Indie Novella Writing Course
Lesson 8 - Pacing
Now we are within sight of the course’s finishing line, it is an appropriate time to discuss pacing. Your novel may begin with colourful, elaborate descriptions to set the scene and introduce your style and narrative, but a novel that is mono-paced will fail to capture a reader’s attention. And when I say one paced, I also mean a novel which is high octane all the way through. As we discussed in our lesson on the different narrators, the second person narrative is sparsely used because it often best works in the short form. The constant strangeness and intensity of the ‘you’ address can feel too much for the long form novel. Likewise with pace, which needs modulation and variety.
After completing either the first rough draft of your novel, or even after putting down on paper an outline of your plot and structure, you should at this point give careful consideration to how your novel is paced. Stories ebb and flow, and drama is structured around peaks and lows. Crescendo is defined as the loudest point in a gradual increasing of sound. Think of some of the great pieces of classical music and note how they build from calm and quiet to that dramatic crescendo and ask yourselves if your novel follows a similar structure.
When discussing pacing we are almost caught up in the same quandary as we found ourselves when discussing style – by itself, it is abstract, and it needs applying to the purposes of your story. Hence, let’s analyse pacing in conjunction with its key drivers: tension and conflict.
Defining Pacing, Tension, Conflict
The simplest way of defining and measuring Pacing in your novel is assessing how much ground you cover in your writing relative to how many words you’ve written. It’s sometimes helpful for writers to go through their novel working out, on a chapter by chapter basis, how this ratio pans out. This could be achieved by doing a one or two sentence summary of events covered in each chapter. Take a look at whether your chapters are relatively equal in length, or if there are clusters of units that are roughly equal and carry important parts of your story. Shorter chapters in themselves imply a speeding up of pace. Consider how many thrillers use short chapters (the cliffhanger), and by contrast how many literary novels use other more subtle markers to create pace.
An important reason to keep a keen eye on pace in our novels is to build Tension. Perhaps the greatest source of tension is anticipation and deferral – a sense of something looming but not quite arrived. In direct contradiction to the above, building tension can require a writer to deliberately slow the pace rather than accelerating it. Or to put it more logically, slowing the pace in the build-up to key action, and then accelerating it. One well used source of tension is letting the reader dangle at the end of a scene (the cliffhanger again). Try going through your novel and considering how each of your chapters end: does the episode conclude tidily with the end of the chapter? Or is it a break in the middle of an event so that the reader has to start a new chapter to find out how things pan out? We can term the latter ‘the Gotta’, attributed to Stephen King and a great example for any writer to read is his novel Misery. And how often do you ‘side-step’ and leave an event half-finished, switching to dealing with another aspect of the story, maybe coming back to the original episode several chapters later?
A great contemporary example of the use of high tension in a novel is Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. The first part of Gone Girl is a search for the truth. Clues are laid out in the form of actual clues (Amy’s treasure hunt), the extracts of Amy’s diary and the reluctant revealing of Nick’s affair. As more evidence points to Nick, we see the pace quickening until we reach a crescendo of evidence as Nick opens the door on his alleged thousands of dollars’ worth of credit card purchases which provide him with a perfect motive.
Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home does similar but within a different structure, beginning and coming back to Joe’s hazardous car journey with Kitty Finch.
And almost making a 360 degree return to Lesson 1, we need to pay close attention to Conflict. Without conflict we would have no fiction at all, just stasis. Most novels are triggered by and/or go on to explore an over-arching conflict, and then a number of subordinate ones that may be linked to the main one, or operate independently. Always keep in mind what the main conflict in your novel is. Then note down and pay attention to what your subordinate ones are.
For your subordinate conflicts, how many work as separate subplots, versus how many relate to the main conflict? The most apparent conflicts are those between characters – heroes and villains – but great literature has also centred on conflict with external forces: the weather; a war; poverty; illness; a white whale . . . However, the most profound conflicts are internal ones – which included the effect of an external conflict on the internal life of a character – where our protagonist is confronting some weakness or contradictory impulse in themselves. Finally – think about the relationship between external and internal conflict within your novel.
Pacing
The pace of a novel impacts a reader in subtle, unconscious ways, and it can be more of less pulse-raising depending on how it’s done. When we talk about pace however, we’re not necessarily referring to speed. A writer needs to find the right pace – fast or slow – which works for them, but above all, to avoid a slackness in pace. Remember our lesson on plotting? Pacing is essentially the successful combination of plotting and editing. If after you complete your first draft, you then devote time to reassessing your plot, you will also be able to determine the ‘heartbeat’ of your novel – how the pacing works across the book as a whole, where the key moments of tension are, and where the pace drops off. You can then tweak the pace through your editing.
