It's no secret that pacing and manipulating time is one of the harder things for new writers to learn.

Why is it important to say they walked to the park? Why can't they just be there?

Why shouldn't ponies meet and fall in love within the same thousand words?

Please discuss the basic necessity and execution of pacing and avoiding jumps in location.

880459 Well I could be wrong here, but when I read a story, I need time to become attached to these characters. If you just say "they were at the park when they met and then they fell in love and lived happily ever after" then I think: Why the hell do I care about any of these characters and if they lived happily ever after. But at the same time, if you omit simple things like walking, then you don't get the idea that they are normal. i.e.
"Cian nodded towards the forest, "Let's go for a walk, Flutters."
THEN THEY WERE IN THE FOREST
Cian smiled at the timid yellow mare. "So, you wanted to talk?"
Did they walk to the forest? Did they fly? Dig underground? Spin in circles? Did they make small talk or walk in silence? It's small things like that that show what kind of relationship two characters have. When people don't show these small interactions, they initiate what I like to call "Shepard Syndrome."
In which the main character is nothing more than an airship piloted by the reader doing little more than moving the story along, like Commander Shepard. You don't care about Shepard, you don't want a story about Shepard.

So that's my idea.

880485 Excellent. c:

Personally I didn't have a problem writing time skips until recently. I'm not going to be cheeky and ask anyone to read my fic (though you're more than welcome to ) but effectively Twilight was given a one month deadline to complete an extremely important task, and I didn't want to explain every little detail (even with only the main details the chapter had to be split in two because it toted up to a ridiculous 22,000 words.) so I used quite a lot of time skips. I'm just wondering if it's poor form or not. I do really try my best to set the scene after each skip, (e.g. After leaving the memorial Twilight had teleported the rest of the distance to Sweet Apple Acres in search of Applejack.), but still, is that acceptable or is it something I should work on? Thanks for your time

The idea is to spend time to introduce the charactrs and make us care about what happens to them. Take too long and reader intrest start to wane but go too fast and it bcomes hard to follow. The trick is finding out how much is enough. Sometimes you need to provide lots of details, sometimes you don't.

Because one of the most important aspects of writing a story is immersion. Anything that breaks a reader out of that immersion, that feels jarring, or our of place, can immediately destroy any dramatic tension you were building.

Ponies shouldn't meet and fall in love within the same thousand words because that doesn't happen in real life--and because that isn't a story. Falling in love is a climax in itself, we want buildup! We want little clues on how this is developing, eventually leading into a huge emotional moment. Even if having characters be in love is a necessary plot element with the story, why not start after the event, possibly using flashbacks to deliver that emotional payoff?

To be honest, unless the walk to the park is important--building tension, exploring emotion, yadda yadda, you probably shouldn't show it. That doesn't mean you can cut to the park instantly, but utilising a scene break, or even compressing the walk to a sentence or two helps to acknowledge the passing time. Maybe have somepony make a comment on the time--by the time they reach the park, school has concluded for the day. Simple clues like that can help a great deal.

By way of example of how not to do pacing, here is my first published story, Lethe. Just the first chapter alone gives an excellent example of how a complete lack of control over the pacing ruins any building tension I'm trying to achieve. I've been told that it gets a lot better in later chapters, but for the purposes of this thread, that should suffice.

With random scene jumps, think of a terrible TV show. Now just imagine that people are just at various locations talking about stuff, and you never see anything other than the scene around them.

The transitional scenes are required if you want to be descriptive without shoving new information in the reader's face just before an important part. Not only can you describe things ahead of time, but you can also slip new characters in before they become important, and it just seems more realistic to show them getting there instead of instantaneously teleporting for ease of writing.

