12 Ways to Improve Your Pacing
Pacing is what we call the speed at which your story flows: its ebb and flow, when it’s fast and when it's slow.
We’ve all experienced bad timing from a friend who just can’t tell a joke. They drag the details on until you lose interest, or they’re in such a hurry to reach the punchline that it misses. A well-paced story builds tension during the slow parts, then speeds up and turns into a nail-biter.
You have a natural sense of pacing already, from all the stories you’ve consumed over the years. But if you want your writing to truly stand out among the others, use these 12 techniques to fine-tune it.
12 Tricks for Better Pacing in Your Story
1. Add Dialogue
Dialogue helps you to stretch out the pacing in your story both in terms of words to read and pages to turn. Even though word count and page count don’t exactly equate, both expand the subjective time a reader spends with a scene or a chapter. Since lines of dialogue rarely take up as much word count as lines of expository text, you expand and slow the scene down simply by adding this element.
It’s a mistake to add dialogue for its own sake, and an even bigger mistake to have characters talk about something that’s already happened (or about to happen) without the conversation adding something of value. But if you do this right, you can infuse the conversation with the tension of impending action, slowing the pace while adding suspense or importance.
2. Break Down Your Structure
Even if you hate outlining with the burning passion of a thousand suns, it can help your pacing to quickly sketch the structure of your story. Identify scenes and sections by whether they should be fast-paced or slower, then review each to make sure they’re doing that job.
When you’re finished with that, look at the structure overall. Does it ebb and flow between quick and slow paces? Does it build relentlessly upward in tension and pace until it reaches a breakneck climax? Does it appear random? There are lots of ways to set up the flow of pacing in a story, but all of the good ones get done on purpose. Look at the pacing of your story from a birds-eye view, then tweak it until it works.
3. Consult Your Beta Readers
This one’s so easy it might feel like cheating, but it isn’t. Every professional I know does this on several levels, including their pacing. Send copies of the manuscript and ask your beta readers what they think. If you’re specifically worried about pacing, I recommend asking half of them for their general thoughts and half of them to look specifically at pacing.
That’s because if you ask about pacing, people will notice pacing issues. If the general beta readers all mention pacing, you know you have a huge problem. If only the pacing beta readers mention pacing, then it’s probably close to all right.
As always, get your beta readers’ specific feedback as to where the pacing is too fast or too loose, and any suggestions they might have for making it better.
4. Cut What Doesn’t Matter
The overwhelming majority of books with pacing problems aren’t paced too fast. They’re paced too slow, especially in the middle. One of the best solutions to this is to go through it once and remove absolutely everything that isn’t essential to the story. You can add things in afterward, but it tightens up the prose so much that your pacing will probably be the tightest you’ve ever written.
Many writers find that it’s easier to start tight and loosen up at specific points than it is to start loose and tighten up. This puts your manuscript in a place where you can start tight. If you need more specific guidance, aim to pull 10% or 20% of the word count out, even if it hurts.
5. Discover Subplots
If your book is too short, or the pacing too tight, look for subplots to explore. Think back to some movies and TV shows that bounce between multiple subplots. The best ones tell part of the story while you worry about the characters involved in the drama off-screen, adding tension by delaying the moment when you learn what happened. It’s a subtler form of cliffhanger, and extremely effective if you do it right.
Doing it wrong usually comes from interesting subplots that feel more like an appendix. You have to hook the reader’s attention and emotion with the subplot, and ideally make it intertwine artfully with the main story of your book. If you do that, then the alternating exposition slows the pacing while simultaneously maintaining or even increasing the tension.
6. Enter Late, Leave Early
This advice is simple to understand, but hard to make ourselves do. Start your story at the latest possible point you can that still lets the readers know what’s going on. End it as early as you can while still giving readers a satisfying conclusion.
Slack openings and tedious endings are two of the most common hallmarks of amateur writers. If you follow this simple rule, your books will have better pacing and feel more professional across the board.
7.Have a Think
Another way to slow your pacing down is to not stop at describing what’s happening. Dig down a layer into what your main characters are thinking and feeling about what’s happening. This both slows things down while simultaneously giving insight into the characters your readers have developed an attachment to.
If you do this right, every moment of introspection serves two purposes: advancing the plot and building character. If you do it wrong, you can frustrate your readers to no end.
Take for example, Hamlet. Most people agree it’s a masterwork of introspection and pacing. A few people, though, can’t stand the Prince’s indecision and find it nothing but frustrating. See also the first season of Jessica Jones. All this to say, experts make mistakes with this trick all the time. Be careful, and do it right or don’t do it at all.
8. Look at the Order Of Events
Pacing isn’t just about how quickly things happen on the page, but the order in which they happen. If you have several slowly paced scenes happening in a row, play with your timeline to insert a faster-paced sequence in between them. If you’ve got a fast build-up followed by a series of slower scenes, try alternating as much as you can.
Unless your book explicitly shows events taking place out of order through flashbacks or other techniques, this does mean rewriting the story so the new order makes sense. But that’s okay. It’s your story. You can change it as many times as you want before you publish.
9. Slow Down With Detail
Another good way to slow things down is to describe things in greater detail. Every word of detail both paints a richer deeper picture, and delays the arrival of the next piece of action and progress. There’s something about throwing a bad guy through a filthy, fourth-story window that’s just better than throwing the bad guy through a window.
This can easily slip into too much of a good thing, however. We’ve all read books where the level of detail spent on inconsequential things felt self-indulgent and dragged the story out unnecessarily. Find ways to make your details important, vibrant, and powerful.
One of the best techniques for this is to use details to help develop the point of view character in that moment. A protagonist who’s a music lover will notice different things in a bar than a protagonist who’s a clothes horse. This can be especially effective when you alternate point of view characters, as a way of giving them different voices.
10. Take a Breather
Balance your scenes of action with rest periods where the characters recover, reflect, and plan their next moves. Share details of character relationships, relevant memories, and internal conflicts before diving into the next scene of conflict, courage, and derring-do.
This is akin to using negative space in a visual art. Good painters and photographers capture the subject of their art. The best capture the empty space around them, to better frame their subject.
11. Use Cliffhangers
Some cliches are cliches because they’re overused and kind of dumb. Tom Swifty dialogue tags are a good example. Other cliches are cliches because they’re so effective you almost have to use them. Cliffhangers are an example of the second kind of cliche.
You’re familiar with the technique: you end exposition of an action scene with a character or their goals endangered, and make the reader wait for the next chapter, or through a different scene, before finding out what happened.
This works just as well for cerebral, relationship-oriented stories as it does for tales of action. If you doubt that, think about the last time your significant other told you “we need to talk”…but you weren’t able to talk for a couple of days.
12. Vary Lengths
If your words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters are all of similar lengths it creates a monotonous journey through your story. The first level of fixing this is to vary the lengths of all of those things, creating a more interesting picture of words.
The second level of using this is for your pacing to reflect your characters. Use sharp, short writing for your sharp, quick characters and more expansive prose for your thinkers and reflectors. The third level is to make the lengths match your desired pacing.
The highest level is to add juxtaposition for effect. Insert a long, languid sentence in the middle of an action scene and do what you must to make it work, or vice versa. Once you master that, you can play with pacing as you like.
No Matter What You Write…
Short stories. Novels. Novellas. Even poems. Good pacing is good writing. Bad pacing makes your story less enjoyable, and less enjoyable stories sell fewer books. Challenge yourself over the next month to apply one of these tips to your writing every session, and see what happens. You’ll be glad you did.
