How To Write Good: A Lightly Salted Guide to Stepping Up Your Wattpad Game.

Bonus Chapter: Pacing, Rhythm, and Flow

I'm gonna drill down into these individually later on, but because they have such a huge, gargantuan, massive, humongous, garmongous, and even mas-hu-gar-mongous impact on story (and because, frankly, most WP writers don't seem to know what these are), I thought I'd kick out a short chapter that explains them and why they're important.

          Zora tapped Miroslav on the shoulder. He turned to face her and she smiled at him. He shook his head at her then began to walk away. She caught up and they walked together for a while. The light turned red at the street corner so they stopped to wait. Just then, It began to rain.

There's a special place in hell where sinners are forced to read whole libraries of books like this. Please don't contribute to their eternal torment.

It might be an extreme example, but you can tell without my help that it's a bad paragraph. Why? It's not breaking any rules of grammar, it's not shifting tense, and you as a reader can tell what's happening. It's a story, right?

WRONG! Nobody wants to read that crap. There's a beat but no rhythm, just heavy, marching footfalls, and it's every bit as interesting as a metronome.

When you're telling a story you'll always fall somewhere on a spectrum between stoic and disruptive, and you don't want your audience to linger too long at any one spot.

Think of it this way: what's the most comfortable temperature? 

Ahhhh... it's a trick question! The best temperature is the one that provides the most relief. When you're cold, nothing feels better than soaking up the heat from a fireplace. Likewise, on a sweltering July afternoon in Florida, the best feeling in the world is stepping into an air-conditioned room that's cranked down to sixty degrees.

But if you stay there too long, the fireplace becomes uncomfortably warm, the air conditioner too cold, and stepping back into the hostile environment you escaped an hour before becomes your new aspiration.

Likewise, in your writing, you want to oscillate between tensions that elicit responses from your readers, building and then providing relief from that tension, and this can be applied at every level, from word choice to the "A" plot of your story.

You'll hear different definitions of flow, rhythm, and pacing, but the ideas behind those definitions are fairly universal. The following are how I interpret these three important concepts, using a sine wave as a visual reference to describe the emotional state of the reader.

FLOW describes how smooth your story is. A good flow doesn't mean there won't be disruptions, it just means the planned disruptions are natural and well-timed. The reader should feel caught up in the story, and a bad flow will make them feel like they're hung up on a bit of driftwood. Think of it as the continuity of the line.

RHYTHM is a balancing act. It describes how tensions oscillate in your story. Good rhythm means you're not spending too long in one spot or taking too long to get to the next one. This is important in your sentence and paragraph structure too; when you break up sentence and paragraph lengths and tone, you're not permitting the reader to get too comfortable, and by avoiding extreme shifts you're not unseating them entirely. Think of it as the distribution of peaks and valleys in the line.

PACING is the rate at which your story unfolds, and It has nothing to do with word count or timing. You can have a fast-paced but very long story or a slow-paced 1,000-word essay. This is the distance between your peaks.

Don't get caught up in the sine wave either, it's not a reliable model overall, just a concept to drive my point. Take a look at the following from Kurt Vonnegut's famous "shape of the story."

These are conceptual, not explicit arcs for you to follow. The story will also oscillate independently as it travels those very general plot lines, including minutia such as exchanges in dialog, but in a very basic sense, they describe the majority of stories told today. As a point of interest, Vonnegut observes that the Cinderalla model in the lower left is generally most successful, and if you're attentive, you'll see that exact plotline in most films (especially chick flicks).

Just so you don't get too stuck on the simplicity of these, take a look at this model of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as interpreted by an AI. Credit to the Hedonometer Team and Andrew Reagan for the visualization.

The horizontal represents the percentage of the book, and the vertical represents how happy the characters are (and vicariously, the readers). The blue dotted line in the middle represents an average mood. The book spends most of its time below the median, but you can see a definite rhythm in the peaks where Rowling lets you come up for air.

Please get this. This is fundamental to good storytelling, and you'll hear me talk a lot more about tension if you continue to follow this book. Which is exactly what you're going to do, right?

Right?