The London Obelisk: Cleopatra's Ghosts

The next time you visit London, walk from the Houses of Parliament and

Big Ben along the Thames Embankment until you are next to the seventy foot long Cleopatra's Needle.

At 186 tons, it weighs about ten times as much as the largest stone in Stonehenge, and was already 1500 years old before Stonehenge was built.

Eight feet at the base, it is five feet wide at the top, before its seven foot high pyramidion starts.

London Obelisk from the Millenium Wheel

Take a moment to admire the two bronze sphinxes that stand guard over her. 

Your question to the Obelisk:

Then turn your eyes to the small pyramidion on the very top of the giant obelisk, and say out loud:

"I call spirits from the vasty deep!"

 Listen carefully for an answer.

Before we tell you what you might hear, we need to touch on a fascinating tapestry of history and legend.

The tapestry thread:

This thread of mystery, and of ghosts, runs through and joins together Braveheart; the Gunpowder Plot; Thutmose III and his son, Thutmose IV; a stone slab between the giant paws of the Great Sphinx in Egypt; Cleopatra; the London obelisk; and a noble family we can call the Fighting Percy's, whose swords were ever close to hand throughout the centuries.

Knowing this thread of wonder that joins these people, events and times, you will never look on this wonderful obelisk the same way again.


Thutmose IV:

Let's start with Pharaoh Thutmose III, the maker of the Cleopatra's Needles which were moved from Egypt by Freemasons and are now found in  London and Central Park in New York.

Sphinx by David Roberts

In Egypt these two obelisks had stood together.

Gradually the restless sea closed in on the shore where they stood, and the obelisk which one day would grace London, teetered under the waves washing ashore, and about three hundred years ago it fell. 

It served for a while as a bridge over a small ravine it had fallen over, while its twin – destined to be moved to Central Park - stayed upright.

When Thutmose III died, he left several sons including one who became known as Thutmose IV when he became pharaoh.

The Great Sphinx:

When we visited Egypt as part of  our research for our thriller, Obelisk Seven, we paid a visit to the magnificent Great Sphinx.

The biggest monument in a land of big monuments, the sphinx has a human head on the body of a lion.

Nestling between the huge paws of the Sphinx is a stone tablet, called the Dream Stela, placed there by Thutmose IV.

The tablet tells the story of the younger son of Thutmose III who was hunting in the desert, and stopped to rest at the Sphinx, which was covered in sand up to its head.

The prince fell asleep between the paws, and in his dream the sphinx spoke to him, promising him the throne of Egypt if he would clear the sand covering it:

The kingdom shall be given to you ... The world shall be yours in its length and in its breadth, as far as the light of the eye of the lord of the universe shines... My countenance is gracious towards you, and my heart clings to you.

Thutmose IV cleared the sand, became Pharaoh when his older brother – who was first in line for the throne – died before he could inherit it, and ruled for just under ten years.

Glenn & one London Obelisk Sphinx

Now let's make the connection between Thutmose IV and the Great Sphinx, and the London obelisk.

Look to her left and her right.

Two seven ton bronze guardian sphinxes, nineteen feet long, six feet wide and nine feet tall, flank her, for her protection.

There are shrapnel wounds in the body and paw of the sphinx to her right, from a German bombing raid during the First World War.

These two guardian sphinxes are copies of a small foot-long sphinx of Thutmose IV,  in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle (pronounced Annick). The Alnwick Castle sphinx has the face of Thutmose IV, on a lion's body, with the tail curling around the right hind leg.


Alnwick Castle:

Alnwick Castle was used for interior and exterior shots of the Hogwarts Castle in the Harry Potter films.

The castle is the second largest inhabited castle in England, and since 1309 – for 700 years - has belonged to the powerful Percy family.

The Percys have had a long history of intrigue and warring for centuries, fighting their own king as well as the Scots.

A cousin of the earl of Percy played a part in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, commemorated on Guy Fawkes Day each year. In 1297 Braveheart – William Wallace – launched an unsuccessful attack on the castle.

Alnwick, and Alnwick Castle itself, have links to ghosts.

Sphinx of Thutmose IV at Alnwick Castle

From the eleventh century A.D., the castle was famous for a vampire – known locally as the Creature from the Tomb, and formerly a lord of the estate – that lived beneath the castle, coming out at night to attack the villagers.

The vampire caused an outbreak of plague, and the angry villagers dug it up from its shallow grave and burned its body.

In the village of Alnwick, the public house known as Ye Olde Cross has its own ghosts: a collection of bottles that are cursed.

