Pacing

I think it's a mistake to start the novel with a chapter with all set up and no conflict. It doesn't have to be "fast paced" or have big explosions, but there should be some kind of conflict.

What Ray said. Think about what you like to read and your favourite openings (as it were). Not saying you have to write the same, but getting a flavour might help.

Start the book where the action starts. Usually the third chapter.

Pacing to me is how fast the action moves.

Shorter sentences gives a feel of faster action.

I guess you kind of lost me with the use of the word, pacing.

I would start the book with something very interesting, gripping, the hook.

Yep, what Ray said. Start with conflict, but not necessarily cars exploding type of conflict. Establish your protagonist and his/her goal/need, and set that protagonist on the road to accomplishing that goals right away. It's the question -- will he accomplish his goal -- that keeps the pages turning and the question will get tougher and tougher as the story progresses, and that's pacing.

Conflict of some sort -- pov character wants X, and someone is preventing pov character from getting it -- in every single scene, with no time outs to introduce people. Think in terms of "actions speak louder than words," and a person in crisis (even if it's a tiny one initially) will reveal more about him/herself than a person sitting around in his/her comfort zone.

JD

ADVICE THE FIRST -- WRITE THE BEGINNING LAST

Or at least, do the agonizing perfect polish of those first three chapters,
last.

I'm paraphrasing somebody else here ...
can't remeber who just at the moment.

One problem with story openings is that they are technically difficult,
and we write them just when we are least prepared to do so.

We write the opening before we know our characters well,
before we have negotiated the conflicts of Chapters 13 and 22,
before all the 'aha moments' Chapter 8 and Chapter 11.

One way to solve the 'opening problem'
is to sketch out the opening,
finish the ms,
and return to lock down those first three chapters,
last.


ADVICE THE SECOND -- DON'T BE AN AMATEUR

There are some openings
that an agent picks it up and just groans.
Because many many amateur mss start this way.

AAAARRRRGGGGH goes the agent.
You do not want to do this to the nice agent, do you?

Do you want to know what amateur openings look like?

Go thou out to the web and find display sites.
Google -- "writers" "post" "your" "manuscript" "showcase"

Read fifty or a hundred of the offerings.
You only have to read to the point where you know this story sucks.
Look at why you know this story sucks
and don't do that


ADVICE THE THIRD -- SOME STUFF TO PUT IN CHAPTER ONE

Your story has a couple Main Characters. (1)

Your story has something that makes life just hell for an MC. Something that wants to let the air out of his tires and steal his underwear and bite his liver out and chew it up into little pieces and spit it out on the pavement. (2)

Your story also has something an MC would give his right arm up to the elbow for. (3)

Chapter One should contain (1) and either (2) or (3) or both.
It should contain those elements right from the start.

Not the beginning of the element or what will become the element. The element itself.


ADVICE THE FOURTH (AND FINAL) -- STRUCTURE

Do not put in a teaser for a few paragraphs
and then nip away somewhere else --
to yesterday or twenty years ago or Nome, Alaska.

Because wherever you nip to,
it is not as exciting as where you have just been
and the reader knows it.

When you start in a place and time,
with your MC and either (2) or (3) or both,
stay there
for the whole opening scene.


NON-ADVICE --
just an observation.

You can do any durned thing you please,
except bore the reader.
If you write well enough you can start Chapter One with the Vladivostok telephone directory.
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Good advice, job. And a very good idea about only sketching the opening until you have the story finished, and not worrying about whether it sucks. My book finally presented the right opening when I was only a few chapters from being done, which required completely rewriting the first four chapters, which I'd spent (wasted) so much time trying to get right the first time.

I'd say, err on the side of action. If you want to lead in with some gentler getting-to-know-you stuff, cut it short. But the sooner the better, in terms of getting the adrenalin going.

maestrowork said:

. It doesn't have to be "fast paced" or have big explosions,.

Click to expand...

Although that does help. First chapters have to hit the reader in the face, steam roll over them with concepts, charicters and situations. Make sure it's a fun steamroller. Then , once you've paved the reader over, you start driving them with new chapters, like a road thingy.

Make sence?

