I've got a terrible pacing problem.

I have a tendency to rush through the endings. My beginnings are my most flushed out, and I just write more quickly as I go, skipping details as the story takes over my fingers.

To compensate, I write over the top of the endings, adding those details I've skimped on. This at least gives everything a more even pace. I always have areas I have to embellish on, after, and parts I need to slim down, too, but that's only after I've written over until the story is a nice rounded out sort of number. Scenes get added and deleted, sure, but when you're working from 60k, plus or minus a few scenes isn't much.

Best advice, look for places where the story is rushed, or where it summarizes events that should be shown.

(Let me say again, I'm so excited for this book to be written. ) Planning exercises! I love them.

Actually, I don't. What I do is sit down and write a list of scenes/things I want to happen in the book. This is how one usually looks (with random situations);

1. Grafitti the school gym
(Here the subpoints go that I want to see in the scene)
- Character A buys wrong color paint
- Character B's car breaks down halfway there
-Character A almost accidentally confesses her love to Character B (this is the subpoint that advances the plot, it could be anything from running away to cutting her hair to having a teary phone call, something that moves the plot forward.)

2. Character B gets in very public fight during school with local bully
- Character A hears about it as it's going on and rushes to see it because she's worried
- Character A debates with self about jumping in and defending Character B/masculinity/bully looks really pissed/etc.
- Character A doesn't jump in. Character B gets the shit kicked out of him, but his pride is intact. He sees Character A saw the fight and regrets not fighting back.


The list of scenes will usually be 50-60 long, but I cut some out if they don't fit. After cutting down the completely useless/bad ones, you ask yourself if any can be 'merged' to make a chapter. Sometimes one scene takes up a whole chapter!

Um...that's how I do, but it's probably a crap way. XD

Maybe you need to add a(nother) subplot or something like that? I mean, other than the modeling and falling in love with his roommate and looking for her, what does he have to deal with? Any personal issues? I'd think something like this would bring something up. Any insecurities that modeling brings up/out or that falling in love does? Or that possibly losing someone he loves does?

What about the lie he tells his parents? How big is the blow up going to be? Why does he lie? Can you expand on that? Any friends he has who could end up causing trouble for him? Or his parents possibly come looking for him?

Because you have so few words in your manuscript right now, you have an array of things you could add to pad it. You should focus on questions that could possibly arise from the things he does or doesn't do. Think about other ways things could go.

Unfortunately, I have the opposite problem, which I am dreading dealing with right now. Adding seems so much more fun than cutting.

I wish you the best of luck!

finish the first draft before you worry about it.

I agree with everybody Keep new twists, events, or subplots boiling in your brain as you finish the first draft. But get what you know down on paper rather than lose any momentum over the length issue.

I second Shady Lane to get the whole thing written and then worry about length, plot holes, adding scenes, whatever. I usually have so much backstory in my first 3 chapters that I know I'm going to delete them anyway. I consider those my 'getting to know my characters' chapters.

I don't know if you'll find this helpful, but what I've done before with stories and poems (not novels, yet) is to push past the THIS IS THE ENDING wall. I.e., Once you get to the point where you think the ending is, force yourself to keep writing. For me, at least, this forces my imagination to reach into areas I'd not otherwise considered and often ends up changing the overall feel/point of what I'd already written.

In essence, I'm agreeing with Shady Lane because, well, you have to finish what you see as your first draft before you can push on through that ending.

Alternatively, 37K might be the exactly correct length for the story you're telling.

I don't mean to talk for Tilt, but --

I think the problem she sees here isn't so much an "it's too short" problem. (I don't think it is.) I mean, you probably can't query it at 37K, but at the pace you're writing, the likelihood is that you have skimmed over something that can be expanded on, or there's a subplot that can be included. I too favour fast drafts, but you can't take them to be representative of your book.

I think what you're seeing here (jumping to a few conclusions) is that you're already trying to see this through an agent's eyes. They tend to ask for the first 50 pages, don't they, as a partial? People will tell you that's not a healthy thing to do, and maybe they're right, but as you've just come out of a huge querying spurt, I think it's quite understandable.

What I tend to do in books where I feel like I'm treading water for the first part -- eventually, I have an info-dump of sorts that falls somewhere around the middle, where the protaganists realize a lot at once. It's possible that you have that problem. In which case, it might help your 50ish pages if you can spread that out.

But, ultimately, you HAVE to finish the first draft before anyone can offer you any constructive assistance. And that isn't just your typical "ALWAYS FINISH THE FIRST DRAFT" party line. Because pace is something that has to run through the whole novel, and it's very difficult to judge pace on a section of the novel.

tilt190 said:

I have this new WIP, which concerns a guy who goes to New York on a lie to his parents, secretly becomes a male model, falls in love with his roommate, and then needs to find said roommate after she runs away. This takes about 17K words.*

I'm pretty sure my pacing will be way off because the actual "finding" part will take about 15K to do. *

And in the first fifty pages, the MC gets used to being a model/contacts home/falls in love. Nothing really happens. If I cut it shorter, then everything'll be pushed forward a little and my word count's gonna nosedive. If I make it longer, it'll be way too tedious to read. Right now, I'm sitting at 25K (MC gets started on journey), and I've got about 12K left, tops.*37K is nowhere as long as a novel should be, and I know that if someone else was writing this, it'd be an acceptable length...but alas. >.<

Does anyone else have this problem? What do you do (methods, planning exercises, etc) to decide where to pad/thin out the right parts of the book? **

ACK.*

Click to expand...

Throw another obstacle at your MC--much as True suggested via a subplot or two. Do the parents discover his lie and make life difficult? Is the journey to find this girl too easy? Can he run into a few extra characters / trouble along the way, etc.