Touch them and you die.

The bottles are now apparently covered up to prevent further deaths.

Enter Sir Lancelot:

Lancelot, the famous Knight of the Round Castle, lover of King Arthur's wife, Guinevere, and searcher for the Holy Grail, was sent to King Arthur's court by the Lady of the Lake.

As a young man, Lancelot, then known as the White Knight, came across a castle called the Dolorous Guard, guarded by the Copper Knight, ten knights at the first wall, ten at the second wall, and then the Copper Knight  himself.

But that knight fled; Lancelot is taken to a cemetery and shown a metal slab with writing on it.

Only one knight, says the writing, can lift this weighty slab, and his name is written on the other side of it.

Lancelot flips over the slab and finds his name: Lancelot.

Lancelot then took the Dolorous Guard as his home, changing it to Joyous Guard; on his death, he was buried there.

Legend has it that Alnwick Castle is Joyous Guard, home and burial site of Lancelot.

So: Alnwick Castle is home to ghosts, and to Sir Lancelot.

Hotspur in Alnwick Castle

Young Prince Hotspur:

And it was home to the famous Harry Hotspur. 

A statue of Hotspur astride his horse is found inside the castle. 

In 1403 Hotspur tried to depose Henry IV and was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury when he raised his visor and an arrow penetrated his mouth. 

His body was shown to King Henry IV, who wept.

After his burial, rumors spread that he was still alive, so Henry IV had his body dug up, impaled on a spear, displayed in public, then cut into four pieces and sent around all of England; his head was then  stuck on a pole at the gates of the city of York.

In Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I, Hotspur and his the Welsh rebel Glendower plot together against King Henry IV, and Hotspur mocks Glendower for his outrageous claims to control the devil and his spirits in the underworld.

And this brings us to the question you are to ask the London obelisk.

Glendower, in Henry IV, says:

I can call the spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur replies:

Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?

If you listen carefully, you just might – if your quest is pure and the water of the Thames runs clean that day or night – hear a soft voice, seeming to come from one of the two bronze sphinxes, or perhaps from the obelisk itself, repeating what Shakespeare recorded that Hotspur had said.

Cleopatra's Needle Ghosts:

Strike a blow for Nefertiti: Leave a Rose for the Imprisoned Queen

Nefertiti bust - Old Museum, Berlin - 2009

On the 8^th of April 1930, the Berlin newspaper Der Tag reported on the crowds that gathered to see the bust of Nefertiti, and commented on the roses that were laid before her.

Today, Neertiti stands in her  bullet proof glass cage in the New Museum in Berlin, a solitary figure in a room built to showcase only her.

Her cage is raised, so that visitors look at her from below.

This is designed, according to Claudia Bregger in a chapter entitled The 'Berlin' Nefertiti Bust – Imperial Fantasies in German Archeological Discourse, in The Body of the Queen, so that:

A museum visitor of average height is presented with the carefully lit bust at an angle from from below, which lends the face 'something majestic', as Borchardt remarked. The bust is thus exhibited as the royal object of a modern cult.

For the many who visit her and who believe she should be returned to her homeland rather than languish in this new jail of hers, we have a suggestion:

Do what the visitors in the 1930's did – lay a single rose before her bust, to register your views.

The choice of the color of the rose you lay before her will depend on the message you wish to send.

The color of a rose expresses emotions, so choose the color that will, on the day of your visit to the New Museum to see the queen, express your emotions.

If you want to express your love for the lonely queen, lay a single red rose on the floor before her.

If you wish to symbolize your protest at her continued imprisonment under the grey winter skies of Berlin rather than her return to her perpetually sunny deserts, place a black rose on the floor beneath her cage.

If you want all to know that you are aware of the possible deceit of the German archeologist, Ludwig Borchardt, and the German Oriental Company (or  Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft) he worked for, when he removed her from her desert grave in Amarna in 1912 and took her to Berlin, then select a yellow rose, which significes deceit.

If you want the queen to know that you are fighting, in your own way, including by your laying of a rose before her, for a reconciliation of her image – the bust – with her homeland – Egypt – so that she may return home, then choose a white rose.

If you simply want to indicate that you love this forlornly beautiful queen, then place a simple red rose on the floor as you bow to her.

And when the New Museum authorities prohibit the laying of roses before the queen – something that is almost inevitable, because of the sensation a series of roses would cause – then you can consider resorting to a petal or two, which you can drop near her cage.

Just to let her know that she is not forgotten.

The Artist, the Engineer, the Dinner & an Obelisk for London

Edward A. Goodall

What on earth did an English artist, who thought parrots made an excellent soup and was accused of being a Russian spy in the Crimea, have to do with the move of an obelisk from Egypt to the Thames Embankment in London?

During our research about ancient Egyptian obelisks, for our thriller Obelisk Seven, we came upon the answer to this question.

The Beginning Dinner

It seems that the artist held a dinner which had momentous consequences for an ancient obelisk that had fallen down on the seashore in Egypt, at the foot of the one that was moved to Central Park in New York City:

At a dinner held at the home of Edward A. Goodall, several artists were invited including John Dixon the engineer.

Conversation eventually centered on Cleopatra's Needle in Egypt and John Dixon suggested that it be brought to England by private means since the government had estimated that the cost would be too great.

He said that if he had the money he would do it himself. Shortly thereafter, Sir Erasmus Wilson the celebrated surgeon and Freemason, called on John Dixon and offered the money to bring the obelisk over.

In 1865 Edward Goodall was living at 3 Fitzroy Rd., Regents Park, in London and the St. George's Square house, which Edward owned, was his studio. In 1884 he and his wife moved to 57 Fitzroy Rd. where they remained.

The Dixon Brothers

John Dixon (1835 – 1891), a civil engineer, and his younger brother, Waynman Dixon (1844 – 1930), also an engineer, moved the obelisk to London.

In 1876, Sir Erasmus Wilson, a leading surgeon and Freemason, agreed to pay John Dixon 10,000 pounds to move the obelisk, with payment only to be made if Dixon erected the obelisk on the Thames Embankment.

The Dixon brothers had been involved for some time in Egypt, mostly on engineering tasks, and Waynman Dixon had also spent time accurately measuring the Great Pyramid (he found some ancient relics which the original builders had left inside the pyramid, and John sent them to England).

The obelisk was first erected in Egypt by Pharaoh Thutmose III - the pharaoh who, according to the Royal Annals – saw around 1,500 B.C. fires in the sky above the desert, and centuries later was gifted to the British government in 1819 in recognition of Nelson's victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798.

From one Freemason to Another

Included in A Short History of the Egyptian Obelisks, by William Ricketts Cooper, published in 1877, is a short narrative by Erasmus Wilson of his first meeting with John Dixon, including this:

As a sailor's son I took an interest in the matter ... I soon found that Mr. Dixon was a Freemason, hence, all formality and ceremony were at once banished. He told me that he had
long contemplated bringing the obelisk to England, and he hoped some day to do it himself, when he should be rich enough ... He then said, I should enclose the monolith in boiler plate, and then roll it into the sea ... and tow it to England.

Erasmus Wilson liked Dixon's idea of encasing the large granite pillar in iron, and hired him to do the job.

The Wanderings of Goodall

Edward A. Goodall (1819 – 1908) was an interesting man. He was a landscape and orientalist painter, the eldest sone of Edward Goodall, the well known line engraver; his brother was the celebrated Royal Academy painter Frederick Goodall.

In 1841 Goodall joined a Government-sponsored commission which was to define the boundaries of British Guiana, tasked with sketching the landscape, flora, fauna and inhabitants.

It was here that he had parrot soup, and once, when food ran low, ate a spider monkey.

He also singed his eyebrows , eyelashes and hair when gunpowder that was being prepared to salute departing members went off.

And he fell in love:

The entire party was much taken with the beauty of the local women, but Goodall must have been more so than most as he impetuously asked the father of one of them if he could marry her.

It seems that Goodall wore his rejection by the father well, and in 1854 he went to the Crimea as artist correspondent for the Illustrated London News, which was the most widely read journal in Britain, with 150,000 copies sold.

Edward A. Goodall - home at 3 Fitzroy Rd., Regents  Park

Goodall had access to the frontlines and battlefields, and observed the battle of Balaclava – scene of the famous Charge of the Light Brigade against the Russians on 25 October 1854, captured so eloquently by Lord Tennyson's poem - and the siege of Sebastopol:

At Inkerman in the spring of 1855, Goodall witnessed the melting snow reveal the bodies of dead Russian soldiers who had lain unburied throughout the winter. Crocuses were seen growing between the fingers of dead soldiers.

He had a short-lived spot of trouble due to mistaken identity, though:

Even so the [Naval] Brigade could not save Goodall from being arrested on suspicion of being a Russian spy. Ironically, the officer who arrested Goodall turned out to be a friend of Goodall’s brother, Frederick.

