Hiya Vonsey,
My background is also academic. And at times, when I'm reading trade published fiction in an ongoing effort to 'level up,' I find myself thinking that the author really wrote a lot of non-essential stuff in some particular paragraph or other. It's entertaining but not necessary. So why is it there?
I find myself thinking of storytelling in a historical context--perhaps villagers around a fire, with an elder telling the tale of how their ancestors survived the drought. I also find myself thinking of Bob Ross and his painting show. Have you seen those? A happy little tree.
A happy little cloud.
In other words, I start to see the role of the writer as one of unfolding the story for the reader, at a pace they can ingest. Sure, it requires all the writing skills you read about--active voice, show don't tell, etc--but it also involves, in this case, the idea of
serving the reader. It's not about getting a story out efficiently... it's about hearing the story as a reader might, and making the experience as delicious as possible.
I just finished
Shanghai Girls for the second time, and this time I tried to be more cognizant of Lisa See's prose. Here's the open:
"Our daughter looks like a South China peasant with those red cheeks," my father complains, pointedly ignoring the soup before him. "Can't you do something about them?"
Mama stares at Baba, but what can she say? My face is pretty enough - some might even say lovely - but not as luminescent as the pearl I'm named for. I tend to blush easily. Beyond that, my cheeks capture the sun. When I turned five, my mother began rubbing my face and arms with pearl creams, and mixing ground pearls into my morning jook - rice porridge - hoping the white essence would permeate my skin. It hasn't worked. Now my cheeks burn red - exactly what my father hates. I shrink down into my chair. I always slump when I'm near him, but I slump even more on those occasions when Baba takes his eyes off my sister to look at me. I'm taller than my father, which he loathes. We live in Shanghai, where the tallest car, the tallest wall, or the tallest building sends a clear and unwavering message that the owner is a person of great importance. I am not a person of importance.
^^That opening gives you a character + name, appearance, immersion, her emotional state in the moment, relationships, culture...
It's Lisa See's voice, and it isn't mine, and it isn't academic,
, but to your question I think
the way to slow your pace is to "be the reader" experiencing story for the first time.
For me, in practical terms, this means keeping a list of all the
sorts of sentences that can be added to the skeleton of a story as I develop it. (an academic approach!) When I want to flesh out a paragraph, my list reminds me that I can add: a sentence of emotion, a sentence of situational context, a sentence of time-awareness, a sentence of action in response to something, a sentence of setting, a sentence of .... This list is part of my growing toolbox.
If you look at that quoted text, you'll see the first sentence (dialog) is a 'stimulus' --it's a poke in the eye to Pearl. Her response includes an action (slumping), a little setting (the tall buildings etc in Shanghai), a little something of how she looks, her awareness of time (
When I turned five...). Craft-wise, that open is accomplishing a lot.
See could simply have written
My father insults my face. His words make me feel small, but being unimportant, I am used to that. Instead she added a sentence of this, a sentence of that--each sentence serves the reader's experience. She integrated all the bits and smoothed it out.
So, to your question, I think that's one way to go. Break it down analytically.
Find the spots you want to breathe more life into, look at the tools in your toolbox and start tinkering.
Lisa See is a bestselling author with multiple novels. Sandra Dijkstra is her agent.
Shanghai Girls took her nineteen years to write.