This is what I sometimes like to do (and others can tell you if it is bad): Rather than stuffing your first chapter with setup info, accomplish the same goal by turning it into a brief "prologue" that hits some critical point earlier in your character's life. For instance, if I were writing Sleeping Beauty, I would begin with a prologue in which Beauty is a little girl terrified of falling asleep and having nightmares. This has its own internal conflict and I might end it with something ambiguous like her father coming in to comfort her and tell her that there's nothing to fear from sleeping-- but Beauty is suspicious that her father might not be telling the truth.

Now I've accomplished the "hook" - hopefully my reader is curious about this little girl, sympathizes with her, and wants to know exactly where this "sleeping" thing is going.

Then in the first chapter I'd begin right at the action-- she's searching the house for a spindle or whatever (am I totally botching the way this story goes?) and thinking about how everyone has been so darned worried lately, what's the big deal? And where the heck did that old woman with the spindle disappear to? She wants to learn how to spin! (And flesh out the background as you go.)

Zoombie said:

Although that does help. First chapters have to hit the reader in the face, steam roll over them with concepts, charicters and situations. Make sure it's a fun steamroller. Then , once you've paved the reader over, you start driving them with new chapters, like a road thingy.

Make sence?

Click to expand...

It depends on the genre and the story.

I thought this was about "walking back and forth". Ay ay ay.

"Whiz bang" is not the same as conflict. You can have explosions and not have "conflict" in the requisite sense for fiction, and you can have a couple of people sitting around on a veranda, and there IS conflict.

This is one of the hardest concepts, I think, for struggling writers.

Pick three to five of your favorite (currently published, in the last three to five years) authors. Read the first scene and see if you can identify the protagonist, what he/she wants, why it's important to him/her, and why he/she can't have it. Those are the elements you need in a first scene, and they'll vary in their whiz-bangyness by the genre and the author and the mood/voice of the story. If it's a thriller, what the person wants will probably be something life-and-death. If it's women's fiction, what the person wants will probably have more to do with community and relationships. But either way, you'll have a person who wants something, and who is being prevented in some way from getting what he/she wants.

JD, who needs to take her own advice and figure out what the heck the protagonist in her current short story wants.

It's not enough to...

have a supportive writing group. They have to know what they're talking about.

Is your writers' group a group of well published writers, some with several novels published?

Does the group have a qualified, experienced, well published writing teacher among them?

Is the group a good mixture of genre and non-genre writers?

Too often writers' groups tend to become a 'Pat your back' group with nothing constructive in the way of criticism.

pdr said:

Is your writers' group ... writers, some with several novels published? ... a qualified, experienced, well published writing teacher among them? ...

Click to expand...

(jo scratches head) ...

I can understand why a newby would want to be in a crit group with pubs and pubbed teachers of great skill.

What I don't quite see is why these clever and experienced folks would want to be in a crit group with newbies.

A more realistic goal might be to find a crit group that contains a couple folks slightly more advanced than oneself in at least some aspects of writing.
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I'm going to use a personal WIP example to illustrate first, then I'll ramble on about how it can be more broadly applied. And when I say "ramble," I mean (to get geeky) "roll D20 vs. sleep." But maybe it'll be of use to someone...

Me, All Me:

In the novel I'm working on, I'm struggling with the opening. The book has ancient curses, mysterious graves, and, by the end, a (for all intents and purposes) zombie army moving against the MC and his cronies.

But that's just the surface story. Underneath, it's really about the way Otherism seeps into your bones so you don't even know you're a bigot until you're confronted with it. And it's about the way people make excuses for things they know are wrong, and even when the excuses are peeled away they're going to keep doing those things. And it's about the damage these bigotries can cause.

And so, to reconcile the two layers, my opening will need to do a few things:

1. Introduce the Otherism concept and the harm it does. ("otherism" = human habit of ingraining Us and Them)
   
2. Introduce the excuse-making/do it anyway concept.
   
3. Set up, in some small way, curses and not-zombies
   
4. (Probably) Bury the ending

In order to do all these things, I could start with a whiz-bang chase scene. (MC, laughing about curses with his girlfriend, is an outsider who gets himself hurt when a few locals realize that he's an outsider and decide to run him off. Scene is from the bad guys' POV, so we can get the Otherism in, and the excuses. MC passes by the thing that'll be needed to end the story and has an opportunity to take it/use it/whatever but he's running too fast to really see it.)

If my story's fast-paced start-to-finish, this might be the way to go.