Cloeopatra's Needle arrives in London

Goodall stayed in the Crimea for a year, and then travelled widely, paying fifteen visits to Venice, as well as sketching and painting in France, Portugal, Morocco, Italy, Gibraltar and Spain.

In Egypt in 1870 Goodall was on the Nile riverbank sketching ancient Memphis when he saw a woman bend down to fill her pitcher, and tumble into the river. He jumped into the Nile and after a struggle brought her safely to the riverbank:

The next day she received several offers of marriage, being considered under "Divine protection."

Queen Victoria liked his work and gave him permission to paint from any window in the palace.

Cleopatra's Needle being raised in London

Cleopatra's Needle on the Thames Embankment, London

Cleopatra's Needle being placed in iron cylinder in Egypt by John Dixon

Cleopatra's Needle in London viewed from the Millenium Wheel

Cleopatra's Needle in London - from book by Erasmus Wilson

Cleopatra's Needle - Cover of book by Erasmus Wilson

Edward A. Goodall's studio was here at St. George's Square

Erasmus Wilson's grave at Swanscombe, Kent

Raising of Cleopatra's Needle - from the London Illustrated Times

Bridge of Sighs in Venice by Edward A. Goodall

Venice scene by Edward A. Goodall

Nefertiti – Torn between the Iron Lady and "Raider" Hawass

"Raider" Hawass

Is it High Noon in Berlin?

Has the head of the Supreme Council of the Antiquities of Egypt exposed a deep fear of the Chancellor of Germany?

Perhaps.

Dr. Hawass' Question

Dr. Zahi Hawass had this question for the Chancellor, when his request for the bust of Nefertiti to be loaned to Egypt was refused:

“They think we will be like the Raiders of the Lost Ark, that we will take it and not return it,” said Mr Hawass, who has been a vociferous champion for the permanent return of Egyptian artefacts.

Is this what the Iron Lady - as Chancellor Angela Merkel has been called - fears?

That Hawass will don his famous hat, put on his dusty boots, strap his pistol to his waist, pick up his trusty horsewhip, and beat off any attempts by the Germans to have the Nefertiti bust returned to Germany after the loan period expires?

Part of the German family?

It seems that the Germans have decided that the Beautiful One is fitting in well in Berlin, according to one Museum official:

The bust, [Dietrich Wildung, head of the Egyptian Museum], says, has become globally famous in a way that it would not have had it stayed in Egypt. “Nefertiti has become an outstanding example of how the foreign can be integrated into society,” Dr Wildung says. “She is accepted, not assimilated. She keeps her separateness and her uniqueness, yet she belongs here.”

The Fragile Queen?

And the Germans raised another reason why they just could not allow the bust of Nefertiti to be sent to Egypt for a short vacation in her homeland:

German officials say that the bust is too fragile to travel. “Nefertiti is not a pop star that can simply go on tour,” a senior official said.

 

Angela (Iron Lady) Merkel with Nefertiti Bust

So the bust is too delicate to travel home for a vacation?

The bust that survived being buried in the hot desert sands of Egypt for over 1,500 years, that was then dug up in 1912 and taken to the home of James Simon in Berlin in Germany, hidden in flack tower and later deep down in a salt mine during the Second World War to avoid Allied bombing, then after the war ended was moved first to Frankfurt then to a central warehouse of the Wiesbaden State Museum, then back to Berlin to the Old Museum and now to the New Museum?

She sure sounds pretty tough to me!

Chancellor Merkel, who lives just across the street from the New (Neues) Museum, Nefertiti's new prison in Berlin, can pop in to see her any time she wants to, but the people of Egypt have been denied the chance to see their famous queen for a few weeks.

The Nefertiti Standoff

Nefertiti's bust is one of "Raider" Hawass' Famous Five targets for return to Egypt (another one is the Rosetta Stone).

It seems we have a standoff between the German Iron Lady and the Egyptian Raider.

Our view - Set Her Free

Our view is in our novel, Obelisk Seven: Nefertiti should be set free, and returned to her home. Our compromise between the "No negotiations" stance of Chancellor Merkel and the "Unconditional Surrender" of Dr. Hawass uses something Kaiser Wilhelm II owned as part of our solution.

It is time for people of good will thoughout the world to rally behind "Raider" Hawass and insist on the return to Egypt of the bust of Nefertiti.

Set her free, Chancellor Merkel.

Let her go home.