As we have said above, the pace of a narrative is how a writer grapples with the passage of time and the dramatic content. Pace involves much time is covered in each chapter and how much action is covered in each chapter. Think back to our lesson on style, and how a descriptive style may linger on details and scene setting while a hardboiled style may be blunt and brutally get to a point. Next, consider how long it takes you to narrate a particular moment of story. For example, if your section of story takes place over two years and you summarise that in 10 pages, have you been a little too concise or ‘hardboiled’ in your story telling? However, what if nothing happened in those two years that is related to the novel’s central conflict i.e. the protagonist went away, had a happy life, and you spend ten pages describing a selection of scenes and events that do not move your story on. Then you might have produced a slackness in pace and need to speed it up and skip what is not important to the overall momentum.
Simple tips for upping the pace:
• Cut scenes which do not take your story forward
• End chapters or scenes earlier
• Trim individual lines of dialogue and look for short, snappy lines. Avoid reiterating the same point during your dialogue
• Reduce exposition and historical research which is not necessary
One common issue for new writers is to spend a longer time with each scene than is necessary to move the story forward. Instead, try spending the least amount of time possible on each scene, without compromising its integrity. If you can get into the scene as late as possible and get out of it as early as possible then this will go some way to picking up the pace. What you want to do is keep your reader on their toes and make them excited to keep up with events, always moving a step ahead rather than having the reader impatient for the next step.
Handling the passage of time
One trap we can fall into when trying to speed up the pace is summarising events within a scene i.e. glossing over scenes with a quick round up. ‘After dinner we retired to the library where Elsa read and I continued with my writing.’ Your narrator may also feel they need to account for all the story-time which passes between scenes, such as in the example about covering two years of the protagonist’s life. Rather than speeding up the narrative, this in fact slows down the pace as we narrate away ‘dead time’ and our narrative is merely treading water. Contrary to what we believe as a writer, a reader has not picked up our novel to marvel at our writing – they are reading it because they demand a story and want things to happen. Summarising the passage of time hence neither drives the story forward nor do the events within provide justifiable reason to be included in the novel. Try cutting to the main action of each scene, and then jump straight to that of the next scene.
Conflict
We opened this course by discussing the importance of conflict to the opening of a novel. Conflict gives your novel, and its characters and a trigger for action, as well as inner life and depth. Predictability is can be the enemy of first time writers. A story can feel underdeveloped if characters are unmarked by events and change comes too easily and at no cost to the protagonist. A controversial example to illustrate this is Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee, controversial because the novel was published when Harper Lee was very old and her active decision-making in the editorial process before publicstion has been questioned by sone. In one particular scene towards the end of the novel, the protagonist is in a rage about all she has learned of her father and while packing to leave and never return, she confronts her uncle about all the unpleasantness she has witnessed. Her uncle’s response is to slap her. The protagonist uses this slap as the single event it takes for her to "come to her senses" and change, to come out of her rage and gain more understanding of the events. This summary action does not read very comfortably, readers might and have questioned. Remember, if a problem is worth creating, it is also worth developing it and working out its consequences. If not it can leave your reader feeling underwhelmed and short-changed.
Pacing your novel comes hand in hand with laying out the obstacles in your protagonist’s way. Very similar to when laying out your plot, make the obstacles seem insurmountable – the greater the conflict, the more impressive overcoming them will be (as long as it is believable). But this does not mean everything has to be of a life-and-death nature. Internal conflict or personal conflict can be just as engaging as war or Armageddon.
Understand your conflicts and how this drives your pace. Consider Madame Bovary and Emma Bovary’s struggle with dissatisfaction and that wanting inside herself which drives her to change her state of being. Consider how similar challenges impact your own characters and the pace at which you introduce and tackle these conflicts. The most prominent conflicts in story telling are often the interpersonal conflicts between protagonists and antagonists. In an earlier writing exercise, we asked you to write a scene from two different perspectives. This essentially shows who the protagonist is and really depends on your narrator. For those of you who enjoy crime and detective stories, you will be familiar with the concept of ‘the hunter and the hunted’ where one character pursues another, and the other tries to evade capture. Again, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a good example as it flips this traditional and familiar storyline into a more interesting dynamic of who is really the hunter and who is really being hunted.
There can also be a social conflict which exists between a character and a whole community, or the whole world. These stories usually focus on an individual’s determinedness not to conform or to maintain their will when faced with adversity. This form of conflict often, and in some of the most famous cases of literature, goes hand in hand with the personal and interpersonal conflicts described above. Take Madame Bovary once more, Emma’s dissatisfaction ultimately leads to interpersonal conflicts and her actions spill out into the community she inhabits, to the point that she becomes a pariah.
When placing your obstacles across your novel, it is key to ensure that the events do not just happen to your characters, but rather they happen BECAUSE of them. Obstacles should be tied to your character’s actions and decisions – that your character determines the plot, and it is simply not the case where your character is reactive to the events happening to them. The latter will struggle to engage the reader as the reader wants to feel your character has deserved their success. Characters must pay some form of cost for what they want, they have to lose something along the way, and it is this cost which is often the reader’s investment in the story.