But the way I have it planned right now, it's a slow build--things going wrong a little at a time until everything goes to hell in the middle. A fast-paced beginning wouldn't accomplish what I want to accomplish. So I'll probably want to start with something more insidious:

1. MC comes to town, laughing with his girlfriend at the locals like he's superior, in a way that will make the reader laugh with him. They go to a diner, maybe, where people are cold to him, which will justify him laughing at them sotto voce.
   
2. MC and his girlfriend do the rationalization/"I know this is wrong but..." thing, something as small jobbing the waitress on the tip because they didn't like the way the waitress looked at them, even though the service was just fine.
   
3. MC notices some small thing--maybe just the way the waitress looked at them--that sticks out as Wrong that will later grow to be larger as the curse takes hold.
   
4. MC, listening to another local's conversation in the diner (mocking it quietly with the girlfriend, no doubt), hears the Thing that will help him make sense of everything at the turning point in the story.

Something like that is probably the right opener for this story. It's subtle, but it contains the themes I'll be dealing with in the book, and it accomplishes "dramatic" things as well. Individually, none of these might carry a scene, but combined, they have a pretty good chance.

Too, they (or something like them) will hopefully help me accomplish something else: by the end of the book, I want the readers to look at themselves and ask themselves what preconceptions and Otherisms they believe, and why. To that end, I need the MC to engage himself on his own Otherisms as part of the story's endgame. And so I need to set them up in the beginning so he'll have them in the endgame.


And now the more general...

I think the above is a fair illustration of how one can figure out what belongs in the opening and what kind of opening to use. It implies the following questions:

• How is the story is going to be paced?
  
• What is the story about? What are the themes?
  
• What elements does the story emphasize? Milieu/time/place? Character change or lack thereof? Break-neck action?
  
• What effect do you want the story to have on the reader? Do you want them to think? To take action? To sit back with a glazed look on their face, overwhelmed? Do you want them to be happy? Sad? To feel impotent against some larger force? To feel empowered to face some larger force? Whatever you want the reader to feel at the end, you have to set up in the beginning. If the character is going to give something up, he needs to have that thing; if he's going to gain something, he needs to not have it.

Once you know this stuff, you can determine what type of conflict the beginning needs in order to accomplish your goals, and what elements need to be present.

The beginning should complement the story, making the promises that the story will fulfill. It should introduce the themes that the story will deal with. It should set the stage for the way you want the reader to walk away from the story. And, most of all, it should engage the reader.

I would agree that some novels do need set-up time. Some novels need to start slow, with no action. But you STILL have to have conflict, right there up front. Here are some example openings. Identical situation, sort of, but the first has no conflict. The second has plenty.

::No Conflict::

John came over now and then that season and we would watch the the tobacco harvest over the river. We sat on the porch with tea and bare feet. Sometimes he would talk about hitching up to Michigan for a factory job, but mostly we just stared and dozed.

::Conflict::

John had been out of work a few months, and he came to my place to pass the time most days. We sat on the porch in the morning and he chewed his nails watching the tobacco harvest, muttering. He didn't like to talk about the state pen so I never brought it up.

"You sold that old hutch yet?" he asked sometimes. "How much you get for it?"

I usually just shrugged. "Not much." And I never said more than that about it, even if he pressed. Eventually he'd give up and complain about the weak tea, and talk about Michigan.

Pacing, eh?

Let me grind it down to its most simple, basic element in the following statement:

Effective pacing is being able to go from slow to fast or fast to slow in the appropriate places in your story to not only hold your reader's interest, but their emotions.

The thing is that page turners are page turners for a reason. While many discredit Harry Potter as being an example of poor writing that many simply bought into, I have to disagree. It is one of the top 3 most printed books of all time, I believe, up there with the Bible and The Lord of the Rings (which has also been discredited). To refuse to learn from Harry Potter, claiming it to be purely a commercial success, is to discredit all those who read it, and to give up perceptiveness, one of the most essential traits among writers. That being said, Harry Potter, especially the early novels from which the books exploded, do an almost mystical job of pacing. Many times, for research, I've found myself being instead drawn into the story of book 1 and reading half the book before I look up at the clock and remember that I'm supposed to be an analyist of this story right then, rather than an engrossed reader. It seems as though the pace is high-speed, but that is only the speed at which you read. The pace of the story is actually down and up constantly, as Rowling grabs you with her words, whatever page you flip to, and sends you on a ride of emotion from which you're not likely to get off unless you suddenly become aware of what's behind the scenes and grow jealous. Bad idea.

