TRANSFORM Your Writing's QUALITY and PACE (Easily)

Improving on pace can TRANSFORM your writing

Today we look at how pace can completely transform everything from characters to scenes.
Sometimes you just want to take in MORE of a moment. There’s a setting, a conversation, or an event which you wish could carry on forever and you absolutely relish in the moment while it’s there.
Sometimes there’s things you want over and done with. The clock can’t go fast enough and you’re hoping you can speed through things as fast as possible. And it’s safe to say that readers will share that feeling.

We don’t want our writing to feel one note. No one does. We don’t want things to feel too slow because people will get bored.
On the other hand, we don’t want to speed through every scene because then nothing is memorable. We want to work with speed to complement our writing, not fight against it.
There’s a time and a place so let’s discuss pace. What is it and what affects pace? Fundamentally, pace is the speed at which a story unfolds.
It contributes to the rhythm of a story and often works alongside genre conventions. For example, many physical fights are going to sport a fast pace, whereas solemn moments like a funeral scene may benefit from slower pacing.
These are expectations that we can either lean into or subvert.

The three big things that affect pace are going to rest within action, dialogue, and description.

Description:
If there’s too much description, especially if you’re info dumping through exposition, your audience may skip prose, meaning jumping or skimming paragraphs until something happens.
When this is an issue, it tends to be because there’s no feeling of narrative progression. If there’s no feeling of progression, the audience is instead left feeling bored.
Consider what’s important in a scene, or which details might be irrelevant or have been highlighted previously. We’ll have a look at this a bit later on in our example piece.
Remember, if you’re drawing attention to something, you’re highlighting its importance. Don’t go describing the fireplace in great detail if you’re never going to light a fire or discover some burned up notes.

Inner monologues are a great way to tell the feelings of a character in a moment.
They can, however, get over used and drawn out. I think we’ve all read at least one book set in first person or perhaps 3rd person limited where we’ve skipped over the protagonist’s thoughts.
The best way to combat this is, again, consider whether the moment dictates such a lengthy monologue. If your character is going to get hit by the swing of a sword, do they really have time to fill half a page with thoughts?
This lengthens the scene and can disrupt your reader’s immersion.
You could be an amazing writer with beautiful sentences but if your reader is skipping over them then it’s not benefitting either of you in any way.

Action:
Consider how much time you realistically have in a given situation. A bit like with the monologue above, if your character is ducking from a sword swing, do they have time to readjust their armour, unsheath a dagger, pop open a bottle of poison, taint the metal, and step behind their enemy? Not likely. Try to ground your action in your audience’s expectations. Likely, this character will duck under the swing and then do all of those things after, when they’ve got a bit of safety distance and time.

Over directing. This is action that I personally struggle with. In my revisions I notice just how much I over direct.
Being too specific with who does what, which hand something gets carried in etc. Removing overdirection not only speeds up the pace but also offers some freedom to our readers and their creative imaginations.

Dialogue:
Dialogue can be slowed down by using hard to read dialects, or sped up by using more simple lexicons, which might even add to your characters and their personalities.
You can also reduce the dialogue tags used by ensuring you’re clear about who is speaking.

Look at your sentence craft. We can vary sentence lengths to not only offer a bit of variety, but to change the actual rate our readers get through a scene.
Breaking up larger sentences into smaller ones through removing connectives and introducing some full stops and commas allows us to change our reader’s rate of progression by forcing moments of respite.


Word redundancy. Here we’re looking at repetitions we don’t need. Any dialogue tags that are overly flamboyant or are redundant because we know who is speaking or thinking.

Chapters:
0:00 intro
0:32 what is pacing?
1:09 the big 3
1:24 description disadvantages
1:56 possible solutions
5:34 over directing
6:53 dialogue and dialect
9:04 example
11:39 conclusion

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