Writing: Pacing · 1:50am Aug 27th, 2013
I know nothing about pacing. I’m not even convinced that it’s a thing. If I’m reading a story and get bored, I don’t say the pacing is slow. I say it’s boring. That tells you more ways and more specific ways to fix it. If a story has two breathless action scenes in a row in a way that doesn’t work for me, like the opening to End of Ponies, I don’t say the pacing is too fast; I look for something that's missing. Raiders of the Lost Ark is just as fast, but it isn’t too fast.
I’m not convinced there’s such a thing as “too slow” or “too fast”. There’s such a thing as too boring, and such a thing as too many questions per second. The opening action scenes in End of Ponies continually increase the reader’s uncertainty and pull her attention in different directions, because the information they provide is outweighed by the questions that information immediately leads to (What happened to Equestria? What happened to Rainbow Dash? Where were the princesses?) The opening action scenes in Raiders give us more story-relevant information than questions. (This is one advantage of an OC, BTW: The opening scene of Raiders is interesting partly because we’re finding out who Indy is. It would be almost boring if we already knew.) They don’t open troubling new mysteries on us in the beginning or middle of an action sequence.
If there’s a correct ratio between slow and fast, or a correct interval at which to alternate between them, I don’t know about it. But I’ll play along for now and assume “pacing” means something measurable and useful for a story.
I was scanning in “Scene and Structure” by Jack Bickham when some of the highlighted words in the chapter on pacing caught my eye. As often happens, though I read it only two months ago, I had no recollection of any of it. I think maybe some alternate-universe stupid me underlined it, because he underlined the wrong parts. It said some surprising things that I would have remembered, or at least highlighted, if I’d read them.
Jack Bickham divides stories up into what he calls scenes and sequels. A scene shows a conflict; a sequel tells what the main character thinks about it afterward. Bickham’s theory of pacing is that scenes are fast, and sequels and interior thoughts within a scene are slow. So his prescription for making a story’s pacing faster or slower is to change the ratio of scenes versus {sequels and interior thoughts}.
This has the counterintuitive results that you can make something faster by making it longer, fleshing the scenes out with more detail, and you can make it slower by making it shorter, converting weak scenes into summaries (which are then sequels).
I at first mapped “scenes” to “showing” and “sequels and interior thoughts” to “telling”. This is close, but not quite right. I talked in my Vault interview about writing “Mortality Report” versus writing “Twenty Minutes”. The first was boring because it was all telling, and I added scenes to make it less boring. The second was boring even though it was all showing. I thought that the problematic opening was all a single scene, all showing. Why was the “pacing too slow” if it was all scene / showing?
Then I realized it wasn’t a scene at all by Bickham’s definition. A scene starts with a protagonist who wants something, and an obstacle. I had a protagonist with a problem, but the reader wouldn’t learn what it was until the second scene. So my opening “scene” was neither scene nor sequel, according to Bickham, but an unclassifiable thing that you should not write.
So I don’t have to believe in “too fast” or “too slow” to benefit from his advice on pacing. I can think of “pacing” as just meaning “the ratio of scenes to sequels”, and this turns out to be useful (and more precise) information.
Here’s my theory of pacing, which I just made up at this moment: Pacing means balancing the load across your reader’s processors. Your reader has, at the very least, a graphics processor (GPU) for visual and perceptual scenes, a CPU for logical thought, and an EPU (Emotion Processing Unit) that decides how she feels about all these things. Bad pacing means fully-loading one of these processors with multiple tasks while another of them sits idle. Your reader’s CPU can still be crunching on the consequences described in the previous sequel while her GPU is absorbing the details in the current scene. If you put too many parts in a row that task only one of these processors, you’re not challenging your readers.
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Postscript is unrelated: If you've already read The 8 Creepiest Things About My Little Pony, you may want to go back and read this comment/story by Aquillo.
I don't know a damn thing about pacing.
I"m not really good at emotions, either.
Judging by some of the comments I've gotten on my stories, I guess I must have some idea what I'm doing, though.
I occasionally wonder if good storytelling can really be broken down into numbers and statistics, or if it's more ethereal, a thing that you either have or don't? I mean, the formula for a haiku is pretty simple; even I can write them. I presume a computer could, too. But, there's something that transcends the formula in a good haiku, something that if I have it's only by accident.
I mention this because I'm currently editing a chapter. I am not breaking it up into scenes and sequels as I go through. Instead, I read it, make notes with whatever pen I have handy, and cross out or add sections as I see fit. There are points where a change of perspective seems right, or where an interlude to a different story arc might fit. There's occasional places where I drop what may or may not turn out to be foreshadowing (too many years of DMing has put me in the habit of leaving threads here and there I can use later if the urge strikes me). Occasionally, I try to work in a little bit of alliteration (my personal favorite, so far, is "silver salver,") or a bad pun. Mostly I just bang away at the keys, scratch my head, imbibe in some liquid muse, and figure I'll fix it in proofing. If it's really bad, one of my pre-readers will comment, in all caps, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING?
To me, that's writing. While I'd love someone to do a mathematical analysis on my story (I'm lying) and tell me why it's so awesome, what it really comes down to is the reader. And I think, like all art, no matter how technically correct or formulaic or nouveau or whatever it is, it's appealing (or not) to an audience of one, who will either like it or hate it.
I've always compared pacing in a story to the relationship between tension and release in music,
I've never bothered to fully think that out though...
It took me so long to figure out where that 'ferrets to otters' thing started...
I think what you're describing is part of what the term 'pacing' is usually used to refer to. It may seem a more nebulous term for some, but nebulous terms are frequently useful.
For me, I think 'pacing' has to do with how much plot event is happening as we move along, how much density there is in terms of description, and (to some extent) selection of words that makes the narrative more quickly readable.
Maybe that's just me.
Out of curiosity, why do you assume all your readers are female? Or are you using the word 'she' with an intention/meaning I'm not familiar with (I heard of calling vehicles or ships with 'shes', but somehow it doesn't fit
)?
Side note: finally someone explained the whole show/tell shenanigans with language even software developers (and other geeks) can understand.
Props!
1312144 I try to assume they're male about half the time and assume they're female the other half of the time.
1312294
Fair enough.