Writing with pace

[John Dean]

I teach a lot of writers and some themes crop up time and time again. One of them is how to write with pace. Learning how to write a narrative with the right pace is one of the most important skills, particularly given the vast number of books out there in today’s market.

Get the pace wrong and you are seriously jeopardising your chances of success, get it right and you give yourself a chance of climbing those bookseller charts on Amazon and the like.

So, what does writing a narrative with a good pace actually entail? It simply means producing a passage of writing that is pacey enough not to leave the readers yawning, but slow enough that you don’t leave them unsatisfied - ie telling the story so fast that you forget to set the scene.

If you want to grasp how to write a narrative with the correct pace, it’s worth remembering a tip I read once from a couple of agents. They recommended that writers think of their stories like taking a trip downstream in a boat. You need plenty of white water for excitement, but you also need calmer stretches in which to draw breath.

The key to this approach is to remember that some scenes, and some parts of scenes, will be more central to the plot than others and, therefore, more dramatic. So, if you devote ten pages, say, to a key scene, you might write a less crucial scene in only three or four.

To work out which is which, the opening portion of a scene is usually not particularly dramatic. In pacing terms, therefore, it should be over with relatively quickly. The guts of a scene, the argument, the chase, the discovery of an important clue, is more dramatic, and, therefore, needs to be lingered over.

In order to keep that forward momentum going in your writing, it also helps to establish a direction of travel, giving the reader the clear sense that the dialogue or piece of narrative is there for a reason, that it’s building up to something. That keeps your reader with you when you’re not battling the white water on your literary raft (if that’s not too much of a mixed metaphor!).

For most writers, getting the pace right is an activity best performed after fashioning their first draft. Once you’ve written the piece, it’s worth reading it aloud, trying to find which places could use a faster pace and which ones could happily cut back because they’re too slow.

If you feel after all that you need to slow a piece down, look towards adding descriptive segments that detail the environment, the setting and other similar content that provides the reader with a break in the action. For speeding up the material, rapid-fire dialogue, shorter sentences and the minimum of description usually does the trick.