As for pacing, I find it essential to make it relate to the reader more. Think of a stereotypical "love at first sight" romance. It just seems thrown together so the drama can start earlier. By making the couple take longer to get together, the reader becomes more emotionally invested, and it becomes much more realistic for them. After all, no relationship in real life becomes serious in less than an hour.
-SoI

880524 In my opinion that example is fine because you're explaining what happened. Saying "she teleported" says "Oh, she was using magic to get somewhere faster." It's only when you don't explain the transition or leave it incredibly vague, not giving people enough of an idea of just what happened during the transition.

A fast paced story is like scribbling a drawing. You might be able to tell a story, but it's a pretty ugly story. Part of character development is relevant to speed of pacing. It's possible to flesh out an entire character in an in-universe period of an hour if done correctly. As for jumps in location, it takes at the least just one or two sentences (or even just a few words). If you can't write two sentences about a simple action, there's a problem. Vague location jumps could probably be used to good effect, but again- it really has a bare minimum of putting in a few words.

More (relevant) details, better picture. Better picture, better experience.

Pacing is this thing that authors do to get readers invested in the story. It also tends to build immersion. In real life it takes time for things to happen, and other things happen in the meantime. This means that would-be authors should supplement the story with decent transitions, unrelated and related events and glimpses into the minds of the cast to build the characters' erm, character, and to add meat to the story. Overindulgence can lead to a story that feels padded, so one should stay within reasonable bounds. Stories lacking transitions will feel rushed and will fail to entice the reader.
Good pacing is a test of patience on the part of the author. I have some trouble with it, myself. But I suppose the end result of a fleshed-out piece is more than worth the effort.

This might sound amateurish, but I'm simply impatient. In the first few chapters of one of my stories, everything happens fairly fast. I got comments on this a few times, telling me I move straight to the payoff, and in my newest chapter, still in progress, as well as in my new story, I attempt to work on it. Pacing something too fast has always been a nasty habit of mine.

I wrote a lesson about time in writing on a lesson/advice thread I have on mlpchan.
http://mlpchan.net/fic/res/3348.html#3660
This is less about pacing and more about fine-tuned time manipulation in writing.
As for newer writers, it's just a part of being a new writer. In time they'll learn pacing.

I feel like as much as it is important to take things at a reasonable pace and not just dump plot details like an avalanche onto your reader, it's also important to remember that something interesting has to happen, preferably within your opening chapter, (or I would say the opening 2k words if we're not using chapters) or else a reader is just going to toss it because nothing has hooked them.

I'm reasonably certain that there is a rough heuristic ratio out somewhere that defines what percentage of a story's length should be taken up by critical plot elements, and what percentage should be spent on pace-slowdowns and descriptive world-building. I'm a complete amateur, so I hope someone more experienced comes along and corrects me, but I'm going to guess a 60 - 40 split in favor of plot.

880459 Because it isn't about reaching the end of a story as fast as one can. It's about the journey, and to show what eventually lead up to it.

When I read a story, I want to know what is going on in the world around the characters at the same time the characters are talking. I want to know the change the character experiences on every level. I want to be their friend. Or their enemy. I want them to be real and loved. I want 3dimmensional problems. Those tiny things. Why is the character here? What is their story? All of this. We want characters to be humans. To be able to be different every single time. If the character is the same as any other, why should we pay attention to them if we know what has already happened? That's my thought. Just need to realize it myself.

Think about telling a joke.

No, not a knock-knock joke or a one-liner. Think about a story joke, one with setting, build up, and most importantly, the punchline. Now the entire reason you're telling the joke is to make people laugh. And you'd think the best way to do it is to get to the punchline as soon as possible.

This is wrong. Don't think like this.

If you rush to the punchline, people won't understand the joke correctly. They'll miss words, or important clues to make the joke truly funny, and when you do get punchline, they won't laugh. So it behooves you to take your time and let the joke unfold slowly, like a flower, and allow your audience to get wrapped up in the set-up so that when the trap springs and the punchline is given, the audience is ready to give you the laughter you're after.

