and it all sounds like a run-on sentence because you’re reading it so fast that you start to lose your place? Something is missing because there’s a long paragraph of description and even though your commas, semicolons, periods, and apostrophes are in the right place, it still feels like you have to rush to read the whole thing.
Maybe it’s time to take a breather and think about the importance of space. I think white space is an underutilized tool for beginning writers because you want to get all your ideas down and your plot and characters on paper. However, we as writers need to be kind to our readers and give them an intermediate session from time to time. Space in a creative writing piece can indicate a change in the timing of your story or poem, it can be a place to pause for the reader, or it can just make your piece easier to read and control the pacing of your piece.
These are not the only things that space can be used for. It can also be used to switch back and forth between scenes and summaries in a fiction or nonfiction piece. This is a clever way to separate the action from the description.
Comments