I also agree with Shady Lane. Get the first draft on paper and then flesh it out. You'll see plot potential / pacing issues in a much clearer light if you do that (IMHO).

Good luck!

ex_machina said:

(Let me say again, I'm so excited for this book to be written. ) Planning exercises! I love them.

Actually, I don't. What I do is sit down and write a list of scenes/things I want to happen in the book. This is how one usually looks (with random situations);

1. Grafitti the school gym
(Here the subpoints go that I want to see in the scene)
- Character A buys wrong color paint
- Character B's car breaks down halfway there
-Character A almost accidentally confesses her love to Character B (this is the subpoint that advances the plot, it could be anything from running away to cutting her hair to having a teary phone call, something that moves the plot forward.)

2. Character B gets in very public fight during school with local bully
- Character A hears about it as it's going on and rushes to see it because she's worried
- Character A debates with self about jumping in and defending Character B/masculinity/bully looks really pissed/etc.
- Character A doesn't jump in. Character B gets the shit kicked out of him, but his pride is intact. He sees Character A saw the fight and regrets not fighting back.


The list of scenes will usually be 50-60 long, but I cut some out if they don't fit. After cutting down the completely useless/bad ones, you ask yourself if any can be 'merged' to make a chapter. Sometimes one scene takes up a whole chapter!

Um...that's how I do, but it's probably a crap way. XD

Click to expand...

I use the same technique! I write them on note cards so I can lay them out and shift them around until I get the best story arc. Easy enough to edit the cards too if you come up with something better. (When I finally have the perfect storyline, I number the cards in pencil just in case I change my mind again).

Shady's right. The 1st draft of my boom on sub was 38k, it's now at 95k. My plot moved similarly to yours - stuff happens & girl goes looking for boy. But somewhere along the way, I realized there was more to it. And the beginning I had pushed forward (lost a chapter).

I think what everyone else has said is great -- finish the book, look for subplots, don't worry about it.

I thought I'd also just throw out...

I had a fantasy novel I'd worked on forever. Had a similar problem of being short, but I eventually finished it up with a lot of subplots at 80k. The problem was, the main plot moved so slowly because most of it was subplots. After going through three more drafts of the novel, I really wasn't happy with it. I saved this version, then made a careful, careful outline, stripping sub-plots and combining what scenes I could. Then I tightened language like crazy. It's now a 10k short(ish) story going through revisions -- and for the first time, I'm actually really happy with it. I hope this doesn't happen with your book -- definitely finish it first -- but this angle's finally letting me tell a story I really wanted to in a way that I'm also happy with. I also think it makes an awesome short. Sometimes I think it was wasted time...but by fleshing everything out, I got the best 10k from 80k of writing. Having a good short story is better than having a bad novel.

I hope yours works out as a novel.

You've gotten great advice already...I'd just mention that in your description, I'm not sure what the main conflict of your story is.

If it's a story about a young man's journey toward independence or whatever, then the first part (being misunderstood by parents, lying, leaving, becoming a model) isn't boring...it's all part of the conflict and story arc (he's trying to break free from his parents, find his way, etc).

If the story is primarily about his relationship with his roommate and the losing, then finding her thing, then the initial set up is less significant.

Anyway,it's the big picture stuff--how your MC is going to change, and what events bring about that change--that should help guide the pacing.

But, yeah, finish the first draft!

The reason I write them fast is so I don't have time to think about this stuff, seriously. my first drafts always have major pacing problems. i mean, they're under 30,000 words, always, and the part that ends up being the entire third act is, like, ten pages in the first draft, because i just want the damn thing to be finished as quickly as possible.

so i fix it later, but i don't think it's possible to really be able to look at the whole thing and what needs to be faster and what needs to be slower until you have the whole thing.

I have to agree with Shady. I'm also a slim first draft writer. I write fast, though no two weeks.

That's probably due to the three toddlers running around the house.

Anyway, after my last novel was giving me sleepless nights because I knew it needed more but it had great bones, I went to this:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html

You have to think outside the lines a little. I wouldn't write a novel based on this. I am very anti-book writing books too. I found this helpful with filling in the holes. It's extremely tried and true stuff if you can manage to wrap your head around a way to relate it to your novel. Some parts you have to stretch for some books, some you don't.

My last revision added 15K using that and notes from my writing partners. That included quite a bit of cutting too.

That touches on my other suggestion. When you know you need more beef but you are so close it's making you itch, e-mail your crit partner and BEG.


If you don't have steady crit partners, start dating. They's better than men.

Shady Lane said:

The reason I write them fast is so I don't have time to think about this stuff, seriously. my first drafts always have major pacing problems. i mean, they're under 30,000 words, always, and the part that ends up being the entire third act is, like, ten pages in the first draft, because i just want the damn thing to be finished as quickly as possible.

so i fix it later, but i don't think it's possible to really be able to look at the whole thing and what needs to be faster and what needs to be slower until you have the whole thing.

Click to expand...

In total agreement. My first draft was 50k. Second, 65K. Third and final that I'm just now finishing revisions on is 80K.

Write to the end.
Start over. Turn tells into shows, add sensory details, and smooth out rough spots.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

Good luck. You can do it.

I'm going to agree with everyone here. My latest draft clocked in at 48K. (I actually thought I was the only writer who has to add scenes and words instead of chop them.)

Anyhow, writing that I knew there were scenes and areas that I needed to explore more. But just finishing makes it that much easier to see what needs to be done.

For yours, subplots could help beef it up.

Another consideration: Do things come too easy for your MC? If so, beat him up a bit more, which will add words. For example, make him work harder to get the girl or make the girl have a boyfriend when he finds her, etc. Life should suck for him, so if everything happens too soon then maybe those extra words could go toward tormenting him more.