#5 Pace: Cracking or Grinding?

« « #6 (Dull) Beginning, (Sagging round the) Middle and (Lame at the) End. | #4 Enter Deus Ex Machina; Exit Reader » »

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

Your reader is into the third paragraph of your story and although she has already developed a connection to your main character, nothing seems to be happening. She’s beginning to feel the tug of the outside world. The main character doesn’t seem to be doing anything. The shopping list for this evening’s dinner pops uninvited into her head. Maybe she skips a couple of paragraphs to find out if anything interesting is going to happen. Mmm, not much change. Images of the local supermarket’s special offers she noticed in this morning’s local paper get harder and harder to repress. She averts her eyes from the page and notices it’s stopped raining. The book, your story, goes limp in her hand. She rises. Oh dear. She’s gone.

What was the problem? The story never picked up enough momentum to hold the distractions of the real world at bay. It lacked pace.

Pace is dictated by the structure of your story. You want your story to a lean, mean machine for hooking your readers and reeling them into the world you’ve created for them. You don’t need to set off at a break-neck speed right from the start, but you do need to build momentum and be in control of your story’s pace.

At the beginning of your story you place your main character(s) on stage. Then your readers have to learn what it is your main character wants and what is stopping her from getting it. The drama gathers momentum as your protagonist begins to overcome the obstacles in her path (either internal or external) and move closer to getting what it is she wants. The pace of your story will be dictated by how much action you pack into each scene and how much description and backstory you insert.

We’ve already seen how trimming backstory to a minimum will improve the flow of your story. This is because a narrative is based on a sequence of events: break the sequence of events and you break the flow of the story. Each event must be essential to your story. If you find yourself inserting long sections of flashbacks, you’ve probably started your story in the wrong place.

So what is an essential event? The answer to this lies in the way you structure your story - the way you divide your story into individual scenes.

Write in Scenes

A scene is a section of story with, as Philip Larkin once put it, its own ‘beginning, muddle and end.’ Each scene can be viewed as a mini-story in its own right - the simplest stories are made up of a single scene.

There are many approaches you can take to writing scenes, but here are the three principle ones:

Action scenes - although we’re using the word ‘action,’ we don’t mean your main character has to roll around on the floor under a hail of bullets or charge through exploding office buildings. We’re talking about the actions or measures your main character has to take to overcome the obstacles in her way and resolve her dilemma. For example, in Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis,’ the main character wakes up as a giant beetle. That’s quite a dilemma. Each scene shows how his life changes as a result of the actions he takes to deal with his new and problematic situation, and as each action he takes makes his situation worse, the stakes get higher and higher. As a result, the story moves along at a cracking pace even though you wouldn’t describe it as an action story - far from it.
Descriptive scenes - as the name suggests, these provide your story with description, explanation, background information, or character reflection. As you might expect, this kind of scene will slow down your story’s pace. You are more likely to find descriptive scenes in literary fiction, especially if it was written before 1950. Again, your character has to be at the centre of the scene, and it must give us some information that is essential to your story.
Transitional scenes - these are scenes which are intended to tie two scenes together, often involving a switch in place, time or viewpoint. They are useful to maintain the flow in longer stories or novels, and often take the form of a brief summary.

Which scenes you choose, and the order they appear in the structure of your story, will determine the pace. A chain of action scenes will pump up the pace of your story to a sprint. By interspersing action scenes with slower, descriptive scenes you will allow readers to catch their breath while your story still moves forward. The more descriptive scenes you employ, the more your story will assume a leisurely or contemplative feel. It is your ability to control the changes of pace that will make your stories a pleasure to read.

The most important factor to bear in mind is that your readers will be interested in how your character deals with the dilemma your story poses. If your characters are believable, interesting and involved in a struggle, and you are writing in scenes that show this, you will never have to worry about the pace of your story flagging. Your reader’s shopping list will just have to wait.