8 Tools for Pacing Your Novel
“I try to leave out the bits people skip.” –Elmore Leonard
A well-paced novel holds the reader’s interest throughout. But how does a writer achieve such a thing of beauty? These are some of the techniques you can use:
Suit the pacing to the genre.
Before anything else, consider the kind of novel you’re writing. A thriller, for example, will be faster-paced than a sweeping historical saga.
(The Art and Craft of Pre-Writing.)
Whatever the genre, we all should aim to leave out the parts people skip. Pages of lyrical description of a setting or long, convoluted passages of introspection might have been acceptable in an age when life itself moved at a slower pace.
These days, readers tend to steer clear of books where the story takes pages, or even paragraphs, to move forward.
Varying the pace.
The best thrillers allow the reader breathing space between high octane scenes. Conversely, slower stories might quicken the pace when reaching the story climax or during action scenes.
Keeping the pace at a constant level throughout leads to reader fatigue, so it’s good to change the pacing to suit the mood at that point in the story.
Working at the sentence level.
Generally speaking, the longer the sentences in a piece, the slower the pace. In thrillers and high action adventures, short, declarative sentences might be best, but some variation in sentence length is still required so as not to make the prose seem stilted.
Sometimes, a long sentence can be fast-paced—it depends largely on its cadence and rhythm. Authors aiming to achieve a fast pace might even try not to use too many words with more than one or two syllables.
On the other hand, historical fiction might be more suited to complex sentence structure, words, and prose. Be careful of this, however. A story can be more powerful when told in direct, simple language, no matter when it’s set. Hilary Mantel’s novels are a prime example.
Check out Christine Wells’ The Royal Windsor Secret here:
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Now, look at your scenes.
The best way to tighten a scene for better pacing is to know exactly what the protagonist of that scene wants, and what is stopping them from getting it. Most of the time, when a scene meanders, it’s because the writer is casting about for the scene’s actual purpose or narrating parts of the story that are irrelevant to the character arc and plot.
We don’t need to know how your protagonist traveled to a certain destination if nothing much happens on the way. Pinpointing precisely why a particular scene is in the book at all will give it more energy, the characters more agency, and keep your reader engaged.
Seed in story questions.
Readers often say they burned through a book because they had to know the answer to a certain story question—the identity of the murderer in a classic whodunnit, for example.
However you don’t need to be a crime writer to plant intrigue and mystery in your book, secrets the reader is dying to know. Their curiosity will pull them through the story, but be careful about leaving smaller story questions unanswered for too long. We want some payoffs along the way.
Use hooks and cliffhangers.
Each time the reader gets to the end of a scene, chapter, or part, it is the natural place for them to put down your book—perhaps never to pick it up again—unless there is some compelling reason for them to read on. One way to ensure the reader stays up reading your book deep into the night is the judicious use of hooks.
Instead of ending your chapter at the close of a scene, end the chapter in the middle of a scene. Say, after a long build-up of anticipation, the story’s villain appears. That is the perfect time to cut to the next chapter.
Someone asks the very question that the reader is dying to know? Don’t answer it right there. Cut away to another timeline or point of view, or simply end the chapter at that point.
Zooming out now to get the eagle’s eye view, how do we look at an entire manuscript and know what to cut?
A simple way is to find a trusted beta reader to mark all of the places where their attention wandered or where they put the manuscript down. This isn’t always possible, however, so I suggest putting the manuscript away for a while, then either formatting it to look like a book and printing it out or loading it on to your e-reader and finding the places your own attention wanders.
If you want to do a more thorough analysis, this is the time to focus on character arc and plot.
The method of making sure your novel lines up with your intended structure will depend on which structure you prefer—I favor The Hero’s Journey coupled with Michael Hauge’s “Identity to Essence” analysis of character arc.
I will sometimes draw an arc on a large piece of paper and mark along it the major plot points of the book. In another color, I note my character’s “identity” or the false persona they present to the world at the beginning of the novel and their “essence” or the real person underneath, at the end.
Then I mark the incremental way the character changes in response to the plot points. Then I go through all of the scenes of my book, referring back to my chart, and any scene that does not agree with the character arc or seems to serve neither character arc nor plot will be either rewritten or cut. Equally, if a step in a character’s transformation is missing, I will add that scene in.
Good pacing is one of the most difficult skills for a writer to master. The better we become at pacing our novels in the most appropriate way for our particular genre and story, the more satisfying an experience our readers will have.