What is behind the scenes, though? Let us turn back to pacing.

In the most general sense, as talked about before, this is the concept of the balance between going too slow and too fast in a story. Both will drive the reader out of the story, no matter how pertinent or well-constructed your story is. Do not give tranquility without challange, harmony without tension, peace without danger, normalcy without interruption, or relaxation without fear - You get the idea. You need to create a mix of harmony and tension, slow and fast, that flows on the micro level while, on the greater scale, you have progression. Pacing, however, is between action to reaction within the scenes, the scenes themselves, the sequences of scenes, and the Acts of your story. While not everything may be cut and dry Slow-Fast-Slow-Fast, especially on the greater scale, to pace well you will indeed have variance, or else you will bore the reader. It doesn't matter the content or the awards you win for philosophical masterpiece of the year. You want to resonate with your readers, who are attuned to the variance of life and that desire of duality of pace.

For instance, let's look at the 2nd chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone - you can read an excerpt here at http://www.kidsreads.com/clubs/club-sorcerers_stone-excerpt.asp

Slow: The chapter opens with a description, which can be considered at going a slow pace, but this rides off the fast-paced ending of the cheer ("To Harry Potter, the boy who lived!") at the end of the last chapter, which was big motivation for coming to this chapter anyway. Also, even this slow spot is "fast" because it covers 10 years of time in one paragraph, and gives some gratification for the history foreshadowed in the first chapter.
Fast: Harry gets woken up "with a start", also bringing us back to his position. After he flicks off the spider from his sock, this brings us into slow speed again.
Slow: Further gratifies us with more on the result of Harry going to live with the Dursleys, which was foreshadowed by their disapproval of the Potters and the excellent set up of character in the first chapter, which we now see manifested in Dudley. This also provides a contrast to Harry. The humorous description which builds sympathy for the MC takes that subject and adds a little more info him as an individual, in particular, him in comparrison to the Dursleys, though they aren't the main subject of the second part of this section.
Fast: Within the description, the line "And don't ask any questions" concludes the frustration of living with the Dursleys for the slow segment with clarity. This is very short fast section, ending with Uncle Vernon shouting at Harry about his hair.
Slow: More background, but short, making us want more, as we know there is more to Harry than just his hair growing wild. The second part of this section, however, gets our mind off of that by showing us a picture of Dudley that contrasts Harry from both Dudley and Aunt Petunia: "and thick blond hair that lay smoothly on his thick, fat head. Aunt Petunia often said that Dudley looked like a baby angel--Harry often said that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig." This settles his difference on the subject of hair with every member of the Dursley family.
Fast: We grow even more discussed with the Dursleys as Dudley cries about his presents and gets gratified by his parents.
Slow: This interesting slow segment when the phone rings is a point of interest. The slowness here actually draws us in so we realize that this is a turning point, but just slow enough so that the next part falls in line with our own emotions.
Fast: Petunia asks "Now what?" just as we do, our heart leaping for Harry who has our sympathy in this loony bin of a family. The background tension here launches a set of dialogue that moves quickly, but slows down partially in the middle to help us in hating Dudley for crying in this moment of glory. The scene is on Dudley's side when we hit the slow section.
Slow: This gives the conclusion of the scene first, in which Harry gets to go to the zoo, which leads into the second section. More background, made pertinent by the fast section, and gratifying some more of the anxiety of the offset worlds of the first chapter where we have already seen wizards. Even this part has a mini-pace to it, progressing from small, humorous magical occurances to even more doubtfully normal cases in which Harry is forced to come to logical conclusions. Then it goes to "But today, nothing was going to go wrong.", which, from the pacing of the examples, we scoff at, knowing that logic is folly, and not only will something go wrong, but it will be a magical sort of thing. Still- we want to find out how. It then snaps back to the moment.
Fast - snapshot of an inconsequential moment that reveals much about every moment with the Dursleys through that inconsequence, and a great example of what Harry has to deal with, living with magical reality mentioned in the slow segment before.
Slow - Entering the zoo. No description is wasted, poking further fun at Dudley.
Fast - Brings the slow section to come into perspective with a single scentence: "Harry felt, afterward, that he should have known it was all too good to last."
Slow - Sets up the scene and the problem: the snake won't move. We are pulled alone emotionally by Dudley not being gratified - something we wanted all chapter.
Fast - Our pulse quickens as the snake raises its head while only Harry is looking, and we are hooked beyond measure of putting the book down when it winks.
Slow - Harry and the snake have an exchange, which is slow but tense, noting the air of mystery and excitement surrounding this encounter.
Fast - Dudley butts in. The scene turns when the glass disappears, and continues to hold us till the snake is gone and sufficent people have screamed.
Slow - A long passage settles in the injustice of his reality with us, engraining the irony of magical experiences without understanding or appreciation for them. Even though the two scenes in the chapter ended up, the chapter as a whole ends down, creating irony that binds us to the MC, and helps us to feel his pain at having to live in abject tyranny, the "magic" of such experiences as the one at the zoo being offset by an oppresive sense of logic. We see alot wrong in this scene, and what should have turned out good went bad, though we knew it would all along- it could have ended no other way. But we want to see it end another way, so we turn to Chapter 3.