James Simon - backer of Ludwig Borchardt who found Nefertiti Bust

Berlin flack tower - home of Nefertiti bust in 1941

   

Twice Buried – The Finding of Nefertiti's Bust

Bust of Queen Nefertiti - reformatted

A beautiful bust of a beautiful queen was buried under the hot sands of Egypt for 1,500 years, dug up and moved – surrounded by controversy – to Berlin in Germany in 1912, and then reburied, only this time in a salt mine.

Read this short extract from Chapter 15 of Obelisk Seven, about the discovery of the long-buried bust of Queen Nefertiti:

"After his death, Nefertiti simply vanishes from the scene. The city where Nefertiti lived is swiftly emptied. It falls into ruins and most of it is covered by the desert sand over the centuries."

            Gliffy paused. He had them completely now.

            "And then the revisionists start their campaign. They use chisels to carve out the names of King Tut's father and his mother and the new sun god, Aten, wherever they can find them. They even delete his father's name from the List of Kings, so that Nefertiti and her husband disappear from Egyptian history for more than three thousand and five hundred years. Poof!"

            His bunched fingers exploded.

            "One pharaoh gone."

            The exploded hand turned and moved gently sideways through the air.

            "And life moves on," Gliffy said, "until, one hot day in the year 1887 AD, a peasant woman starts digging among some ruins which peek through the hot desert sand, looking for old bricks which she can grind into a fertilizer for her garden."

            Kate shivered, feeling goose bumps on her arms. She folded them and leaned forward to stare once more at Nefertiti.

            "The peasant finds what becomes known as the Amarna Letters, around three hundred baked clay tablets with diplomatic correspondence on them. Other odds and ends are found and slowly the story of the missing royal couple is pieced together and the chisels of the ancient censors are overcome. The legend of Nefertiti starts to be reborn."

            "What happened? How did they find it?" Lorenzo asked, pointing at the bust.

            "Egyptologists rush to explore the city of Amarna. Over years, the city is uncovered from the sandy desert," Gliffy continued. "One of these teams comes from Germany and is lead by the famous Egyptologist, Ludwig Borchardt."

Ludwig Borchardt with Nefertiti Bust in Egypt

Borchardt (1863 – 1938) was an Egyptian archaeologist, discoverer of the Nefertiti bust and expert and Old Kingdom temples. He founded the German Archeological Institute in Cairo in 1907.

He began excavating in Amarna, and discovered the workshop of the sculptor Djhutmose, and in it the bust of Nefertiti, which is now in the New (Neues) Museum in Berlin.

The bust was buried once more in a salt mine in Germany, to protect it from Allied bombs during the Second World War.

Bust of Nefertiti

Amarna Tablet - which lead to discovery of Nefertiti Bust

Emilie & Ludwig Borchardt - discoverer of bust of Nefertiti

General George S. Patton  in Egypt during WWII

General Patton's Third Army with Nazi gold  in Merkers mine - DailyMail

Set Them Free! But keep the Kaiser's copy ...

We invite you to stand a while, and think.

Stand on the embankment of the Thames on a sunny weekday afternoon, Big Ben at your back, the Thames to your right, and watch the crowds scurrying past the twin Sphinxes standing guard over Cleopatra's Needle.

Observe how people stop and stare at the two giant statues, and then let their gazes drift upwards, to the small pyramidion on top of the obelisk.

Or stand on the plaque marking the spot where the guillotine first tasted blood during the French Revolution, and watch the cluster of people beneath the beautiful obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, and then let your gaze wander from them to the huge fountains with their leaping waters, and on past them along the most attractive street in the world, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, up to the proud Arc de Triomphe.

Or stand before the uncarved beauty of the obelisk in St. Peter's Square in Rome, and see how the colonnades sweep outwards to embrace the granite spear.

And think of these monuments, torn from their desert homeland and moved to these foreign spots.

By what moral right are they kept there?

The sight of these lonely giants, standing lost in the peace of millenia amidst the hustle and bustle of the huge cities they now find themselves in cannot but move you.

They moved us.

And so as part of our novel Obelisk Seven, we are hoping that we can add to a movement to Set Them Free. To return them – along with the bust of Nefertiti now in her new Berlin prison – to Egypt.

We are proud to join the company of H. Rider Haggard (1856 – 1925), the famous author of She, and King Soloman's Mines, in calling for their return.

Haggard, whose book She sold an incredible 83 million copies, wrote his first novel while struggling as a newly admitted lawyer, and established a genre of lost worlds. Haggard wrote She in a "white heat", he said, in February and March 1886.