Tension
And to further our discussion on Conflict, Tension is the delay in fulfilment or resolving the conflict you have created. Going back to detective stories, these are characteristically based on the whodunit, ‘question and answer’ type of suspense where the story is told in reverse and work backwards to find the murderer – the reader should be in an overwhelming state of curiosity.
Dramatic irony is another key form of tension in novels. Here the conclusion of your novel may be predicable – the world does not end, and the couple do find each other – however, even if the reader knows things will work out for the character, they are still anxious for the characters and how they will get to their resolution. The reader knows information which the protagonist does not know, so tension builds as the reader knows some form of conflict is sure to take place. If a reader knows a character is having an affair, and they know that character plans on coming clean, the tension the lies in when the conflict will occur and what the reaction will be. Here, the tension lies in the journey rather than the conclusion.
Another form of tension often seen in contemporary fiction is where the characters knows more than the reader and a secret is has been buried. Pacing works to gradually unearth this secret, uncovering one clue while perhaps throwing in an additional mystery along the way. This is a highly effective in engaging the reader, however it also takes time to get right. There is a fine line between enticing a reader with subtle hints toward an outcome and too much blatant signposting. Pacing and timing are everything in creating tension. There is a huge difference between being subtle and just signposting.
Tips for Building Tension
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Delay the pay-off – Keep the reader waiting. Build urgency and tension by making your reader wait along with your character for revelations.
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Sustain the suspense. We’re told something bad has happened, which in the next paragraph is elevated to something horrific, but we’re forced to wait for until our protagonist has trudged through the snow before hearing what it is… A body! But whose body… It can’t be… By cutting away to a completely different scene next, the narrative forces us to wait to find out who the dead person is, and what happened to them.
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Make the reader care. Have the reader make an emotional investment in your characters. Go back to our lesson on Character and work out who you like and sympathise with, feel sorry for, or even hate. The more emotionally invested we are, the more we want to know what happens to them.
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Be Unpredictable. Plot twists and surprises are considered the mainstay of thrillers, but it is a dull novel in which nothing goes wrong. Conflict and complications make stories interesting. But it can be devastatingly effective when something happens that the reader hasn’t seen coming.
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Don’t tell but also don’t show. When it comes to tension, it’s often what we don’t see that counts.
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Creating the right atmosphere. Weather, songs playing on the radio, silence, try putting yourself in the character’s shoes and imagine what would make you feel more tense in that situation
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Remember that drawing things out too much will undermine the suspense and risk losing the reader’s interest. Try asking yourself how you would feel if you were the reader.
Summary: Tips for Pacing
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Do not reassure your reader that everything is going to be alright. Creating a sense of confidence in a protagonist can lead to signposting. Also do not wait until the last minute to give your protagonist a skill which miraculously leads to them overcoming their obstacle – a good novel introduces these subtly and early enough to allow the reader to still feel anxious when conflict arises.
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Try not to be predictable. We have talked about dramatic irony but a reader probably does not want to know what is going to happen before it happens.
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Balance between likelihood and contingency. When building drama or leading up to a conclusion a writer also needs to consider how realistic a reader may find your series of events. An unlikely event, even if based on real-life facts, needs to be rooted and integrated into what came before for the reader to have sufficient buy-in. You might say, ‘that really happened!’ when an editor or agent criticises whether your characters would really act in a certain way. But he point is thay the writer needs to make the reader believe what they are pitching/writing is possible.
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Reduce Descriptions. To be at its most brutal, it is often ‘good writing’ that results in a poor novel. Descriptions can be the enemy of good pacing. Any scene can quickly be killed by the description of too much detail. Descriptions are great for slowing down the pace, and at times that is needed, but they can also bring your story to a grinding halt.
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Reconsider Transport and travelling scenes, especially if characters are on the way to something that will happen.
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Waking up or going to bed scenes, if purely for waking up or sleeping, can also be reconsidered.
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There is no need to tell the reader all the reasons why a character chooses against a course of action. Like with exposition, many authors get bogged down thinking they have to explain to the reader why a character does what they do.
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When plotting your novel, list the scenes which leave your protagonist and your story unchanged.
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Be cautious when it comes to sections you have to put in italics. Often this applies to our character’s inner thoughts or relaying a dream.
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Never use two scenes to establish the same thing. An example is having three scenes of your character going on bad dates to show they are unsuccessful in love.
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And above all, notice when you are holding your plot back.
Weekly Writing Exercise
As this is our final weekly writing exercise we won't ask you to go through your novel and look at the highs and lows of your pacing. Instead, let's have one last bit of fun and write a short scene that builds tension. Remember,the aim is to build suspense, not describe an action scene. Here are a few ideas to get you started, but feel free to come up with your own:
You walk into a room and everyone stops talking.
You’re in a cellar when the light goes out.
You are alone in the house and hear a noise.
A character is waiting for some important news.
A couple are late for an urgent appointment.
When you’ve decided on the scenario, take a moment to decide what’s going to happen. You don’t need to map out a story or even decide what the cause of the tension is if you don’t want to. Just have a go at writing and consider how you will build the tension. Stop the scene wherever you want.