5 Tips for Writing a Fast-Paced Fantasy Novel
Pacing is an essential part of every novel, but it’s also one of the trickiest writing techniques to master. What is pacing? It isn’t just the speed at which events happen in the narrative; it’s much more complex than that.
(21 Popular Fantasy Tropes for Writers.)
Like the style of the prose, pacing seeps into every aspect of the story and colors the reader’s entire experience. A fast-paced story might have the reader flipping pages and leave them feeling breathless and exhilarated; a slower-paced story usually makes for a denser, more thoughtful read.
There’s always a natural ebb and flow within a story, too. Pacing is a tool used to manipulate tension, with slower-paced sections used to build tension and faster-paced sections used to release it through pulse-pounding climactic sequences.
Lately, there’s been a strong appetite for fast-paced stories in the fantasy genre. When I was revising my debut, Road to Ruin, a Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic road trip fantasy, most of my agent’s notes were about pacing. Specifically, how to make it faster.
Of course a book inspired by an action movie that’s essentially one long chase scene should be fast-paced, but how to make it so?
If pacing has ever felt like the bane of your existence as a writer, here are my hard-learned tips for writing a dizzying page-turner of a fantasy novel.
1: Start with a bang
You might think that this tip applies to all novels, not just fast-paced ones. Yes, you do need to grab your reader’s attention from page one, but in a slower-paced novel, the hook doesn’t need to be an action beat. Instead, it could be an interesting character moment or a scene introducing a world-building hook.
In a fast-paced novel, you have no such luxuries. Your opening scene needs to pull double or triple duty. Ideally, you establish character, world-building, and plot in one fell swoop.
In Road to Ruin, Jin crashes her motorcycle on page one and finds herself stranded on a wasteland highway with raiders and a deadly storm converging on two fronts. Right away we establish the setting, the first seeds of plot (those raiders are important, we’ll see them again later), and Jin’s character (a jaded survivor with a soft streak).
This challenge doesn’t end with the opening chapter. Every scene in your novel should be carefully examined to make sure it serves more than one purpose. Cut and combine as necessary!
2: Reveal as you go
I’ve heard this called the “flashlight method” of world-building. Instead of providing exposition up-front, you reveal the world around your protagonists as you go, like a flashlight illuminating a few paces ahead into the darkness and no further.
This method helps the story move faster because it avoids bogging the reader down in long sections of info dump. It also runs the risk of making the world feel confusing and unpredictable. You can get around this pitfall by sowing hints about crucial world-building elements early in the narrative.
Check out Hana Lee’s Road to Ruin here:
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3: Use flashbacks sparingly
Writers are often advised to avoid using flashbacks. I actually love flashbacks (and their oft-maligned cousins, dream sequences), but they’re frequently unnecessary and contribute to a slower-feeling narrative. Use them sparingly, during natural breaks in the story’s pace.
The first draft of Road to Ruin contained multiple chapter-long flashbacks, but in the interest of pacing, I cut them all in revisions and kept only one extended flashback sequence: a scene where Jin tells Yi-Nereen a story about her father. It’s short, sweet, and introduces key aspects of both the world and Jin’s character. In the final draft, the other flashbacks were replaced with much shorter, contemporaneous scenes that conveyed the necessary information.
4: Know when to take action offscreen
Not everything needs to be spelled out. Omission is a key part of storytelling; sometimes the negative space where an important event happened but the reader didn’t see it leaves a more powerful impression than actually reading a blow-by-blow description.
Experiment with taking action offscreen and showcasing the aftermath instead. Alternatively, if the action is necessary to the plot but doesn’t make for an emotionally compelling scene, you can safely skip it and let the reader infer what happened.
5: Focus on pacing in revisions, not the first draft
I outline extensively and write pretty clean first drafts. That’s not a point of pride, simply a reality about my own process as a writer. Most of my prose survives into the final version and rarely do large-scale rewrites of plot or character occur after Draft One.
However, the one aspect I never nail on the first try—not even once—is pacing. I always wind up with the dreaded “the first half is a bit slow. Can we make it faster?” comment from my agent or editor. It’s very, very, very difficult to accurately gauge the pacing of a story as you write it, while a fresh-eyed reader will have a much easier time spotting meandering portions or climaxes that feel too abrupt.
So! Let go of your inner perfectionist, on this point if no other. Accept that the levers of pacing are easier to tweak when you have a birds-eye view of the manuscript, not when you’re in the weeds.
You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “kill your darlings” in the context of editing a novel. Adjusting the pacing of a narrative can feel like stabbing at your darlings in the dark and hoping you kill just the right amount—no more, no less—but hopefully, these tips will make your job easier.
Now go forth and write that page-turning fantasy!
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