I love it when I post my frustrations and thoughts here, and it ends up being a discussion with fellow writers.
In the comments to the post below, Josh said:
You seem to be talking a lot about when to introduce things in a particular story, which I guess I’d have called Timing? Pace I usually think of as how much weight to give things in a particular story or chapter? How quickly, or slowly, something is dealt with before moving on and I find that balance can be the difference between something poor and something good?
And I thought I’d re-post my comment back to him as a separate post, because I’d like to hear what other people have to say.
Pace, to me, seems to be made up of a lot of different things. For example:
Basically, pace is everything that has to do with your reader’s perception of how fast or slow the story goes.
In my first draft, which is what I’m struggling with now, I’m most concerned with the first three things I mentioned: the timing issue, the length of the novel issue, and the keeping the balls in the air issue, because those things have to do with the basic structure and skeleton of the book, and if you don’t get them right, you have some serious re-writing to do. The other stuff, I tend to look at in revisions.
And (to cheat) in an email to me, Josh added that pace is
just so important and can fundamentally change a story – the very same story told in the ‘same’ way, just at a different pace – into something almost entirely different for the reader.
I think that’s a really interesting concept. I know that pacing can make the difference between a story you can’t put down and one you can’t be bothered to finish. But I’ve never thought about pacing actually changing the story, though I suppose it really affects the reader’s experience, so it’s bound to.
Of course this makes me much more paranoid, so thanks a heap, Josh. 
What do you think?
(Now I’m off to pour myself a glass of wine and fiddle around with little bits of paper. Photos to follow.)
Good pacing makes such an amazing difference when reading a story. All of my favorites have a quick pace but it’s balancing that with the plot that can give me a migraine
I really like the idea of not forcing the characters to hold onto a secret climatic moment until the end because that’s what I’d originally planned. On reflection I’ve actually skipped a chapters of books in the past to read the ending because what the those middle chapters had become almost annoying with their pacing, like discussing the weather in between a sniper turning up and the actual shooting a character.
Yes! I love that analogy—pausing to discuss the weather between the sniper turning up and the shooting. I was thinking the same thing today, while watching…er…”Wonder Pets”.
There was a baby griffin with its tail trapped under a rock, and the drawbridge of a castle was coming down to crush it, and the Wonder Pets paused to sing a little song about how they were going to roll the rock off the griffin’s tail!
“This is not good pacing,” I thought. Probably missing the point altogether, which is that the show is about teamwork and singing little songs.
But then again, maybe that little song did work after all, because it made me really impatient for the griffin to be saved, and it meant that they saved him in the nick of time!
Anyway. “Wonder Pets” is probably not the best lesson in pacing. But I think you have to be flexible about secret climactic moments. Sometimes, if you hold the secret too long, it can be annoying waiting for it, and it can turn out to be an anticlimax. Or sometimes the secret does need to be kept—but if it is, the reasons for keeping it need to get bigger and more important, the longer it’s kept. It’s like any form of conflict—you always have to ask yourself, is this going to make things worse, or better?
Am loving this discussion. Pace is HUGE, we will all go mad if we discuss this for too long! It’s like the spine of the book, the PTQ. . .if the character pace, or conflict pace, or story pace whatever, starts to drag, it kills the whole thing.
I am re-writting at the moment, having given a voice to a character who was a quiet soul in the first write, and all is going well (she says!) But my hero is yet to say a word!! He is “pacing” around, waiting to get on scene.
And three cheers for the Wonder Pets.
I know, Lara, there’s too much to say about, it, and so much of it is instinct. But I find that articulating what I want to do can help me a lot.
Interesting that you’ve got a previously mute character speaking up; is s/he teaching you things about the story you didn’t know before?
I love the Wonder Pets, despite their pacing issues.
Hey Julie, I love hearing your thoughts on writing, thanks for this! Remember that pace is also VERY important when drinking wine. Critically so, sometimes.
If I take a few of your above examples – timing, weight, length and build up – I think that how these are handled doesn’t just affect the ‘pace’ for the reader, but also the theme of your story itself?
I wanted to write a short love story, with a stolen picture in the plot. Both picture and heist are important to the story, but it is NOT a heist story, NOR a story about art – it’s a love story. The same things happen to the same people, but could be told in a very different way, depending on timing, weight, length and build up…
maybe.
“He” who has found voice, is helping me with the “theme” of the novel. I was scared of letting him talk first time, as he befriends my heroine, incase the reader thought he was the hero. I am trying to make sure that by how he and the heroine react around each other the reader knows there is no spark. And when my pacing around hero finally gets to speak for himself (she has wrong impression of him at the moment) the connection will be made and sparks and love etc etc will fly.
Julie, you will have to start charging for your services. It’s good therapy.
It’s an interesting thought, Josh, that pace can determine genre. I’ve never really thought that way, before you mentioned it.
It makes me think of Hitchcock’s Psycho, for example. He starts that story in quite a leisurely way, for what the story actually is. We think we’re being plunged right into the middle of a thriller about stolen money, and a woman on the run. Then there’s quite a long build-up of suspense when she gets to the hotel…and then suddenly, she’s stabbed in the shower!
It’s a shocker, not just for the graphic violence, but also because the pace has led you to believe that this story was about the Janet Leigh character…and now she’s dead. The stolen money was a McGuffin. The movie is really about Norman Bates, and his mother.
Thanks for this, Josh; it’s great food for thought.
Pace is a good thing but I did read somewhere that there can be too much going on and you should have a break for your character. That was for children’s books and I think it can relate to adult ones too. It made me think about what I had written and had to rewrite some of my book so that there were pauses in between happenings for my heroine. Am now working on pacing my next children’s book with that in mind.
For films that change tack in unexpected ways, have you seen Kiss Me Deadly? – its just brilliant. Its has dialogue like this:
“Kiss me, Mike. I want you to kiss me. Kiss me. The liar’s kiss that says I love you, and means something else.”
I do love film noir.
I’ve never seen Wonder Pets so I feel totally deprived and as soon as I’ve finished here I’m off to google it but I don’t think I’ll ever forget that example for pacing.
I hadn’t thought of the influence of pace on genre before, that’s really interesting. Pacing has a surprising amount of power.
I haven’t seen Kiss Me Deadly but I really love the last line of that quote.
Lara, it’s interesting you kept a character quiet so that the reader wouldn’t expect him to be the hero. It sounds like he’ll be useful, once you allow him to speak.
And I’m taking donations. Just pop a cheque into the post…
Julie—definitely, you’re very right. You can’t go racing from one episode to the next; you need a little bit of “down” time in between. That’s a very important part of pacing.
Good luck with the next book!
I haven’t seen Kiss Me Deadly, Josh. But I’m going to see Iron Man 2 tonight. Is it similar?
Little pacing niggles aside, Lacey, Wonder Pets is truly wonderful. A guinea pig, a duckling, and a turtle saving the world, one baby creature at a time. Singing nearly all their lines, like in an opera. Lovely.
It’s funny: one person’s suspense is another person’s delay. I could never get along with those endless priestly monologues in Shakespeare: I’m the person sitting there wishing he’d shut the hell up so Juliet could just wake up and kill herself already.
Just like Wonder Pets, really.
But then, I’m not big on suspense for the most part. I’m too impatient! That said, I know I have a problem with delaying the big reveal in the book. So it might increase the dramatic tension; it also means you’ve got tens of thousands of words with no explanation for a character’s behaviour.