Writing Fiction With Pace

What does writing fiction with pace mean? There is really nothing complicated about it. It simply means writing fiction that is fast (pacey) enough not to bore the readers, but slow enough that you don't leave them unsatisfied.

The pace should not be uniform, either. A good novel should read like a trip downstream in a boat. You need plenty of white water for excitement and calmer stretches in between for the readers to draw breath. Fiction that is all calm rapids or all calm water is not good.

This article, then, answers two questions:

1. Which parts of a novel should be fast and which slow?
2. How do you control the pace?

Before answering them, though, a couple of points...

• First, writing fiction that is poorly paced is one of the biggest things that newcomers to novel writing get wrong. Very occasionally the pace is too quick. Nine times out of ten, it is way too slow. Be sure to keep this in mind.

• Second, pace is not something you need to particularly worry about until the revision stage of writing fiction. Thinking about how to achieve the correct pace when planning or writing a first draft is difficult without experience. Much better to write the novel first and then worry about how fast or slow it reads.

When to Speed Up and When to Slow Down

There is actually a paradox here, or an area of possible confusion, that you should be aware of...

• When you think about scenes in a novel, the first thing that comes to mind is fast-paced action sequences.
• With interludes, however, you think about those slower parts in between the scenes when the character reacts emotionally to whatever has just happened.

(Not sure what scenes and interludes are? You will find the answer in this article on plotting the novel.)

Perversely, though, scenes should read slowly and interludes should happen more quickly. Let me explain that...

• Scenes, broadly speaking, contain all of the novel's interesting and exciting and dramatic material. It makes sense, therefore, that the readers won't want them to be over with too quickly.

  Let's say that a scene involves a car chase. In one sense, the action here could be described as fast (not least, because the cars are moving at high speed). But in terms of writing fiction with the correct pace, the scene should read slowly - it should last for several pages, in other words, and all of the action and emotion and so on should be fully described.

• Interludes, on the other hand, are not so dramatic. They move slowly in the sense that nothing much is happening. But in a pacing sense, they should read quickly - with two days of events being summarized in a single paragraph, for example, or perhaps even in three words: Two days later...

It's not quite that simple, though...

Because nothing about writing fiction ever is!