Pacing Basics
Nikoda asks (paraphrased): I get confused on pacing. I just can't wrap my head around the assorted definitions....Pacing is complicated and I could teach a week or two worth of classes on this. Here are a few tips, though, to point you in the right direction.
Pacing is the rhythm and speed of a story. Some stories slow down, not a lot seems to happen, details and descriptions and complex interactions occur; language can be richly textured.
Or text can be sparse. Lots of action. The story jumps from location to location.
There are plenty of great books that have both types of pacing. There is no one right pacing.
I do think it’s important to know the kind of book you want to write, and what your audience expects. For me, I always try to vary the pacing. Too much action, too fast, too many things happening—it wears (or worse, confuses!) your readers. If your story is always slow you risk fatiguing the reader and losing them.
There are many ways to vary pace. The easiest is on a mechanical level. Shorter, simple sentences, brief paragraphs, and quick dialogue all make for a faster pace. Conversely, longer paragraphs, lengthy speeches and descriptions, fat sections of character self analysis all slow the pace.
The most critical thing to remember is that slow pace doesn’t mean boring, and fast pace doesn’t necessity mean compelling. This is the classic rookie mistake.
You want your slow sections to have tension, to mean something, and draw the reader deeper into your story. For example I’ve recently re-read Salem’s Lot wherein there is a long passage describing the setting sun. Normally a mistake because the story grinds to a halt...but in this case it heightens the drama because you knew when that sun sets a hundred vampire are coming to get the heroes!
Conversely going fast all the time cheats your readers on the details of your world and characters, and you lose the opportunity to make them fall in love with your story.
To really understand the building blocks of pacing you need to understand how to build tension (to make everything--slow and fast--be integral to the narrative). And to build tension, understand it on the most granular level, I’ll refer again to STORY by Robert McKee wherein he talks at great length about this topic.
I hope that helps. Good luck with your writing!
posted by Eric Nylund at 7:17 AM
5 Comments:
Thanks for the great advice! That really puts what my brain's been trying to figure out into focus. And I know I've been quite guilty of the ye olde rookie mistake. It always fascinates me that it seems everyone (or at least a fair amount) of n00bs have the same n00bly ideals and make the same n00bly mistakes. So much for the lone writer trying to eke things out in a world of people who just don't understand. *laughs*
Thank you, Mr. Nylund.
I had actually written my first writing exercise for the express purpose of seeing whether or not I could manage a "pace."
Up to that point, I had never thought that I could write narrative well.
Again, thank you for the information about pacing - coming from you I value the advice a lot more than if I read it in some book by some person I didn't know or with whose work I wasn't familiar.
:)
Pacing is a fascinating subject. Every author has a different style for different situations. As I was fortunate enough to not only finish one book, but start a new one and read the first 100 pages (all in one day!), it's fun to see how each scene type has different pacing.
I was reading a large group of scenes that relayed various important pieces of information, but the pacing was slow. Why? Because the characters were doing mundane things like shopping at the grocery store or taking care of children. Yet the stressful scenes come up and are short and tense, not to mention fast paced.
Pace is also something that comes in the editing, I think. I find that when I'm writing, generally some emotion is coursing through me, pushing me to write. At least for me, it's almost always been beneficial to write out the scene(s) and see later on whether that emotion comes through correctly or not. That way, the pace is either already set, or just something to tidy up!
Then again, because pacing can be figured out in the editing, it's not really that big a deal. You can give your manuscript-in-work to anyone and ask if the pacing feels right. Anyone who can read should be able to give a good answer.
I think pacing is very interesting to think about when you think in terms of manuscript pages and book pages. In a manuscript you have way more pages then there will be in the book, and so if you feel you've written too much, you might have probably written just the right amount when you think about how many pages are going to be in the book. Does that make sense?
I'm actually reading 'Salem's Lot for the first time (no kidding) and, just like 'It' I've noticed that King spends a lot of time on setup and stuff. Like, if you think about it in terms of two manuscript pages to one book page (that's just an estimate there), then he spent over 200 pages in the manuscript before he got to anything even remotely horrifying. I think that that relationship, book pages to manuscript pages, is also a good thing to keep in mind when trying to figure out pacing.
dangerusdave, horror is its own particular beast. A lot of effective horror, including King's, depends on having characters that you know well and care about, otherwise what's the big deal when the horror arrives? So, you work on the characters, setting, and more, before you start doing horrible things to them. Your typical sf/f book needs to have the speculative elements introduced much earlier in the story.
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