“Wait, slow down!”
“Why? Am I going too fast for you?”
The pace is the tempo at which a story is told. This does not have to be the actual time at which the story takes place, although for some scenes it may be. Often the more important a scene the longer it is. Your climactic scene may take place over two hours in storytime but also makes up a third of your total pages.
We use pacing to increase tension and engagement. A shift in tempo can help to keep and increase attention. You can use slow pacing to build suspense and fast pacing to increase tension.
Depending on what you’re story is or what genre you’re writing in, either overall slow or fast might work better. Thrillers are usually fast-paced and Romances might be slower. But that is just generalization, every story has it’s own rhythm at which it works best.
How to use Show and Tell for Pacing
In narration, you can choose how much to condense a narrative. The more you zoom out the less detailed you are and the more you’re just summing up events. The more you zoom in the more you focus on actual scenes and presenting/living events while letting them play out on screen. Part of deciding how to pace a scene is to determine what is important and what is not. The more important, the more it makes sense to slow down and go into details by showing. Whereas if it’s just normal everyday life, we often tend to skip those parts by summarizing them in tell and therefore speeding up the story.
Pacing Methods
Slow things down:
- Sensory description
- Level of detail & description (the more the slower the scene)
- Narration: commentary, exposition/background story etc.
- Introspection
- Character bonding moments
- Side storylines
- Focus on real-time presentation
- Long scenes
- Chapter length / How many scenes per chapter
- Language
- Sentence length
- Simple vs. Decorative language
Speeding up:
- Dialogue and Action (Show instead of Tell)
- Scene almost completely just dialogue
- Action instead of Narration and Exposition
- Jumping scenes (scenes that are never on screen)
- Summarizing familiar/repetitive actions
- Short scenes
- Frequent paragraphing
- Language:
- Active voice and aggressive/action verbs
- Fat-trimming: removing unnecessary sentences, words, etc.
- Simplifying the language, short sentences, making it easy for the reader to fly through
Technique to Speed Up: One Scene per Chapter
By having one scene per chapter the book flows swifter and it is more appealing to a reader who may consider taking a break (“…just one more chapter”).
Story Rhythm
Every story, just like every song, has its own rhythm at which it wants to be told. Pacing is what creates an overall story rhythm. Aside from pace (speed), you can also use the following tools to create a rhythm:
- Silence: In storytelling using silence might means a sudden shift in the reveal of information. So far the story went at a fast pace with new information coming upbeat by beat and then just when we’re about to get to a critical point…sudden halt in events.
- Jumping to another plotline
- A moment of rest
- Unevenness: Changing up the delivery rhythm to force them to pay attention. This is when the pacing of your story is not predictable or (as in it doesn’t follow an intuitive flow) has sudden patches that create a sense of unevenness.
- Layering: Where parallel running plots have different paces. This can be used to create a sense of complementing each other or contrasting each other.