pacing methods

It strikes me that there are two flavors of "pacing". One involves the movement of your story, the "plot", if you like that terminology. How does it flow? The second involves the flow of the prose itself. How do your sentences and paragraphs move along. For the latter, one of the best ways I know of to get a feel for that is to read aloud.

caw

Hmm. I think getting a good setup in the beginning, and then paying attention to what you have been writing as it compares to the kind of stories that you're shooting for. So maybe paying attention to what you're doing might be the key.

On a large scale, pacing is very much affected by the ratio of story actions (events) to reactions. (These are also called scenes and sequels.) A fast-paced book gives the reader the feeling that one thing after another is happening, because there can be several actions before the characters finally have a chance to react and regroup. A literary novel may have a much more leisurely pace due to actions being more spaced out, with a larger number of quieter scenes in between.


On a scene scale, pacing is affected by how much dialogue there is versus how much description and narration. And within the dialogue, how much space is given to beats (the bits of narration, description, body language, etc, that fills in around the dialogue) also affects pacing. IOW, if there's a lot of white space and not much narration/description, the pace will seem fast. Which is not always a good thing, particularly when you're trying to build tension in a dialogue scene.

In my experience, not all books have chapters that are close to the same length, and writers vary in how they structure or use chapters. Is there a reason why you think it's bad to fly over some parts of the story in a way that results in some chapters being shorter than others? Don't some segments of a story naturally resolve themselves with fewer words devoted to them?

I'm not trying to pick nits, since I haven't read your story, obviously. Maybe this is exactly what you need to do. But I'm wondering how you knew or decided that chapters of close to the same length with very even pacing was what this novel required.

BethS said:

On a scene scale, pacing is affected by how much dialogue there is versus how much description and narration. And within the dialogue, how much space is given to beats (the bits of narration, description, body language, etc, that fills in around the dialogue) also affects pacing. IOW, if there's a lot of white space and not much narration/description, the pace will seem fast. Which is not always a good thing, particularly when you're trying to build tension in a dialogue scene.

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I think you can have a fast-paced action scene with no dialogue. I'd say it's the proportion of action and dialogue vs. description and internal monologue.

I think you need to know when to slow down the pace. When something significant happens, you may need to slow things down a bit before characters react. Otherwise they look like everything's easy for them and they always know what to do and immediately have the courage to do it. On the other hand, use an occasional exception for effect.

How I think about pacing:

If I start to get bored while writing, it's probably a sign that my pace is lagging.

I don't plan, particularly, but in expanding my current novel, I draped the main plot over the three act structure and used that. Getting my point of no return to the 25k mark, for example, helps me make sure things flow right.

First, setting specific word targets is not the answer. A scene or chapter will be as long as it needs to be.

Pacing is a multi-level "thing." Too fast, too slow, too much action, too internal. I say focus on a process:
- my top level story follows a hero's journey.
- I write scenes and sequels, usually many scenes to a sequel. Following Ingermanson's advice has a risk of leading to predictability. My rule is one sequel per HJ element, so about 15 of 50-75 scenes. I also don't hesitate to blend sequels within scenes.
- within scenes I write mini-arcs. A long, narrative paragraph should follow an arc: action, pause (for description or whatever), resistance, climax, suspense, and ending. Such arcs often span many small paragraphs and dialogue. Internal or external doesn't matter.

When you take care of the elements that comprise a story, pacing will be there. Write to the story, not the pace.

Some links to consider
The Perfect Scene --
The Stevenson Knot --

morngnstar said:

I think you can have a fast-paced action scene with no dialogue.

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Yes, of course. Stripping out excess description (which can include choreography) and internals and even dialogue can help speed things up.

I'm also a pantser (love that phrase), and here's my strategy. I identify my main beats and the arc of my main character, including the ending. Then I write the first draft. (that's the hardest part for me, because I have a strong urge to fix as I go.) I sit down with my draft and eliminate any unnecessary scenes -- anything that doesn't push the story forward. I trim the remaining scenes and polish them. Then I send out the second draft to beta readers and ask (among other things) where they got bored.

My method is fairly painful, but I need my manuscripts to move along quickly because I write for young adults. There's very little chance to rehooking someone who's already peaced out on me.

Just focus on the content. A short chapter could still be boring if the content is irrelevant to the story. It will still feel slow-paced to the reader. On the other hand, a long chapter filled with interesting moments could boost the suspense, the time when the reader sits on the edge of their seat desperate to see what happens next. That won't be exactly "fast-pace" but the reader won't skip it and they will enjoy it all the same. Don't focus on boring things, that's all. Pacing doesn't have to be fast all the time, it has to be just right.

MonsterTamer said:

I'm working on my pacing. I'm a pantser - I've tried to plot and plan, with no success.

For those of you who write this way, would you mind sharing your methods?

My current process is to force myself into 3,000 word chapters, give or take a few hundred words. By doing this, I make myself flesh out the parts of the story I'm tempted to fly right over. This is not a hard and fast rule for me. Obviously if the chapter is done, it's done, and I move on. I have no intention of adding fluff to satisfy my theory. But it has seemed to help.

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You can use character change. If you know the character is one person at the beginning and another at the end, then that allows you to pace the change.

I'm terrible at planning out my plots in ways that make the pacing work the first time around. Instead, the pacing gets fixed in the editing round, where I force myself to ask if each scene adds to the story. If it doesn't, cut it. It's not the most efficient way to do things but if you're a bad planner like me it might be the only way to do it.

I'm a pantser too. I think pacing both in terms of plot flow and on a sentence level are both intuitive for the most part, but there are things you can do.

I keep an eye on word count when I am worried about plot flow. I mainly focus on short stories, but perhaps you can adjust it to chapters if you think this could help you. Rather than think of the end word count, I use the word count to help guide me. The end goal for me is between 3,000 and 5,000 words (so similar to a chapter). By the time I reach 1,000 words, something interesting needs to be going on. Another 1,000 words, there has to be an option or options presented to the characters and/or I'm nearing but still on the way up to the climax. Usually, I have a mini peak before the climax peak. Then another 1,000 words for the climax. Then 500 words for the comedown or conclusion. Okay, it's not an exact science, but I find this helpful. It helped me more than thinking I wanted by stories to be a certain word count and just focusing on that. Now, I pretty much have it down internally. But it was not something that came naturally for me. I had to work at it.

As for flow and pacing on a sentence, read poetry. After about three months of reading a ton of poetry, the pacing in my writing changed greatly. Everything was just smoother and the pacing seemed effortless, which is how I think we want our pacing to feel.

I'm a complete punster. I knows how long a given novel is supposed to be before I start writing. I know length, and I know genre. That's all I know about the novel when I sit down to write it.

Pacing is something I do in the first chapter. This kind of pace involves and controls length. It is, for me, the toughest part of writing a novel. The first chapter not only sets up character and story, but also controls length.

The other kind of pacing is the ratio of action to non-action. The exciting times that puts a reader on the edge of the seat, and the quiet times that gives characters, and readers, a chance to rest, to catch their breath. For me, action has to contain character and story, not just blowing something up, and quiet time must have something happening, even if it's just planning what to do next. It can't just be chatter and rest.

With this in mind, when things start to slow down, I hit someone in the head with a rock. When things speed up, I move the character to a location where no one can throw rocks at them. I don't mean this literally, of course, but the idea is there. As long as the action also contains character and story, and as long as the quiet times conta9ns something happening that pertains to character and story, this seems to work very well, and is more or less instinctive.