The Craft of Writing, Part Four: Pacing

Hello, my readers! We are fast approaching Valentine’s Day, so we must remember what Valentine’s Day is all about: the martyrdom of ancient saints, like Valentine. I’m just joking (or am I?). I’m not quite sure what my wife and I have planned for Valentine’s Day this year, but I have a feeling that a good portion of it will consist of recovering from church. We love our church, and the ministry we’re involved in, but it can get so exhausting at times. But alas, we must persevere for the sake of teaching the faith to our band of kiddos.

Now if you’ve read the last three of my articles, then by now you’ll know about plot, character development and setting, the chief triumvirate of the fiction-writing world. But there are also a few other aspects which, while not nearly as crucial as those, nonetheless have the power to vastly improve your writing when properly utilized. The aspect I wish to cover today is called “pacing.”

If you’ve ever gone running, then you know that when you try and maintain a steady speed, that’s called your “pace.” You can sprint at a fast pace, or you can jog at a slow pace, or if you’re an angry child throwing a fit and not wanting to go to the dentist, you can move at a snail’s pace, if you move at all. Pacing in a story is simply when you take a particular speed and graft it onto the plot. If you want a fast-paced novel, then you’re going to have a lot of things happen in rapid succession. If you want a slow pace, then you may have long periods of time in which no real events take place, and the events which do happen come about at a slowly and leisurely, almost as if the plot got trapped in a jar of molasses. The Lord of the Rings is an example of slow pacing, and that’s the reason why I couldn’t make it through the first book (though, oddly enough, I found The Hobbit quite enjoyable, aside from a slow part which took me two weeks to get through). On the other end of the spectrum, you have the fast-paced films of Michael Bay, who has developed some notoriety for substituting engaging, developed plot for mindless action and an incalculable amount of explosions in his films.

So how do you work out a proper pacing for your own work? First, decide whether or not you want it to be fast-paced, slow-paced or somewhere in the middle. For fast- or slow-paced, it seems to be a balancing act between new events and explanations/reactions to those events. For a fast pace, shift the balance toward events; for a slow pace, shift the balance toward explanations and reactions. That’s an easy rule of thumb. Personally, though, I prefer a balanced approach. I look at the events to happen in my story and I try and have an equivalent amount of explanations and reactions. In addition, I try and space it all out evenly, with the result that my story continuously varies between a fast and a slow pace, a sprint and a jog. I try and get my readers’ hearts pumping as they are sucked into the action, then I take a step back and allow them to catch their breaths and calm down. After they’re nice and relaxed, I then work back toward more action. My goal is to find that sweet spot where I don’t overwhelm my readers, nor do I bore them.

Unfortunately, I have seen too many movies and read too many books where the pacing is good, but the plot seems to have that meandering feel, as if the writers don’t entirely know where they’re going. There’s just no goal in mind. This is the other half of pacing. Imagine, if you will, that you’re running, and you vary back-and-forth between a sprint and a jog. This may be enjoyable for a bit, but personally, I need a little bit more in order to keep it fresh. I want a mountain to climb. I want something that changes the whole terrain of my story.

That goal that you’re striving for is called the story’s climax. The climax is that event in the story which is maximally exciting, that point where you’ve reached your fastest pace. If you’re running up a mountain, the climax is the mountain peak. Everything building up toward that climax is called the rising action, and everything afterward is called the falling action. In your rising action, you establish the characters, the setting and, ultimately, the goal. In my stories, there’s an escalation in the events of the story as the climax is approached. Things grow steadily more intense the closer you come to it. In some Shakespearian plays, the rising action comprises the first act. Then you have the climax, where the characters reach their destination, where parallel storylines converge, where everything comes together to bring about the happening of one single event. Sometimes, Shakespeare reached the climax at the end of his second act. Finally, you have the falling action, when you descend the mountain and establish how the characters fared following the climax. Did some of them die, or go crazy, or live happily ever after? This often comprises the third and final act of many of Shakespeare’s plays.

In the Harry Potter series, each book has its own climax, whether it be facing Voldemort, or rescuing Sirius Black, or facing Voldemort, or facing Voldemort, or Dumbledore getting killed, or facing Voldemort. But when all of the books are put together, it becomes clear that everything is building toward the final, climactic Battle of Hogwarts in the end of the final book, during which the evil wizard is finally, finally vanquished. Then, following his death, you have the recovery of many of the characters, the falling action. Among the three, falling action is the one most often forgotten, and it can sometimes leave the reader feeling unfulfilled, without a sense of ultimate closure. But only once have I ever encountered a story where the climax was omitted, in the intensely fascinating series, Remnants, by K.A. Applegate. It was still good, but that part never sat well with me.

As you can see, pacing is intimately tied in with plot. Poor pacing gives the impression of “clumsy storytelling,” which may not sit well with the reader. But with a proper pace braided to the plot, and then these applied to the mountain of rising action, climax and falling action, you will have a story not only enjoyable, but, quite simply, fun. And that pacing is what will keep the reader interested so that they can’t find it in them to put down your story and forget about it. They will be dying to stick it out until the end.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next post, in which I discuss the proper dissemination of information in a story!