By Joe Moore
The story in most novels takes place over a period of time. Some are condensed to a few hours while many epic tales span generations and perhaps hundreds of years. But no matter what the timeframe is in your story, you control the pacing. You can construct a scene that contains a great amount of detail with time broken down into each minute or even second. The next scene might be used to move the story forward days, weeks or months in a single pass. If you choose to change-up your pacing for a particular scene, make sure you’re doing it for a solid reason such as to slow the story down or speed it up. Remember that as the author, you’re in charge of the pacing. And the way to do it is in a transparent fashion that maintains the reader’s interest. Here are a couple of methods and reasons for changing the pace of your story.
Slow things down when you want to place emphasis on a particular event. In doing so, the reader naturally senses that the slower pace means there’s a great deal of importance in the information being imparted. And in many respects, the character(s) should sense it, too.
Another reason to slow the pacing is to give your readers a chance to catch their breath after an action or dramatic chapter or scene. Even on a real 
rollercoaster ride, there are moments when the car must climb to a higher level in order to take the thrill seeker back down the next exciting portion of the attraction. You may want to slow the pacing after a dramatic event so the reader has a break and the plot can start the process of building to the next peak of excitement or emotion. After all, an amusement ride that only goes up or down, or worse, stays level, would be at best, boring. The same goes for your story.
Another reason to slow the pace is to deal with emotions. Perhaps it’s a romantic love scene or one of deep internal reflection. Neither one would be appropriate if written with the same rapid-fire pacing of a car chase or shootout.
You might also want to slow the pacing during scenes of extreme drama. In real life, we often hear of a witness or victim of an accident describing it as if time slowed to a crawl and everything seemed to move in slow motion. The same technique can be used to describe a dramatic event in your book. Slow down and concentrate on each detail to enhance the drama.
What you want to avoid is to slow the scene beyond reason. One mistake new writers make is to slow the pacing of a dramatic scene, then somewhere in the middle throw in a flashback or a recalling of a previous event in the character’s life. In the middle of a head-on collision, no one stops to ponder a memory from childhood. Slow things down for a reason. The best reason is to enhance the drama.
A big element in controlling pacing is narration. Narrative always slows things down. It can be used quite effectively to do so or it can become boring and cumbersome. The former is always the choice.
When you intentionally slow the pace of your story, it doesn’t mean that you want to stretch out every action in every scene. It means that you want to take the time to embrace each detail and make it move the story forward. This involves skill, instinct and craft. Leave in the important stuff and delete the rest.
There will always be stretches of long, desolate road in every story. By that I figuratively mean mundane stretches of time or distance where nothing really happens. Control your pacing by transitioning past these quickly. If there’s nothing there to build character or forward the plot, get past it with some sort of transition. Never bore the reader or cause them to skip over portions of the story. Remember that every word must mean something to the tale. The reader assumes that every word in your book must be important.
We’ve talked about slowing the pacing. How about when to speed it up?
Unlike narration, dialog can be used to speed things up. It gives the feeling that the pace is moving quickly. And the leaner the dialog is written, the quicker the pacing will appear.
Action scenes usually call for a quicker pace. Short sentences and paragraphs with crisp clean prose will make the reader’s eyes fly across the page. That equates to fast pacing in the reader’s mind. Action verbs that have a hard edge help move the pace along. Also using sentence fragments will accelerate pacing.
Short chapters give the feeling of fast pacing whereas chapters filled with lengthy blocks of prose will slow the eye and the pace.
Just like the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 sets the pace for the start of the race and dramatic changes during the event such as yellow and red flags, you control the pace of your story. Tools such as dialog versus narration, short staccato sentences versus thick, wordy paragraphs, and the treatment of action versus emotion puts you in control of how fast or slow the reader moves through your story. And just like the colors on a painter’s pallet, you should make use of all your pacing pallet tools to transparently control how fast or slow the reader moves through your story.
What additional techniques do you use to control pacing?
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Sound advice, Joe. Learning about pace is crucial for novelists. Overall, we need to remember that fiction is not reality; it’s stylized reality. That means we can and should vary pace to fit our desired effects. For example, in an action scene, the “reality” is it would happen very fast in linear time. But we can, in effect, use a “slow motion camera” to stylize the event. And so on.
