Chapter 7 “From Story to Art” – Section 11 “Pacing”
With Links to Supplementary Material
Have you ever received or given criticism for a story being too rapid and confusing or too slow and boring? Perhaps you had a specific scene that you just couldn't get to fit right with the epic scene that followed. When writers find these issues, it is very often a problem of incorrect pacing in the text. The speed at which the reader perceived the story was simply not working to make the timing work to create a dynamic experience. Today, I'm going to talk about the fine-tuning process of pacing, and how to maximize its potential.
Tip 1: Understand what pacing means to your story.
Before you begin to adjust the pacing in the text, you need to begin to understand how pacing affects your story, overall. When it comes to a story, pacing is about shaping and designing a complete and dynamic experience with a varied and lively feel. Think of it as designing a roller coaster. There are many different types of roller coaster, but the good ones have a certain experience in mind for the riders. This experience is created by a mix of slow ascensions that build expectations, drops, tunnels, loops, and anything else the builder can imagine to create an evolving adventure of thrills that won't become too dull or too manic. So, in your first draft—your blueprint for a roller-coaster—create chapters that have varied pacing—a mix of slow buildup scenes and action/payoff scenes, both of various intensities.
Tip 2: Learn to get a feel for how your story's pace needs to be adjusted.
As you are planning your chapters, and purposefully creating varied structures, buildups, and payoffs, you will likely have a pretty good idea of what pace each scene will have. Chase scenes, hilarity scenes, fight scenes, and any other payoff will be done with a quick pace, while setting up for them will be slower. It may help you to begin by marking each scene within your chapter with either 'fast' or 'slow' or even a rating of 1 through 10 to symbolize how fast you want it to be. After that, however, you'll need to improve the pacing by reading works of other writers who have mastered the skill of pacing, and by getting your Writing Partner to pay special attention to pacing and tell you whether each scene is too fast or too slow.
Tip 3: Use character reflection to slow the pace.
Once you have figured out how each of your scenes needs to be adjusted, it's time to develop your pacing tool-kit. Your first tool for slowing the pace is personal reflection. We often speak in writing about 'show, don't tell' in reference to describing objective facts and creating an image for the reader to see, like the rubble of a city that had been destroyed by a bomb, as opposed to just telling the audience that some bad people once blew up a city. Personal reflection is a meditative sort of tool that we use after showing an objective image, in order to get a feel for how the characters feel about a scene—like the hero standing over the bombed city and feeling hatred towards the villain who did it. However, this can even be as subtle as a character eating a banana and deciding whether they like the flavor. Using character reflection will greatly slow the pace of any scene that is passing too quickly—by subtly adding additional world, plot, and character building exposition.
Tip 4: Change sentence and paragraph lengths to adjust the pace.
Another thing you'll want to consider in speeding up or slowing down your pace is how long your sentences and paragraphs are. Just seeing a long paragraph slows the pace of a story down before the reader has a chance to go through it. They just take one look at the block of text and know that there will be a lot of information that will take time to process. However, short sentences and paragraphs—even paragraphs that are only a short sentence long—create a quick scene that is constantly changing and moving. Consider a sportscaster's play-by-play synopsis. Especially in soccer (futbol, football), the sportscaster or sports commentator creates the most vivid, tense, and lively verbal imagery of the game right before a goal, when there is lots of simultaneous action that they must quickly describe in short sentences. By using quick paragraphs and sentences that quickly change in focus from one player to the next, the sportscasters use their language to put the audience on the edge of their seats, even when listening by radio.
Tip 5: Utilize active and passive verb tenses to adjust the pace.
I've spoken before about cutting passive tense verbs—especially in action scenes—but that does not mean that they do not have their place. You can make a slower or more moderate pace by mixing active and passive tense verbs. Consider the difference in the purely active tense sentence, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,” and the one mixed with passive tense, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, and now he was falling.” By replacing the second active tense verb “had” with a passive tense “was falling” you create a moment of slow-motion in the reader's imagination. You can use this change in pace to create a sense of drama or even to have Humpty Dumpty think something critical to the plot before he falls.
Tip 6: Create stakes, time-limits, and tension.
When reading a novel, time is a subjective force created by the reader's imagination; that is to say that if you read about a character that had thirty seconds to disarm a bomb, there is not actual timer relating to the real world. The reader can put the book down for a week, come back, and there will still be 30 seconds on the clock. But what a time-limit does is to create the illusion of time passing quickly. A reader who is fully engaged in the book will trick themselves into reading faster and counting down the imaginary seconds so that they can fully appreciate the experience you have crafted for them—dramatically increasing the pace. Similarly, if you talk about days, or months, or even years passing between chapters, the reader will give pause and try to feel that time, even though it may just be a few sentences that show that passing. Something that they couldn't believe because it 'happened too quickly' suddenly makes plenty of sense because they have a inner sense that time has passed—giving you both the pacing that you need as well as the benefit of the doubt for how time changes things.
Tip 7: Adjust the Point-of-View (POV) character's sensory information to further reflect the pace.
Sensory information—what the character hears, tastes, smells, feels, and otherwise senses—will drastically change depending on the situation. When in the midst of battle or with a gun trained on their head, the POV character will likely not notice the chill of the wind, the smell of decay, the slight taste of scotch still on her tongue from the night before. Even though each of these could be possible on the battlefield, a character will not notice the same information in a fast-paced situation as when they are walking in the park. Instead their senses will usually be much more condensed and personal—they'll notice the beating of their own heart, the light-headed feeling of blood-loss, the disorienting flashes of lights and sounds of explosions going off all around them. Adjust your POV character's sensory information to make it best reflect the pace you are trying to create.
Feel free to comment with other suggested resources. Any questions about writing? Things you want me to discuss? Comment or send me a message and I will be glad to reply or feature my response in a later article. If you enjoy my reviews, please feel free to share my articles with friends, add it to your favorites, become a watcher on my page, or send send a llama my way!
Have you ever received or given criticism for a story being too rapid and confusing or too slow and boring? Perhaps you had a specific scene that you just couldn't get to fit right with the epic scene that followed. When writers find these issues, it is very often a problem of incorrect pacing in the text. The speed at which the reader perceived the story was simply not working to make the timing work to create a dynamic experience. Today, I'm going to talk about the fine-tuning process of pacing, and how to maximize its potential.