THAT is pacing at its finest. We ride along, and tension builds because there is forshadowing placed at strategic points in the chapter off of which to base further conflict, fast leads to slow and slow to fast with seeming effortlessness, but building the conflict till we get the extremes of possibility presented in the chapter in truely ironic fashion: Harry has a supremely gratifying magical experience that grants his revenge on Dudley, who we've grown to dislike more and more throughout the chapter, and then Harry gets punished for it, prolonging our sense of injustice and deeping our desire to have Harry get out of that mess and find out who he really is.

This is what I meant by being able to learn from effective pacing. Whether in a movie, play, or novel, you know when your attention has been grabbed through effective pacing, and you don't have to justify why you're watching or reading what you are. Rather, you might feel something devious in it, and seek to discredit it somehow to protect yourself from its effect on you. If you catch yourself doing that, instead recognize its effectiveness and analyze it. Whether or not it is based in moral, deep, probing themes or questions about our reality is an entirely different matter.

Hope that helped

EDIT- As a further example, I noticed that my post is a BAD example of pacing, but that was for necessity, and I wasn't in the midst of writing a story. I go from slow to fast to slow to fast for way way too long, then back to slow for a few lines too long, then summing it up with one line of fast. A lesson within a lesson!

Ooh, that's interesting. I never really understood how pacing worked. Now I do. I hope this improves my writing significantly. Another thing I'd like to add is to keep the language consistent. Narration should maintain the same tone of voice unless it's by a character who's personality changes. Using a static background character as the narrator is a challenge because you can't change them too much, but if you need to portray an emotion more then it's tempting to alter how the narrator speaks. Buuut...yeah, not getting into that right now. Also, even when doing foreshadows and asides and flashbacks and all that good stuff, you cannot change the voice. Otherwise, it might confuse the reader, or make subtleties too obvious, or worst of all, repulse the reader. I'm going to take a stab and add that when changing the tempo while pacing, DON'T CHANGE THE VOICE.

Sorry if this was too random or preachy; I love to go on about writing style.

Voice and tone should be another thread but my side note on that would be that while voice probably should be consistent for the narrative, tone doesn't have to be. If you have an actual character doing the telling, however, they can also change their voice in surprising ways to add depth to their own character and add insight to the story. You then become aware of the narrator and his influence on your view, and you have a multilayered story. While this can be dangerous, it can be handled effectively if you have a supreme knowledge of your world, your purpose, and your narrator (who you should construct to fit your purpose).

ANYWAY- back to pacing

I guess when one of the problems with pacing is how variable the interpretation of the word is for different people.
Pacing is not a mad rush in an action novel. (OK Dan Brown can do it.)
Neither is it an issue of keeping the novel all narration let's say if you are writing literary.
In my opinion pacing works at different levels, at different points of the novel. Sometimes when you have set up intense scenes, the reader needs a bit of air and the the writer can slow things down.
Pacing is more about the right blend of action/dialog versus narration. A mix of show and tell and all the other subtle elements of a novel.

Driving a Ferrari at full speed for 6 hours or a hybrid at under 10mph, both can get boring.
Plus both run out of fuel at some point.

IMNSHO.

There's a huge difference between overall pacing & the vital "first words." If someone picks your book off a shelf & reads the first page or three, will they go "wow -- I need to know more"? or will s/he think, "nice grammar, there" & put it back?