He puts the ship through paces
And paces the halls, pacing is madness
Patience is virtuous, patient of these observations
It was all a dreamClipping - “All Black”
Ah, pacing. Bloody pacing.
We all talk about stories being slow reads, or whip-quick and page-turning. We speak of sections that drag, or happen too fast. Everyone seems to have a speedometer as part of their reading comprehension — except me.
I don’t have an intuitive sense of story pace, and rarely talk about how fast or slow stories are, except in that awkward Chinese room way where I shuffle around the symbols and associations, carried on by a studied assumption that I’m probably pointing to the thing everyone else understands and I don’t.
Does pacing exist? To some, I’ve made a fool of myself by insisting it doesn’t. It’s a meme, we made it up as a joke.
Bad pacing is oft-trotted out as a critique, but I’ve long held that speaking of good or bad ‘pacing’ is about as useful as saying a movie has good or bad ‘visuals’. You can look at a movie and see something, and you can like what you see — but ‘things you like to see’ don’t constitute a useful category, whether you seek to understand art or improve your craft.
What defines my essays is a pursuit of specific and thoroughly worked out advice — capturing writing process with elegant and scrutable models.
Let’s begin by figuring out what kinds of pacing definitely exist. With some thought, I can think of at least five things that map onto what people seem to mean:
- Pacing is word choice. Fast paced stories have punchy prose that says exactly what it means with no fluff, and slow paced stories get bogged down in description and metaphor.
- Pacing is plot progression. The more characters and situations change per wordcount, the faster the pacing is.
- Pacing is external plot progression. The more fights and travel and visible stuff happening we see, the faster the pace. But if there’s a lot of character moments and internal changes, this feels like slow pace instead.
- Pacing is in-story time progression. The more time passing in-world per word count, the faster the pace.
- Pacing as the delivery of information. This is a somewhat specific use, but people speak of the pacing of backstory/worldbuilding reveals. The sooner important facts are revealed, the faster the pace.
(If none of those seem quite it, that’s because the way this rhetorical game works is that no definition I list off at the start is right, and instead serve to make me look smarter for pointing at the right one later on.)
Still, these five are enough to illustrate the paradox of pacing. Consider a story that dramatically, breathlessly recounts a rather uneventful week. Consider a story where a novel’s worth of events happen in a single day. (Well, take it from me: this, uh, isn’t exactly hypothetical.)
These considerations aren’t even adversarial gotchas — just recently, I’ve read Six Pomegranate Seeds, and I was floored by just how relentlessly quick it proceeds, years going by in chapters, only for a fellow writer to have the exact opposite impression, dropping it for the slow pace. Quote: “you can’t be fast paced if nothing is happening, even if you proceed through the nothing at a fast clip in-universe”.
I recently defined what prose is, and on the face of it, it’s tempting to reprise that structure. There I contended that prose decomposes into 12 independent facets, and the word itself is too polysemous to be useful.
Is pacing not the same? Can I speak of the N plot virtues, individual knobs that control our gestalt sense of pace? I’d like to; that last essay wound up as one of my most successful.
Yet, to my great chagrin, I’ve found a definition that unifies all these disparate facets of pacing and indeed salvages the concept.
Pacing is payoff.
Why does verbosity matter? Because the more words you lavish on descriptions, the longer it takes to get to the payoff. Why does plot progression matter? Because conclusive change is what we’re here to see, and transitional changes promise we’re moving closer to some satisfying conclusion. Why do information reveals matter? Because answering questions you’ve raised is simply one form of payoff.
Why does in-world time matter? This one’s harder to explain. I think it’s somewhat peripheral — in order for more time to pass in fewer words, you need to skip over things. This means you only focus on the stuff that matters, things connected more directly to the payoff you’re building to — or at least you give the impression that’s what you’re doing. And if you don’t skip over things, even if those things do matter, then that continuous accounting will feel like getting bogged down in minutia.
(This moment by moment chronicle of events is an oddly common feature of webfiction style. There’s a blogpost somewhere in that observation, I think.)
But I skipped over one last facet — Why do character moments and introspection slow down the pace? Here we cut to the heart of this definition’s utility.
Character moments can seem slow-paced due to their subtle, dare I say, cerebral nature. It’s easy to feel satisfaction at hero confronting the villain — but a conversation with their ally, exploring the nuances of their relationship, full of subtext?
You read a romance story because you want to see two people kiss. You read a detective story because you want to see a mystery unraveled. You read an action story to see some ass kicked.
Different stories have different appeals, and if we boil the appeal of stories down to their payoff, then does “no payoff” look much different from “payoff I don’t care for”?
Or better yet, “payoff I wasn’t primed for” — so much of writing comes down to anticipation. It’s suggestive to think the longer you’re anticipating something, the slower the pacing feels. And if you’re waiting for something the story never delivers?
(In correspondence, it soon became clear that aforementioned critic of Six Pomegranate Seeds, for better or worse, came in with expectations of the story that it would not deliver.)
I suspect part of why I don’t sense pacing as finely (and why my writing ends up so slow paced) is not only am I open-minded and easy to please, tending to approach stories burdened with few expectations, but I deeply enjoy writing on a line-by-line, beat-by-beat level. Slow pace doesn’t bother me as long as the prose sings. (Indeed, I’m so unconcerned with long-term payoff that reaching the end of an incomplete story doesn’t even faze me — when a dead fic ends on a cliffhanger, I don’t despair, I laugh.)
But back up. Pacing isn’t just fast or slow, it’s also good or bad. Some fics are fast-paced and it rocks; some fics are fast-paced and it feels rushed. Why’s that?
Aren’t you already anticipating the answer?
Payoff is famously only half the equation; you never speak of it without its antecedent: setup. Setup is quintessentially slow-paced. Just uttering the word conjures images of plodding stories that take forever lining up dominoes before knocking them down.
It’s not a new insight to say fast pace isn’t an unalloyed good, but this makes it clear why. We can improve the definition, render it plain and simple:
Pacing is how long it takes to get what you want.
The subjectivity then becomes abundantly clear. Different readers want different things, and the same reader will want multiple things, each delivered at a different rate.
(This doesn’t even dive into the pedantry of deciding what “long” or “get” means.)
A different faultline is possible, though — because it is the writer’s job to tell the reader what they want. No, to make them want to see what’s coming next.
Setup sounds boring, but why? If I tell you the bombs will drop in five minutes, are you bored as I describe the trails of smoke through the air, the metal hulls looming closer and closer, the people fleeing for their lives?
A much less drudgeful word for setup is build up — that sounds so much more promising. I wager endless setup hits different when the direction is clear.
How much of “slow” pacing is the writer hyping and teasing something you either don’t care about or don’t follow?
And it goes with but a cursory mention (heh) that ‘rushed’ pacing is payoff you weren’t adequately primed for, that didn’t linger long enough to be satisfying.
I could end this essay here — this is a fairly cogent exposition on pacing, but the essay doesn’t feel finished. Part of that is the (admittedly fitting) anticlimax of this dashed-off final assertion, and I suppose part of it is I have a history of longwinded blather I want to maintain even when I’ve run out of things to say.
But have I run out of things to say? Suppose your story is slow paced, and you want to make it faster. Suppose it’s rushed, and you want to make it slower. How do you do that? What are the actual knobs we can turn to manipulate pacing?
I recently watched a video: “The Arc that broke MHA” by Oceaniz. I recommend it, with a caveat: it is difficult to follow if you aren’t familiar with My Hero Academia. I wasn’t, so I struggled. But Oceaniz’s skill as a video essayist, and his genuine insight, kept me watching.
It’s easy to find people talking about how to write sentences and scenes, and if Thanos snapped twice there’d still be no shortage of people explaining the Hero’s Journey or a dozen different three act structures. The former lets you write good chapters, and the later is fine for structuring a movie, an arc, perhaps even a novel.
But for truly long-form writing? Serialized fiction, whether fanfic or web novel, can sprawl, and what structure is there, in that expansive morass? No million word saga is so single-minded that a story circle carves its joints. What I found so compelling about Oceaniz’s was his analysis dissects this long running series with tools that feel scale-invariant.
Even without familiarity with MHA, the most important part of the video is introduced early. Oceaniz contends that the early arcs of MHA exhibited three virtues: preparation, deliberation, and consequence.
With names that well-chosen, do I need to explain? Preparation is setup by another name, and consequence is the aftermath of payoff. Is deliberation just payoff, then? Not quite. It’s slippery to grasp just what deliberation entails — it’s (unfortunately) the least well articulated, yet I find it the most interesting part of the model.
Oceaniz’s first example of deliberation is pointing to a significant early fight, then asking why two specific characters confront the villain, not anyone else. “Because the author picked them”, of course, but what’s the significance of that choice? The specific context of fight could easily have been tweaked to put someone there. It’d hardly change the structure.
And yet, Oceaniz finds thematic weight in these particular characters being the ones to confront the villain. Their backgrounds and the narrative questions they struggle with render them a perfect counterpoint. It wasn’t arbitrary. Having these characters fight says something. Tweaking the setup so that it’s anyone else would still make procedural sense, yet weaken the story.
But I think I can offer a succint explanation simply by dint of definition: it’s deliberate, not random. Deliberation is payoff of a particular form: using preparation to make a development not merely plausible, but necessary. Or to allude to Aristotle, inevitable.
Preparation and deliberation perfectly explain why my stories are so slow-paced. My preferred style of story-telling is meticulous to the point of insecurity. I hate to rely on vague happenstance, nor ask for the reader’s charitability (better known as suspension of disbelief). So I try to justify everything that happens, pin everything down to clockwork causality.
Still, how do you make a fast-paced story slower?
The overarching argument advanced by Oceaniz is that MHA gradually lost sight of the fundamentals of preparation, deliberation, and consequence in its later arcs. When describing the arcs that abandon this structure, one feature repeatedly mentioned is the pacing. Most tellingly of all, Ocean argues MHA’s slap-dash writing results from a rush to finish the story quickly.
Put polemically, you make a fast-paced story slower by writing it better.
(I should just let that hot take stand, but I’ll risk clarity. This is a lie, because you can of course make it slower by adding filler — but take this as an oath of editing: first, do no harm. If you’re trying to make a story slower, you’re also trying to make it better, so you should only make it slower in ways that also make it better.)
Slower pace improves the story when it adds more preparation, deliberation, and consequence. In other words, look at the things that have happened, and ask yourself: How can I hype this up beforehand? How can I tie this inescapably to what’s come before? How can I make this reverberate afterward?
Payoff means answering questions, so you must first raise the question, clearly and compellingly. Will a certain character get what they want? Will a certain event come to pass? Will an interesting bit of lore be revealed? And why should we care if it does?
There’s a skill in portraying a character’s needs and motivations sympathetically enough to get us invested; skill in promising an event so striking and consequential we need to see how it plays out; skill in having a backplot or setting so intriguing it begs to be exposited.
But I think that’s a different skill than pacing, and I can’t delve into it here.
Curiosity and anticipation mean tension — and once you have established that tension, the next step is to heighten it and progress it toward resolution.
Slowing the pace, then, means adding clues and complications, layering in deeper mysteries and raising further questions, tangling things so that you need intermediate answers before you even know the real question.
This is recursive enough to ensnare you. You can add obstacles, setbacks, detours between the start and end. And each of those additional elements could be prepared and deliberated and have consequences.
My feelings on my years old conception of the metadevelopment cycle have grown more mixed, but if you want my complete thoughts on large scale plot structure, there’s a more thorough look. While we’re on the topic of self-linking…
Not an essay goes by where I don’t mention “show don’t tell” or link to my article on it, but I won’t do that here. Because there’s a myopia in how I talk about that technique — I speak of it only as a tool for description, for rendering scenes in greater detail.
Detailed sensory descriptions, of course, slow things down by dragging them out, but this applies on yet a higher level.
Take a point of tension and consider the stakes, the clues, the conditions, the caveats — ask how they’re established to the reader. Is it directly, or indirectly? Can you take each plot-relevant fact and come up with a scene that reveals it by its effect on the world, portraying it in action?
Now, you can weave in new twists, or flesh out what you have, but the last tool I suggest is raising entirely new questions: which is to say, creating subplots.
Perhaps the new question is no more than a B-plot happening in parallel with the main story (bonus points if it mirrors the A-plot on a thematic level), but I think there’s something more satisfying in subplots that converge or diverge. That is to say, a seemingly unrelated question or problem that has the same resolution as the main plot, or an different problem incited by the same cause, requiring the protagonist to separately address it.
This can quickly get out of hand, but I find there’s a certain freedom to juggling a growing number of threads — by modulating which subplot gets focus when, you attain remarkable control over the pacing of a story.
I say I dont have an intuitive sense for this sort of thing, but something I’ve found arises naturally is a rhythm to how I cut between scenes. I’ve developed an innate sense for when there should be, for example, a buffer between two scenes. To name one rule I’ve unconsciously leaned toward, I have a sense that you should never pay something off immediately after setting it up.
Indeed, I incline toward slow pacing because I mind (to a fault) the amount of build up I need for truly dramatic events to have the gravitas they deserve.
So much for making things slower — but how do we make them faster?
An answer to this question, coming from me, is a blind snake leading into darkness; I don’t think I’ve ever made something faster in the edit, and indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever achieved fast pacing except by dint of dashing out a rough draft without particular care.
Fast pacing requires a keen eye to what matters and what doesn’t. My “just vibe with it” attitude towards pacing has a drawback — I write what I enjoy reading, and slow pacing doesn’t particularly bother me. I’m of course capable of looking at what I’ve written, and identifying which parts matter most, which parts I could cut — but I can appreciate the subtle ways those components enrich the text without feeling the costs they incur nearly as keenly, and thus when I cut, I only feel the loss.
But let me at least sketch out an answer. Some tools stand out as obviously appropriate: clarity, summary, and elision.
I often find myself writing oblique scenes, dark with foreshadowing, but I suspect setup is easier to stomach when it’s clear what you’re telegraphing. Why not reach into those implications and yank out the scene’s purpose, let it wriggle naked and free?
Once the purpose of the scene is clear, ask what the reader would miss if you cut it down and glossed over parts. Would they want to see it in full detail? Is the outcome predictable enough you’re belaboring the point? Is the progression believable enough that if you just come out and say what happens, we’d trust it? What do the moving parts actually contribute?
Recall the spirit of show-don’t-tell is letting the reader fill in the gaps, piece together reality from implications. You can skip the process and show the results.
I’ll let you figure the rest out.