Tuesday Tidbits - Pacing

Hello, everybody. This is a new series of blog posts I'm starting in an effort to actually do things on here while I'm not writing. Basically, I'm going to talk about the technical aspects of writing, which is the part I happen to be good at (still working on coming up with creative ideas and stuff like that, but I'll get there someday). In this series, I will combine my experiences as an author and as a proofreader to hopefully help the dozen of you who actually read my blog posts learn something new about writing.

This week I'm going to talk about pacing, since I already had most of the work for this done ahead of time and I only came up with this idea last night. Months ago, at the behest of a Mr. Vexy here in fimfiction, I considered the following question: How do you pace a story? It's not a simple question. We often think of pacing as this immeasurable, abstract concept. We know when a story drags, or moves too fast, but it's difficult to pinpoint the exact cause. Those months ago, I read through some of my favorite stories and through some less high-quality stories that I found around the site at the time, and in reading them, I think I can safely say that I've uncovered many of the factors at play.

There are two important factors that determine the pace of a story. First is the amount of reading time relative to the amount of time passing in the story. If there's a lot of text in a story but not a lot of action going on, the pace of the events will seem slower, while the reverse occurs if there's not enough text for the events going on. This often manifests itself as something I like to call Action Per Sentence Syndrome. This is a mistake most often made by newer authors. Though this isn't always true, most actions should be given more than a short sentence's worth of time in your story. Consider the following passages:

Applejack picked up the apple and put it in the basket.
Applejack leaned over, grabbed the apple in her mouth, and carefully placed it in the basket. The fruit landed with a hollow-sounding thump in the bottom of the empty straw container; one down, hundreds more to go.

Not only is the second more engaging, but it also gives the event more weight. The more detail you put into your story, the longer the events seem to go. But one caveat here: fast pacing isn't a bad things in all cases. If you've got an action-packed chase scene on top of a burning train car in the middle of the arctic tundra, then you want to move from action to action quickly to suit the type of events going on. Half of the battle when it comes to pacing a story is knowing when to use the faster or slower varieties.

The second important factor of story pace is the ratio of dialogue to description. Dialogue will inevitably increase the perceived speed of the story, because it occurs as quickly as it is read, whereas description encourages the reader to create mental images and think more critically about what the story says. To be clear, I'm not railing on dialogue here. I personally write a very description-heavy style in most of my stories, but dialogue-heavy stories work just as well when written correctly. For an example of that, I'd point you to Sompony's Daughter by Bookplayer. The reason this story moves at such a moderate pace is because the dialogue goes somewhere. Many new authors also make the mistake of changing the topic of conversation too quickly. Character interaction should move naturally like conversations do in real life. Dialogue isn't exclusively a means to introduce a topic. Don't be afraid to let your characters stray off topic or spend a while on the same idea. These things can only help your story.

Now I'm pretty much done here. The main determiner of pace is words per story event. Clean and simple. No further discussion needed … only that would be completely wrong. There are a few other things I've seen that have an effect on the pace of a story. Showing (as opposed to telling), will decrease the pace of your story, while telling will increase it. The heavy use of dialogue tags is a notable exception to the rules I outlined above, as they don't change the pace of the story. In fact, they're pretty much useless, but more on that some other week. Lastly, the use of description that deals directly with time passing is a bit more complex. I tend to avoid phrases like "five minutes passed" or "there was a pause" in favor of using indirect events to demonstrate time (for example: "outside, the sky grew darker with the coming of night, but Twilight remained locked in her room). Another option, if you happen to be writing in an omniscient perspective, is using the character's thoughts to your advantage. Rather than saying that a character paused to think about it, actually write down their thoughts. It's always better to have something happen than simply saying that it happened.

Anyhow, that's all for this week. If you want to suggest ideas for me to discuss next week, leave a comment and I'll get right on it. If there are no such requests, I'll be talking about Setting, and how there's a lot more to it than where and when. And if you want to know more about this subject, here's an outside resource for you.
http://www.writersstore.com/techniques-to-establish-pacing/