Now take away the joke part. Every story is like this, Romance, Adventure, Horror, whatever. Every story has setup and payoff (most likely several sets culminating in the climax and resolution of the story), and if they aren't set up and delivered well, most readers will give up before reaching the end of the story.

So, how does one learn to deal with such things. Same as anything, research and practice. Write scenes and hand them to someone you trust to "grade" them, and then rewrite them with the criticism in mind. Read a lot, try breaking down your favorite book into scenes or chapters and note where the set ups and payoffs take place. Figure out how you want your stories to end BEFORE you finish chapter 1 and then figure out what steps you need to take to get there.

Fanfiction is honestly a great way to practice as a lot of the early work (setting and characters) is done for you, and you can focus more on things like pacing. Also you have an entire community to fall back on for advice and criticism (of the constructive sort...ignore the other kinds). So get out there, make mistakes, and learn from them to try again.

880459 thats what i`m missing good to know

Actually, is it always truly necessary to pace it like that? Granted, I normally do. But I do have one story that I wrote with the specific intention of performing a writing experiment. Now, while it wasn't a huge feature box success (only 2 of my stories are) it didn't totally flop either. And I don't think I saw any complaints about the jagged scene movements.

The idea with this fic was to write as much story as possible in as few words possible. I rather like that style for certain scenarios. But I suppose it should be one or the other, right?

880459

Because human beings read at a certain rate and process what they've read at a certain rate. Pacing things at the high-frequency of that scale produces a story that feels like it's flying; pacing things slower allows the writer the luxury of 'time', in a sense.

Learning how to control the 'speed' the reader feels when they read is integral to mindset, to telling them the context of what's happening for the character. Short, choppy sentences, blurs instead of details, getting from one place to another within a sentence or two -- that's 'moving fast', that's what it means to most readers. If you do that about a languid love scene, it's going to be very jarring.

On the opposite end of things, describing a roller coaster ride in slow, loving detail, every flight of every projectile in sweet agonizing sloth -- this, too, is jarring as all everloving fuck.

Kurt Vonnegut's famous 8 Rules of Creative Writing:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Particularly note rules 4 and 5 in the context of this discussion. If walking to the park will reveal character or advance the action, then by all means show it. You need to show it, in that case. If it will do neither, then it has no business being in your story. Just cut to the park and get on with things. (Assuming, of course, that the scene in the park will reveal character or advance the action.)

If there are a lot of scenes where you are neither revealing character or advancing the action, you might have started too far away from the climax. Writing Excuses talked about rule 5, but they called it the technique of "in late, out early." The example they gave was that if your characters are having a 90-minute-long argument and it turns into a shouting match in the last 5 minutes, then you should start the scene just before those last 5 minutes, because your readers don't want to read the other 85 minutes. If your character is going to be ambushed while walking to the park and their assailant will be wearing the mark of the Order of the MacGuffin that kicks off the plot, then there's a reason to start the story just before that attack. If, on the other hand, your character is going to have a pleasant day in the park in which absolutely nothing plot-relevant happens, then the park shouldn't be in your story. Start closer to the climax.

If there is information that the reader needs to know, but that information is too far away from the climax to include in the story, that is what flashbacks and simple exposition is for.

880485 ..Well, I'll be writing that down.

881585

I actually agree with you. And Vonnegut, by extension.

Pacing goes both ways. If the scene doesn't add texture to the characters or setting or advance the plot in any meaningful fashion, then it is useless and worth removing.

But at the same time, a little bit of description can do wonders for a scene when it comes to immersion and character- and world-building. Properly paced, even the act of watching paint dry can become writing gold.

882100 I object to your "but," because you go on to agree with my point, just from another angle. If a piece of description is contributing to character- and/or world-building (plot-relevant worldbuilding, specifically), then it absolutely belongs in the story—that bit of description is following Vonnegut's rule 4. Even description that simply contributes to immersion can be good, because a satisfying and engaging reading experience trumps rules. But personally, I would look damn hard at description I wrote that only enhanced immersion, because that description is underperforming.