Pacing in Writing
Pacing is the engine that keeps that story going and keeps your reader's interest level high. One of the most important things that I teach when it comes to pacing with writing is the balance of action and the information. Information is dense. It moves slowly. Action is fast. It moves quickly. Now, it has nothing to do with page count at all. It has everything to do with the balance of what's in those pages.
This is going to be a short discussion and then you can join us for the rest of the discussion over in Good Story Learning which is our membership site, where we post new content every month aimed at writers of all ability levels, in all categories.
Wish you had a guide to help your work-in-progress come to life? Our expert editors will make sure your project is polished and targeted to your specific audience, from outline to submission package.
transcript for pacing in writing
My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. This video is all about pacing in your writing. This is going to be a short discussion and then you can join us for the rest of the discussion over in Good Story Learning which is our membership site, where we post new content every month aimed at writers of all ability levels, in all categories.
So, one of the most important things that I teach when it comes to pacing with writing is the balance of action and the information. Information is dense. It moves slowly. Action is fast. It moves quickly. Pacing is the perceived speed at which your writing moves. Now, it has nothing to do with page count at all. It has everything to do with the balance of what's in those pages. So, you can have a 600-page, 800-page book that moves very, very quickly and you can't stop reading it. You could have a short story that moves so slowly that you can't even bring yourself to finish it. Pacing is the engine that keeps that story going and keeps your reader's interest level high.
So how do you amp up pacing in your writing while delivering the information that you need to? This is where the idea of balancing the action and the information comes into play. So, let's say you were writing sci-fi, speculative, anything with world-building, fantasy, historical, you need to get some information about the world, the characters in place. But they shoot themselves in the foot by just dropping that information there without any kind of remediation efforts on their parts to, sort of, keep pacing high.
So my theory is that if you need to drop information, you can do it in the smallest bites imaginable, the very minimum that you need to sort of lift the story off the grounds, and then on each side of a block of information, you need to give it some lift with action, tension, mystery, some sort of something that happens in the story, in-scene, to sort of make that information more palatable and keep the reader kind of moving quickly through that dense block of information because remember, information slows your pacing down but action and all of these other, kind of, conflict-forward elements of your craft are going to speed that pacing up and keep your reader reading.
So, when you have something dense to drop in there, make sure to sort of maybe lead in with some action, then have your character slow down. Maybe it's a reaction beat where they sort of synthesize some of the things that they just learned or they learn something new, and then, we're back off to action again. So, an example of that would be if you need your information to come at the beginning of a chapter, you end on a lift with some action. If your information comes at the end of a chapter, maybe there's a twist or some kind of reaction, or some kind of surprise, or interruption that comes at the very end of that chapter so that your readers are suddenly high on action, and they want to get to the next chapter. This creates a little bit of a buffering effect for the information that you've inserted.
So, it is a tricky balance when you are sort of working information into scene, at the scene, and at the chapter level. But this balance, I think, is a crucial part of weaving information into the action. Ideally, your story is driven more by action than it is by information, unless, of course, you are writing nonfiction. In which case though, you still do need to balance your information sections with something that keeps the reader going. Otherwise, it is a slog and they are plodding through from one fact to the next.
I'm gonna talk a little bit more about how to balance pacing your story on the grander scale over in Good Story Learning if you want to join us. My name is Mary Kole. This is Good Story Company and here's to a good story.
Whether you’re still working on your first manuscript or you have an idea for your tenth, Good Story Company’s expert editors are here to help. We offer a variety of options for writers at all stages of the process.