In The Days of My Life, Haggard describes his meeting with Budge Snippets:

Only ought not the thing to stop somewhere? For my part I should like to see the bodies of the Pharaohs, after they had been reproduced in wax, reverently laid in the chambers and passages of the Great Pyramids and there sealed up for ever, in such a fashion that no future thief could break in and steal.

Haggard writes poignantly about the scene which E.A. Wallis Budge (1857 – 1934) found in one ancient tomb he had opened:

Dr. Budge told me of a certain tomb which he and his guide were the first to enter since it had been closed, I think about 4,000 years before. He said that it was absolutely perfect. There lay the coffin of the lady, there stood the funeral jars of offering, there on the breast was a fan of which the ostrich plumes were turned to feathers of dust. There, too, in the sand of the floor were the footprints of those who had borne the corpse to burial. Those footprints always impressed me very much.

 

H. Rider Haggard

In Obelisk Seven our hero,  Kate, argues for the return of the obelisks to Egypt.

She suggests that one way to do this is for the current host countries to provide the funding for Egyptian carvers to cut out of the granite quarries on the banks of the Nile new blocks of stone, and – using the old techniques – to carve exact copies of the obelisks.

These copies the host countries could move to London, and Paris,  and Rome, and New York, and then return the originals to their rightful places in Egypt.

We have a suggestion for the bust of Nefertiti.

It, too, should be returned to Egypt.

However, there is a copy already in existence – the one made in 1913 for James Simon when the bust was taken to Berlin in 1912 and gifted to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Why not let Berlin keep the Kaiser's copy, and return the original Nefertiti bust to her homeland?

Hallie Ephron on Pacing your Novel with a Pacing Table & Dotty Pictures

Hallie Ephron

I was lucky enough to attend the presentation by Hallie Ephron at the Surrey International Writers Conference on how to pace your novel. 

Raised by screenwriters, author of six acclaimed novels, crime fiction reviewer for the Boston Globe, and author of the how-to book, Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock ‘Em Dead with Style, Hallie sprinkled gems during her lecture.

One thing really grabbed my attention: her use of a Pacing Table for analysing the pacing in a novel, along with a graphical representation of the creation and release of tension.

The Pacing Table has three columns.

In the first one you block out the scene by describing the action taking place in the scene, using simple words.

The next two columns each have columns numbered 1 to 5, with the first column headed Slow (being 1) to Fast (being 5), and the third column headed Easy (=1) to Tense (=5).

The Pacing Table

Description:	Slow				Fast	Easy				Tense
	1	2	3	4	5	1	2	3	4	5
	1	2	3	4	5	1	2	3	4	5
	1	2	3	4	5	1	2	3	4	5

You use simple words to describe the action in the description column, and then you circle a number in the second and third columns, depending on your calculation of the speed and tension in that action.

Once you've done this for every action  in the scene, you are ready to portray the results graphically. To do this you turn your page sideways and connect the dots in columns 2 and 3.

Voila! There you have it: two graphs, one showing how the pacing of the scene's component actions changes from slow to fast and back again,  and one showing what happens to the tension (easy to tense, with tension rising and being released).

Now you can sit back and consider whether those two graphs represent what you the author want the scene to do. If you think it needs to be slowed down, you do that; if you need more tension, or a release of tension in a different spot, you do that.

It's interesting to see just how much information you can glean from the two graphs (after all, isn't a picture worth a thousand words?)

Some other snippets from her Pacing your Novel presentation. There is no direct correlation between speed and tension – even slow scenes can be tense. Tension is important, because it's the force that pulls the reader forward.

You can add tension to a fast scene by slowing it down – take a fight, for example: think cinematically, and slow your writing down as if you were shooting the fast scene in slow motion, as we see so often in movies. The slow motion actually makes the scene faster!

One key takeaway from Hallie was that EVERY scene had to have an arc – rising tension followed by a release of tension. The rise and release need not be dramatic, but there must an such an arc or else the scene is flat, listless and boring.

A few pointers from Hallie's bag of pacing tricks:

• you introduce characters slowly, with detail but no big detail dumps (they slow down the story)
• arguing? happens fast
• you can write a scene fast and slow it down in reflection
• staccato rythms create speed
• underwrite a scene to create speed
• verbs, verbs, verbs in a row create speed
• questions raise tension
• stop time with sensory descriptions
• longer sentences slow things down and vice-versa
• humor reduces tension
• conflict increases tension.

A lot of info, crammed into a short hour and a half.

Thanks, Hallie!