Day 12: Pacing

I've been thinking about pacing lately. It's a complex aspect of writing that can really make or break the story that's being told. Too slow, and things feel like they're dragging along. If the reader has to put in a lot of effort just to keep going then the writer has failed to their job correctly. On the flip side, if the reader has to put a lot of effort in to keep up with what's going on, then the writer has once again failed. It's so easy to fall on one side or the other because it's also very difficult to define the pace in absolute terms. Usually it ends up being reduced to 'fast' or 'slow' but these terms are relative. If the topic at hand is very deep, and necessitates that the writer take their time to explore it, it can be easy to come off as 'too fast' even though it might have a slower pace than a thriller novel in absolute terms. Again, the opposite is also true. Slowing way down to focus in on mundane details in the middle of a thriller will come off as 'too slow.' Unfortunately, this seems to be an unavoidable problem when talking about pacing. It has to be relative. If I were to put it in my own words, I would equate the pace of a story to the tempo of music. It's the beat in the background, wholly dependent on the kind of music and the emotions that it wants to convey. And like a strong sense of rhythm, pacing can be difficult to master. I certainly haven't, but the point of this blog is to help me understand my own writing. By having my thoughts down and analyzing them, I hope to learn and improve myself. I want to understand pacing, so first I want to record what I do know, so that I can more easily identify what I don't know later. So let's get into it!

Pacing is the root of all things in a story. It is the time by which a world is kept, that world being what's on the page, and what's implied by what's on the page. As many are intuitively aware, you can 'speed things up' by making lots of things happen in a few words, or 'slow things down' by making a few things happen in a lot of words. For example ...

Here's a paragraph with a few words. You get the idea.

Now here's a paragraph that is a description of itself. An analysis of it's structure, beginning with a simple, single clause that leads to a compound sentence. It really could be two, or even three separate sentences, but either way it gets your brain warmed up and I love it. You'll thank the writer later for this detailed paragraph. I can linger on this topic as long as I want, and therefore 'slow things down.' It physically takes longer to read it, yes, but more importantly, it gives the reader a lot more information to chew on.

I could go slower by going even bigger, but if there's something you can sum up in a few words, why use more? It could end up looking like this if I go too far:

A sentence about itself is inherently stupid because it just ends up like: A sentence about itself is inherently stupid because it just ends up like: A sentence about itself is inherently stupid because it just ends up like: A sentence about itself is inherently stupid because it just ends up like: ...

So you can see the point right? Zooming in and out of a detail-rich topic or series of events can change the pace. Add details to linger and slow things down, subtract to speed up. It's a useful tactic, but the amount of details doesn't dictate the pace alone. Sometimes the quality of those details can imply a lot more stuff happening and therefore change the pace even if you write the same number of words between two topics. In the same way staring at a clock makes time slow down, focusing your writing on meaningless details can also make things drag on.

For example, if you were on a date, what would you be looking at? This?

The bar was a great big slab of oak, at least 600 years old by my estimate, and yet somehow still going. My date sat down and we got to talking, but I was still staring at this great big bar. It went from wall to wall, at least a 14 foot piece of board! It was a decent date, but the real reward was experiencing the history in that place.

Or ...

I saw her instantly. The swoop of shiny hair across her shoulder caught my eye, a drop of sunlight in my direction that stood to light up my entire world. She walked elegantly to the table, her eyes locked to mine the whole way over. We talked for hours, and by the end of the night I knew I was in love.

In the first example, nothing really happens. It covers the length of the date, sure, but the narrator doesn't really experience anything that moves the story along. Why do we care about a bar? What does it mean to him? The answer is probably very little. It drags because there's nothing really going on in all those words. The second example on the other hand feels quite a bit faster despite lingering on the moment he sees her. The narrator's entire love life hangs on this date, and yet I included only as many details as I did in the first example. There's some imagery of a beautiful woman, they talk, and by the end of the date he's in love. More happens in the same number of words. It might not seem like much difference between just these two paragraphs, but if you line up thousands of them to make a novel then the difference will add up.

So that's how to slow things down, or speed things up, but what can actually be done with this power? First and foremost, it can be used to keep things interesting by speeding through the boring parts and lingering on the juicy stuff. Here's another example of what I mean, an excerpt you just read from this very blog post.

I put in several details in the first paragraph to explain what I mean, and then speed right along to an example using a very short paragraph. It seems obvious that you would use more details to explain your point, and fewer to push the reader through to an example, but consider how silly this would look if I used a tiny paragraph to make a point, and a large paragraph to introduce the example you want to get to. The pace wouldn't make any sense, would it? Again, this seems trivial, but the only way to recognize the effect of pace is to recognize it even when it's just the obvious way to write something down.

I hope this was informative, even if you think I'm dead wrong and the examples point to the opposite of the conclusions that I've made. I'm already out of time so I need to go ahead and finish this post off. I'm going to do a part 2 on this one tomorrow because I couldn't get nearly enough down to sift through all my thoughts on the topic. Am I going to have to *gasp* wake up early to write?!?

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley