Four Kinds of Pace
By Donald Maass | October 5, 2016 |
Flickr creative commons: Hernan Pinera
What do we mean by pace? Generally, it’s taken to mean the activity level of a plot. When lots of outward and visible events occur, especially in rapid succession, pace is said to be fast. When a novel is more contemplative and less active, it’s pace is slow.
Fast pace is associated with commercial novels and slow pace with literary fiction. Fast is thought to be commercially successful; slow is feared to be critically successful. Fast is cheap but makes big money; slow is highly valuable but makes little. So it is thought. That’s as far as the discussion of pace usually goes.
In everyday terms, pace is both footsteps and their speed. Gait and rate. In fiction terms, who says that has to apply only to plot events? There are other ways to pace a novel. There are many kinds of steps through which you can put your characters and readers. Let’s look at four of them.
Inner Journey Pace
Commercial fiction writers are on comfortable ground when we talk about plot pace. Make plenty of things happen. Drop complications like rain. Twist. Turn. Surprise. As Raymond Chandler said, when you’re out of ideas have a man come through the door with a gun. Figure out why later on.
But what does that mean if your novel is mostly inward, character driven, and meditative? When not much visibly happens, how can you create a sense of things driving forward? Things can drive forward, obviously, just not in the same way.
In character driven fiction, it’s the intensity of a character’s need that creates tension. That by itself is not enough, though. Pace means change. If plot circumstances don’t change, something must. In practical terms that means complications, twists, turns and surprises that aren’t visible but are nevertheless real, changes that happen inside. These are the steps in an arc. If a such steps happen in every scene then you have a lively pace.
In each scene, ask: In what way can my protagonist become his or her own complication? In this scene, how does another character show a different side or assume a different role with respect to my protagonist (a twist)? In what radically new direction does my protagonist realize that he or she must go (a turn)? What self-discovery is an utter surprise to my protagonist?
This can work in plot-driven stories too, BTW. Why not?
Emotional Pace
This type of pace has less to do with what your characters are going through and more to do with what your readers are going through. Stories have an emotional effect on readers, we hope, but that effect can change. You can pace it too.
Have you ever driven a standard-shift automobile? As you accelerate you take the car through the gears. You hear the engine rev up, then drop in pitch as you release the clutch to engage a higher gear. Downshifting is the reverse. A low engine sound revs dramatically higher as you shift into a lower gear. You surge or slow, depending. Physics causes you to press back in your seat or press forward into your shoulder belt.
This can be accomplished in many ways in fiction, but one way is to shift in a scene from tension to energy, or the other way from energy to tension. Think of tension as a tiger poised for a pounce, and energy as the pounce. A shift inside a character is like that. As emotional gears shift, the reader feels the force of physics. There’s a sense of surging forward or pulling back.
In each scene, ask: How does my protagonist realize that his or her way of life is in conflict with his or her view of life? How does my protagonist show courage here, yet in what way must my protagonist also have faith? How is my protagonist rebelling now, and how can that descend into heresy? What constitutes justice at this moment, but what instead would be mercy? In what way does your protagonist gain control in this scene, yet also realize there is much he or she doesn’t understand?
Create a shift from tension to energy, or the reverse, and you cause your readers to shift gears too. That’s one way to regulate emotional pace.
Pace of Expectations
At any given point in your novel, readers have expectations for what is going to happen. In an artfully executed story, those expectations change. In a great story, what actually happens is unexpected, surprising, challenging and yet, finally, exactly right.
Certain expectations are inherent in a story premise. A romance is going to end with a happy union. A mystery is going to end with a solution. A thriller will end with safety. A personal journey will end with healing and resolution. The job in such stories is to work against such expectations, making it seem as if the expected outcome is unlikely or, better still, cannot happen.
There are other ways to play with readers’ expectations, though. Most manuscripts signal pretty quickly the outcome that we, its readers, are supposed to want. And mostly that is what we get. But what if you started out with a misleading signal?
To do that, work backwards from the actual outcome; that is, what your protagonist will actually do at your novel’s end. At the beginning, make your protagonist’s purpose and goal the opposite of that. Next, list the awakenings and realizations that will lead your protagonist to reverse course. Those little prods, nudges and epiphanies are the steps. More steps mean greater pace of changing reader expectations.
Moral Pace
This too is a sense of pace that occurs in readers. It’s readers’ changing understanding of what is right and wrong.
The most straightforward way to enact this is by gradually revealing your protagonist as innocent, naïve, shortsighted, headstrong, mistaken or possibly deluded. Conversely, you can gradually reveal your antagonist as knowing, rightly motivated, perseverant or even wise.
Simply put, if we come to feel that your hero has it wrong and that your antagonist has it right, the truth of things is in doubt. The more you play with that—seesawing back and forth on what your protagonist should believe and do—the greater is your novel’s moral pace.
Think of yourself less as a story spinner and as more of a questioner. Think of yourself as Socrates. Think of yourself as Bertrand Russell. Think of yourself as Jodi Picoult.
There are other kinds of pace we could discuss, such as the pace of change in relationships, in perceptions of place, and so on. But that’s enough for one morning, yeah? Now over to you….
How are you going to accelerate your novel’s pace today? Not plot pace, but one of the other ways in which your readers feel things changing?
[coffee]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
There is so much wisdom here. I particularly like the analogy of driving a standard-shift car. I learned to drive on a standard and I could feel that sensation of shifting and down shifting. That’s what we want the reader to feel: the pull from tension to energy and the reverse. It is a fundamental element of pacing. Often, pace is equated with action, but this post shows pace has several dimensions. The emotional pace is a key thing for the writer to master because emotions are internal and compelling stories hinge on the protagonist’s internal goals and struggles. My genre is family sagas and pacing can be a challenge because there are so many emotions lurking beneath the surface within the dynamics of a family. Weaving them into the story in a meaningful way that moves it along is the challenge. What was most helpful in your post was the tip about focusing on the conflict between the protagonist’s life way of life and her view of life. My protagonist starts out with a misbelief and through a whole series of events and challenges, she has an epiphany that shakes her and changes that misbelief. Your post helps me to better understand that and hone it in my story. Thanks for this insightful post.
Welcome, CG. In a saga, pace isn’t the only issue, obviously. Another is what conflict underlies the long span of a life, or even the lives of multiple generations.
Ask me, what makes a decades-spanning saga feel like one unified novel are questions that don’t change even when everything else does: Who am I supposed to be? Have I become that yet? How has my perception of things changed?
Changing beliefs are one way to make a story out of a whole life, and it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing. Terrific.
What timing on this post, Don. I just read one of my guilty pleasures, a Mac Bolan Executioner book. #7 to be exact. Taking on the Mafia in … New York! Anyway, the usual stuff, but in the middle (ha, as if looking in a mirror) Bolan has to shoot a German Shepherd guard dog, trained to kill, and it hits him how he, Bolan, is just like this dog. No, worse, because Bolan has a choice. Then, near the end, with the Mafia kingpin staring at the business end of Bolan’s gun, Bolan lets him go! (Unheard of in previous books) He tells the man this is his one chance to get out and get gone.
Why did Bolan do it? Because he took pity on the man’s wife. A momentary lapse in his revenge motive. And he wanted to be better than a dog.
A moral note in perhaps the most action-driven series ever. And you know what? It made me anxious to read #8.
Yeah exactly, Jim. A sense of story progress, even pace, doesn’t come only from face-down-the-Mafia action. It can come from a face-myself struggle.
The Executioner! Wow, been a long time for me. One of the pleasures of knowing you, Jim, has been how you’ve led me to see anew the depths in some shallow-seeming pulp fiction of decades gone by. That stuff endures for a reason.
Cain. MacDonald. Thompson. Those guys weren’t hacks. They wrote from the heart.
Don thank you for another insightful post.
In my WIP I’ve been experimenting with 2nd Person POV for selected scenes as a way to ‘downshift’ the emotional pacing and help keep the reader engaged. Those scenes are meant to build tension for what follows as I switch back to a 1st person narrative.
For example my opening scene is in 2nd person in the form of one character talking directly at my main character. I’m trying to draw my reader into the story more so they’ll stay engaged, and I’m hoping that connection increases the emotional torque they feel as the story progresses.
Emotional torque…yes, great focus. Cool that you’re working on that in stylistic ways, too. Excellent.
I just read In the Woods by Tana French. *SPOILER ALERTS!!! Unless I missed something big, the promise of the premise wasn’t delivered. She built suspense about a lost memory and I read to the very end to find out what happened, but he never remembered. It would be like reading to the end of The Goldfinch with Theodore leaving the painting in storage. The internal pacing didn’t drive the story with as much energy as it could have. Have you read it?
I wrote a big twist yesterday. Now my main character can’t tell her confidant anything about what happened to her. After reading your tips, I’ll really dive into that internal conflict. The more uncomfortable the better, right?
Yes, I did read In the Woods. Loved it. You’re right that the detective’s lost memory of what happened to him “in the woods” as a kid is not revealed. That it wasn’t, I think, was part of the novel’s point.
Not everything gets resolved. The detective has to live with that ambiguity. It’s a modern novel. Luckily, the crime is solved so we do have that.
So curious about your twist! Makes me uncomfortable…which makes me want to read.
Wednesday is writing day. I have the day off, the kids are at school, so it’s the one day I get to set aside for myself and work on my story. And what a gift it is when that day starts with a post from M. Maass! Your questions prompted a whole bunch of “what if’s”, and a firecracker went off when I read that “simply put, if we come to feel that your hero has it wrong and that your antagonist has it right, the truth of things is in doubt.”
Oh, just re-reading it stirs up so many ideas for twists and turns, deceits and discoveries…. Gotta go.
Thank you!
Go, go, go! Write!
Hey Don – I’ve been at this for over a decade, and today you’ve made me fully realize how much of it comes down to this. I feel like an understanding of pace, and a full appreciation that there are different types of pace, is such a vital piece of creating a successful novel. Thinking back on all of the attempts that didn’t succeed with beta-readers, thinking back on the critiques that resonated, I see it. Novels require so much of readers—not just their attention for a given span, but their focus, their anticipation to get back to it—a desire to focus on it again and again. For days. Sometimes for weeks. Even as I begin to find some successes, I can look back and see the effect my improving grasp of pace, and of its various forms, has had.
No matter how worthy we believe our storytelling destinations might be, no matter how intriguing our lure to join us for the ride, we cannot succeed without keeping our readers avid for the journey itself. Thanks for the realization, and the renewed aspiration.
Exactly, Vaughn, if we rely only on plot suspense to keep readers coming back, and back, then we’re bound at some point to fall short.
Focus on other kinds of tension–nicely paced–adds reasons to return and keep reading.
“Create a shift from tension to energy, or the reverse, and you cause your readers to shift gears, too.” There’s so much in your post, but this jumped out at me today because of the dynamic happening in the chapters I’ve been working on. The other thing that struck me was in your comment to CG Blake, about the questions remaining the same even when everything else changes. That resonated with me big time. Not entirely sure why yet. To be discovered! Thanks as alway, Don, for your generosity.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hi Don,
Thanks for coming by this morning with your post. With it, you’ve brought the tools to change my story’s flat tire.
I’ve been reaching/experimenting in my current WIP to instill pace through a protagonist (one of three POV’s) whose choices lead her to sit in a space the size of a couch for the last half of the story. I always knew this would be difficult, not to mention risky. But I think you’ve helped me make it roll. Much obliged.
Funny, a few minutes ago I was in a bike shop having a flat tire fixed. Know that feeling!
That’s a risky idea you’ve got, but others have pulled it off similar premises. Room. Misery. A protagonist doesn’t have to leave the room for a lot to happen.
True about Room and Misery.
The hard aspect here is the character is NOT a prisoner but chooses the fate. The setting and motive need to do the work that terror does in those other books. That’s the experiment. I’ll keep you posted.
Don. I thought aspects of the rewrite I am doing on parts of my novel were done. No. Going back to shift some gears. As always, THANKS. Beth
Always happy to complicate your revision process, Beth.
Thank you for expanding my concept of pace. Some of this has been intuitive for me but not all (moral pace!) and I’m excited to apply this to my WIP.
While reading your post I was thinking of Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine.” The first time I read it I was enthralled. The second time, I was aware Bradbury was controlling me with pacing. I wanted to stop reading and go back to examine what he was doing, but I couldn’t! So I had to read it a third time.
Bradbury was a master of many dimensions of fiction writing. And he did it all with an economy that we seem to have lost in our Age of Tomes.
Much like your books, this post is so meaty I decided to print it out so I could dissect it bit by bit.
Thanks for sharing your time.
Invest in a ring binder? So many posts by contributors here on WU are keepers!
Don, so many delights here: “Think of tension as a tiger poised for a pounce, and energy as the pounce. A shift inside a character is like that. As emotional gears shift, the reader feels the force of physics. There’s a sense of surging forward or pulling back.”
and
“…work backwards from the actual outcome; that is, what your protagonist will actually do at your novel’s end. At the beginning, make your protagonist’s purpose and goal the opposite of that. Next, list the awakenings and realizations that will lead your protagonist to reverse course.”
Though I put many slip-ups and reversals in my WIP, I worry about a leaden sense of inevitability in the larger guy-gets-girl scheme. I now think he should get that tiger (or at least wrestle with it).
On the way to see Pele’s hot kitchen on the Big Island now, and travel has distracted me from commenting on the last few great posts here in WU’s garden. So that ring binder sounds like a groovily great retro idea.
Already done that sir! I’ve only recently been made aware of this site. Went back through the archives and printed everything that resonated with me. Binders getting full.
And it’s free!
(Well, except for the computer, internet, printer, paper, hole puncher, ring binder, dividers, labels…still, a good deal, no?)
Beautiful timing–thank you, Don! I’ve been spending the week stepping back from my current WIP and assessing where things are. In particular, I’m looking at how the main storyline (in the past) and the secondary storyline (in the present) work together–or rather how they WILL work together once I start the actual weaving.
I need to make sure the arc of each one is clear and serving the story. I’m still thinking about how to make them work together: more of one, less of the other, to get the right balance. So reading your post today was right in line with some of what I was mulling over (especially the Inner Journey Pace and Pace of Expectations)…just that much MORE specific and focused. There are some questions here that are top of the To Do list tomorrow morning when I sit down with the manuscript again!
Excellent!
I’ve been struggling for weeks as my WIP pace is slow and I wanted it to be fast. I kind of thought that I’ve been using slow motion instead of a normal mode of narrative.
Then I changed POV and it didn’t work. I even write all over, starting afresh with a prologue to give it a different voice. No way.
So, what seemed to be working now is a division of Inner Journey Versus outer Journey, something like Frodo (inner journey) versus Aragorn (outer journey). Two parallel stories—from intimacy to distance.
Ah, I’m writing literary fiction, you say. And yes, also, I agree, I’m trying to make my WIP commercial. Sometimes seems so hard to write.
Reading your post, it seems, and corrected me if I’m wrong; that a literary way is ‘Frodo’ and a commercial one is ‘Aragorn’. Slow and fast motion.
I liked your expression, ‘footsteps and their speed’.
Yeah, in a way I am using a ‘man at the door with a gun’ though I missed that ‘lively pace’.
Ah, your questions always smack on. Thank you Don.
When you ask, ‘In what ways can my protagonist become his or her own complication?’, that sounds to me like in an Inner Journey, you just poured in—two in one—the public stakes (outer journey). I hope I’m right because I reckon is the way my WIP heads on to. Of course I am missing some ‘turns’. Thank you again Don.
I didn’t get this—BTW(?).
Emotional pace being a car gear is a cool metaphor. Generally in my work, apparently is a tractor and when you break, you go backwards—against the law of classical physics.
Yes, I can see emotional pace, let’s say, as interior conflict for the sympathetic character.
I say ‘division’ (of Inner Journey Versus outer Journey) but I think we mean the same, when you say, ‘regulate’ (emotional pace).
I ask myself, can a personal journey end with its dissolution (in place of the resolution)? Let’s say (dissolution) from Experience to Consciousness.
I guess your ‘misleading signal’ is to me ‘man at the door with a gun’.
In my created (science fantasy) world there is no right or wrong at least that I can devise it, though I see myself of as a questioner. I think of myself as Robert Lanza.
Robert Lanza’s book Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death sounds pretty ambitious. Like yours.
Thank you for checking on Robert Lanza’s book. He’s a life changer (1). He says in his two books (Biocentrism, and Beyond Biocentrism), what I was feeling already in my guts for a while in my world (and character) creation. Only he says it, in a science manner. I was just using my imagination (2). My lack was his logic. I’ve been on it (WIP) since 2001. I hope to be amenable (gentle, humble, answerable) to the reader.
1 in combination with what I’ve learned from your books (and posts, here!) it’s gonna, I venture, be great (My WIP).
2 intuition, feeling, perception
Luis,
BTW= by the way
Thank you Barbara. Appreciate it.
Thank you for another wonderful post. Lots to ponder and think about here but been having a hard time focusing on writing with Matthew on the way. Will have to return to this again.
Another great thought-provoking post. Thank you, Don. I’m travelling (in the Blue Mountains in Australia but off on my next leg towards Wales tonight), and I will take out my journal while sitting at the airport(s) and brainstorm, prompted by your post on pacing. You’ve set my brain sparking.
While wading waist-deep in my YA epic fantasy novel, I love the way you talk about moral pace: “Simply put, if we come to feel that your hero has it wrong and that your antagonist has it right, the truth of things is in doubt. The more you play with that—seesawing back and forth on what your protagonist should believe and do—the greater is your novel’s moral pace.”
I think this would help my genre quite a bit because it prevents the main antagonist from becoming all evil, which is boring … and at the same time, it forces the writer to raise the bar on the protagonist. This seesawing of moral pacing really helps layer the story for a richer, more fulfilling experience. And that’s a hard thing to swing in high-fantasy (at least it is for me). I don’t believe in ever dumbing down one character to make another look better, I think a seesaw progression nails it. Making both savvier, more creative, and at the end of the day, more layered … which hopefully makes for a better read.
Hi Don,
I particularly liked about the pacing of expectations. An area I am weak in and have been working on.
How in the world do you come up with so many probing questions??? You have more than a curious toddler does. :) Those questions are both a curse and a blessing as your endless question marks toss through my head as I plan, plot and write.
Far more a blessing than a curse though. Thank you for always making me dig deep.
Oh, gosh! I was so worried about my novel being mostly character driven with a simple, slightly predictable plot. I was worried about it being tad slow but these paces can help too! So much I didn’t know about pacing. Thanks so much! :) :)
Pacing. One of the biggest things I use for pacing is language. I have a default language I write all my books in. This means that the specific way I word things shines through each scene, however, how many words I use per sentence and how many sentences I use to convey an idea may change in order to get the pacing just right. If it is a fast paced action scene I’m probably not going to use five sentences to describe a single action taken by one person. If it’s a slow paced scene where a character is enjoying time by themselves then maybe I’ll spend ten sentences on a single action with interesperced internal dialogue and everything to boot.
How I achieve the correct pacing is I “find the scene.” I write the scene while listening to music that underscores the emotional content I want to accompany, then I proofread. When I proofread I go through the scene trying out different combinations of the same words, different synonyms, and different sentence structures. I rearrange ideas and combine and split sentences until the scene is “found.” Once the scene is found then it’s simply a matter of going through and cleaning up bits of rough spots and, bang, there it is: the scene. It usually takes multiple read throughs to “find the scene.” Sometimes it takes enough read through that I can almost recite it from memory, lol, but with each read through I can feel the scene becoming closer to what it was intended when I originally wrote it. I invented the term “find the scene” when I realized that I imagine a scene coming together like I’m walking through a thick fog and the scene becomes more clear with each step I take…and then the term “find the scene” was born.
Finding the scene means to get the language right for that specific scene. Every scene has its own needs and wants and to satisfy those, since I cannot have a conversation with it, I have to play the game of “here, is this wnat you want?”
Now, you could asy “duh, of course you use language for pacing, what else is a novel if not language (words)?” Fair enough, but I use language in a way, that’s not unique I’m sure, but is different that how some writers do it. As I’m writing I taylor the language to feel like it’s spending more or less time on what’s in the scene to control pacing. Do I mention that the character drank a glass of milk or do I convey how refreshging the milk is as he swallows it? That type of thing. In some scenes I play with pacing so much that, if it were a movie (instead of a book) you could easily describe certain moments within the same scene as slow motion and regular motion. It’s not slower or faster pacing, it literally is moments where, if it was a film, some editor somewhere would have to slow down the speed of the footage to achieve the required effect. For example, I might have a fast paced action scene, then someone fires a gun and I describe the bullet leaving the gun, then traveling through the air, then entering someones head and the splatter of red spots on the wall behind. This might be half a paragraph spent on just that, then back to the fast paced dialogue as the guys body falls to the floor…dead. I don’t use the effect much, but when I do I make sure it’s as effective as possible.
Pacing is fun, and if you’re aware of it, you can do some really interesting thisngs with it, like the above mentioned “slow motion” effect. I also, a handful of times in the current book I’m writing, suddenly stopped a scene (freeze time) and directed the reader, by speaking directly to them, to something in another part of the scene, or the greater location the scene takes place in (the building, the city, etc.) that has an effect on the scene, or is about to. I pause the scene, direct the reader, then return the reader to exactly where we left off, then resume the scene as though nothing happened. In a film it would take a pretty hefty budget to achieve the “Matric-like” effect that I’m employing there…but hey, in a book it’s only words, so have fun, and dowhatever you want as long as you do it well.
Pacing can be controlled in any nbumner of unique ways. Remember, no one single word costs more than any other word to use, so make sure you use the right ones and get the pacing where you want it.