Write Better: Tips and tricks

Basic (small-scale) Pacing

This is all basic, small-scale pacing. It's managing your scenes on a tiny level.

There's also more nuanced, large-scale pacing. That has to do with bigger picture things, like how much to show or tell, crucial scenes, less crucial scenes, interludes between action, etc. We'll talk about that later. For now, these are the tiny, basic tricks that can make your story more lively and balanced.

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"Help! All my scenes sound the same!"

"The pacing in your story is a little slow."

"Everything moves too fast. Consider slowing some sections down."

These are popular comments on pacing- which is a tricky thing to master, but very possible if you understand some of the basics.

Some writers hear that their action scenes sound exactly like their journey scenes which sound exactly like the scenes in the middle where folks are talking which is identical to the slow, sensual one at the end.

So what gives? Lots of those scenes have action and dialogue and movement, and different things are happening in all points. Why is the writer being told that all their scenes sound the same?

One of the best ways to engage readers is to vary the pace of the story. But sometimes that can be hard to figure out. You have action in chapter 3, so shouldn't that mean the scene is automatically faster than chapter 1, where everyone's sitting by the campfire?

Not always. Some people write everything the same way: same sentence construction, same paragraph length, same sentence length, and so on and so forth. When you treat all your scenes the same, it usually means that you're focusing on all the same elements, so everything just sort of blends together like tree bark.

What's the difference between your action scene and your dinner party? If you can't tell, there may be a pacing issue.

A good check is to look at  your story outside of content. [content tells you what's happening] A story with strong pacing shows variety- your paragraphs will be different lengths, your sentences will be long and short, etc. Your eye will naturally tell you what's faster or slower to read, and if you spot-check with content (reading the meaning of your sentences) you should be able to correctly ID fast or slow spots in the story.

An important note: A slow pace does not necessarily mean a story needs more action!

Lots of writers confuse this. They'll hear someone say the pace is slow, and immediately assume they need more action- or they'll snap onto defense and argue that a story doesn't need action to be interesting. [Lots of well-meaning readers will tell you this, too. "slow" is deeply connected to "needs more action."]

A slow pace is often an indicator that the writer took a long time to say something, when there might have been another, equally informative but quicker, way to word it. It doesn't mean your character has to jump from an exploding car or anything.

Here are a few tips if you want to make a scene 'read' faster or slower. Changing the pace can aid in visualizing a scene, and help your readers connect with a character's emotions and reactions.

How to speed it up:

1. Shorten your sentences. Fragment a few.

2. Shorten your paragraphs.

3. Shorten your words.

4. Narrow your focus. You're running from a bear. You aren't focusing on the shimmer of spiderwebs in the moonlight and how they seem to frame the distant mountain range. You need to know what's in front of you and what your feet are hitting and where you parked the goddamn car.

5. Less punctuation. Commas and their cousins are pauses. Literally. If you're trying to speed up a scene, get rid of a few extra breaths. For an example, see the last sentence in #4!

6. Tell. Logan grabbed Allie's hand and led her on a tour through the greenhouse.

How to slow it down:

1. Lengthen your sentences. Take the time to add in detail and write things out. You don't have to put in excess information, just be a little more free with punctuation (such as combining sentences) and description- the knife is still descending, but perhaps it's descending with a falcon's fury, or it seems to cut through the very moon.

2. Lengthen your paragraphs. Bigger paragraphs take longer to get through than shorter ones, and they provide a visual cue of slowness, sort of like stepping over an ant hill or walking up an actual hill. Your brain just looks and says "that's gonna take me some time" and that's a subtle advantage for you, the writer, to use if things are moving too fast.

3. Lengthen your words. You eye speeds through tiny words. Without sounding like a thesaurus, consider elaborating a word or two. A few extra syllables can go a long way in making the scene run longer (without running longer), and suggest a deeper level of focus than what you'd experience on the run. (think quick brown fox vs quick mahogany fox; mahogany sounds slower and inappropriate, because it's a slower word) If you position these words or syllables correctly, you can say what you want to, in what feels like a slower pace.

4. Broaden your focus. Every second of every day, your sensory systems are fed thousands of pieces of information. Smells, sights, sounds, what's directly in front of you, what's way off in the distance, everything in between. When you pull the focus from one action or sense, you start to slow things down.

5. Show. Logan took Allie's hand in his. Together they walked past venus flytraps and pitcher plants, between long rows of creeping vines and sweet-scented fruits. He told her about each of them: where they were from, what their purpose was, and how dangerously deceptive some were.

Good pacing uses a variety of techniques, not just one. An entire action scene would look strange as a series of one-liners, and twenty paragraphs of 8-11 sentences would look equally as mismanaged.

Action scenes tend to have a higher percentage of sped up elements. More plodding scenes tend to have a higher percentage of slow down elements.