Book Recommendation on pacing??

amergina · Jun 17, 2016

Does anyone know of any craft books or resources about pacing for novels?

This has come up a few times (outside of AW) and I'm trying to see if such a beast exists.

BethS · Jun 18, 2016

Writer's Digest online has a number of articles about pacing in its archives. I don't know as I've seen a book entirely devoted to pacing, but some writing books do include sections on pacing. I am unfortunately separated from my library at the moment by several thousand miles, or I could check on some of mine. But I seem to remember that Renni Browne and Dave King's Self-Editing for Fiction Writers has some things to say about it, as does Gary Provost's Beyond Style: Mastering the Finer Points of Writing.

JCornelius · Jun 21, 2016

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0806111917/?tag=absowrit-20

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/408230.Techniques_of_the_Selling_Writer

A scene is a unit of conflict lived through by character and reader.
The big moments in your story are scenes. Or, to put it the other way around, if you want some incident or bit to loom large to your reader, cast it in scene form.A sequel is a unit of transition that links two scenes.

A scene is a unit of conflict, of struggle, lived through by character and reader. It’s a blow-by-blow account of somebody’s time-unified effort to attain an immediate goal despite face-to-face opposition.

A sequel is a unit of transition that links two scenes, like the coupler between two railroad cars. It sets forth your focal character’s reaction to the scene just completed, and provides him with motivation for the scene next to come.

Sequel and scene: the search for a goal . . . then the struggle to attain it. These are fiction’s two basic units.
To lay out a story, repeat the pattern to fill the desired length: scene . . . sequel . . . scene . . . sequel . . . scene . . . sequel. . . .

You control story pacing by the way you proportion scene to sequel.

Yet in any story, some parts are presented in greater detail than are others. Here, whole chapters are devoted to action that takes place in fleeting minutes. There, a lapse of years may be passed over in a sentence.
So, how do you decide how much attention to give each element, each segment? How long should you write a given passage? Or how short?
Answer: You write to fit.

Book Recommendation on pacing??

amergina

Pittsburgh Strong

BethS

JCornelius