I have a pacing technique–I call it rhythm–for paragraphs. I start the paragraph with a short sentence, and end it with a short sentence. I leave the longer and more complex sentences for the middle of the paragraph. This technique is designed to draw the reader into the para and then shoot them on to the next.
One thing that seems commonplace in many writers nowadays is overuse of short, terse paragraphs filled with short, terse sentences. Maybe they’re doing it for style rather than pacing, but it’s like a strong spice that spoils the dish when overused. It gets tiring to read and I lose interest.
Great advice, Joe. It’s amazing how many established writers don’t have a handle on this. It’s what ruined THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO for me. Larsen spent too much time on things that could/should have been disposed of quickly, and not enough time on things that merited it.
Kathryn,
As a recovering musician, I’m big on finding and feeling the rhythm in my sentences. I’ll sometimes even choose a word that might not be the best dictionary fit because it sounds better on my ear. That being said, there are rhythms I can get away with throughout an entire flash piece or short story I wouldn’t dream of keeping through an entire novel for the exact reason you noted. What may be energetic and exciting for a few thousand words gets old after much longer.
I agree with you, Dana. Some prose, perhaps because the author wants to infuse it with energy, can get very “snappy.” If it goes on too long, my attention snaps away from the book.
Jim, stylized reality is a great way to look at it. Thanks.
Interesting technique, Kathryn. A real-world tip for sure.
Dana, thanks for the warning on Larsen’s book. I haven’t read it yet, but I appreciate the heads-up.
I like Dana’s reference to music. That’s often what I’m going for as well. One of my heroes, John D. MacDonald called it “unobtrusive poetry.” Hard to do, but when it happens, it really uplifts the reading experience.
I have found that pacing is extremely noticeable when reading aloud for narration. It is one of the reasons I narrate all of my own stories into audio book format. If the pacing is off it is an impossible read, therefore reading aloud enables me find and fix any tempo problems.
Having an actual physical rhythm helps me a lot. I am a percussionist in another part of my life and find that I hear drum beats in my head keeping time with segments I am writing. At least I think they are in my head.
My favourite time keeper drum is my 21″ Mother Djembe – a primeval bass sound that makes chase scenes incredibly intense.
By the way Dana, you made think about the music analogy. A short piece is like a song set to a single beat, whereas a novel is like a symphony with multiple beats and rhythms that while separate and undulating throughout the concert must still be in time with each other as a whole.
ooh…I feel like jamming now
Great post, Joe.
I think one of the greatest challenges for a suspense writer are transitional sections in which significant time passes for the character, but where I don’t want time to stand still for the reader. When I know these sections are coming in the seond act–and it seems that they always come in the second act–I plan for them.
In SCOTT FREE, there’s a pivotal section in which my exhausted, defeated protagonist has to make a very long walk through the snow in search of safety. I wanted to convey that wrenching sense of wandering into nothingness, and the emotional angst that it brings, but I had already hammered on the cold and the discomfort and the exhaustion. More of the same would be boring. So, from the very beginning of the story, I’d targeted that section as the one where critical backstory would be revealed, all through Scott’s memories. By periodically breaking his reverie with front story, I could convey the passage of time, and when the backstory was fully revealed, it was time to move on with the next stage of the action.
I like to think of pacing in engineering terms. Like all engineering, careful planning is the secret to a succussful outcome.
John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com
Basil, your suggestion of reading the manuscript aloud is excellent. I take it one step further and let my wife read the story aloud while I listen. It’s especially helpful hearing dialog spoke by someone else and can be a real eye opener. And when she trips up or hesitates, I know it’s a warning sign that something in that section needs fixing.
John, great example on how to use pacing to make room for backstory. We’ve gotten some useful, real-world tips here today.
My computer friend, who lives inside Word, reads to me. I don’t have to take him out to dinner, either.
This is wonderful. I’ve liked so many of your posts recently, Joe. Thanks.
Thanks, Elisabeth. Just for that, I’ll keep writing them. 🙂