Irregular pacing is one of the battle cries of the critic;
and I think it means that we know something is wrong, but can't quite put our finger
on it. We chalk it up to pacing.
To some extent, that's true.
Bad pacing can make a whole novel feel “off”. It can ruin an otherwise good story—and it's
got to be fixed.
And there's a way to do that.
But first, let's define just what pacing is.
It's your novel's speed. Sometimes readers describe novels as
“fast-paced”—page-turners. The pace of
your novel is how fast the reader wants to read—and it's directly related to
how urgent and tense the scene is. The
more intense the scene, the faster the pace.
So irregular pacing is where your novel alternates between
a fast pace and a slow pace too often or too quickly. A well-paced novel starts out with a certain
level of tension and gradually increases the tension as the novel goes on,
until it comes to a climax. A badly
paced novel starts out with a lot of tension, drops it, picks it up again—it's
not measured and regular, which is where the term irregular pacing comes
from.
Let me clarify that slow pacing is not a bad thing. It can be very good if used correctly. After all, what's a novel without a few
conversations around the fire? What
about when characters are talking about their past? What about all those deep moments that make
you feel warm and fuzzy inside?
Properly spaced, these deep moments can have a huge
impact. They develop the characters and
endear the reader—and they give you a little bit of breathing space before
going on to the next conflict of the story.
A story without slow moments feels rushed and hurried. Even “action” movies like Captain America:
The Winter Soldier have slow moments where the characters just talk.
So that's good pacing—a story which ratchets up the suspense
and tension, piece by piece, with slow intervals in between to give you some
space and character development. Bad
pacing is where the suspense and tension runs wanders around the story like a
three-year-old scribbling on a piece of paper.
So how do you fix bad pacing?
First, figure out where it is. The biggest clue is a feeling that something
is “off”, a little niggling at the back of your head that something feels
wrong.
I recently encountered this while revising Chapter Ten of my
novel. My characters are en route to the
worst prison in the country, and the scene I was rewriting took place shortly
after a very intense conflict.
But for some reason, the scene wouldn't work. I cut the excess dialogue (nearly three
hundred of the fifteen hundred words), reworked the action beats, and did
everything I could think of to make it interesting. The dialogue was fine, the prose was fine,
but it just didn't feel right.
It wasn't until this morning that I figured out what was
wrong. The pacing was off. The fifteen hundred words of banter and
character explanation just didn't feel right, sandwiched in between two
high-tension action scenes.
Once you figure out where the pacing problem is, like I did, either
cut or relocate the scene that's causing the problem. In this case, I cut most of the
scene, which allowed me to maintain the
tension level. What was left of the
scene, I rewrote into a separate scene that takes place after the tension drops
off a bit more.
Sometimes a whole section of your story is causing the
problem. Find out why. Oftentimes, things are too easy—I had that
problem several times. The
solution? It's easy: brainstorm ways
your characters' plans could backfire or go wrong. Then, do it!
Nothing helps a dragging scene like an unexpected disaster.
Fantastic novels are well-paced. If you can learn how to detect and fix pacing
problems, you'll be ten steps ahead of everyone else.
What about you? What's
been your experience with the mystical concept of “pacing”?
