Hello, writers. Last week we talked about making time pass in a narrative. Now I’d like to talk about a related area, pacing.
Pacing a story well means spending as little time as possible over the unimportant or uninteresting parts. Tell, don’t show. Tell in as few words as possible. And if something doesn’t absolutely need to be told, skip it.
In the important scenes, of course, the rule is show, don’t tell. Give these scenes their full due. Milk them for all they’re worth.
Here’s an example of a poorly paced scene:
There was stuff all over the floor. Mary Sue had just vacuumed yestereday. She used a Roomba for the most part, but because it didn’t get the edges, she usually had to haul out the old ten-ton Electrolux as well. She vacuumed along each edge. Except behind the couch, because she had to wait until David was home to help her move it, and sometimes she forgot. The load roar of the vacuum cleaner hurt her ears.
Et cetera. Any readers left awake would have wandered off by this point.
That doesn’t mean housekeeping is unworthy of inclusion in a story, of course. Imbuing the details with emotion, or using the details to build suspense works just fine:
There was stuff all over the floor— and she’d just vacuumed yesterday! David had cleaned out his pockets and… what was this?
She bent to pick up a small, folded bit of yellow paper.
One reason the second scene works better is that we can see we’ll be moving on to something more interesting. Mary Sue’s specific method of vacuuming isn’t likely to pull readers in. The folded bit of paper probably will.
In general, any daily business of life: Getting out of bed and getting dressed, walking to the bus stop and catching a bus and getting stuck in traffic, looking for juice in the supermarket and discovering they don’t have the kind you like and getting another kind and paying for it— should be left out, presented as having already happened (“by the time he got to work…”) or summarized in as few words as possible.
There are two times when slow scenes with mundane details can work quite well. One is when the details are used to build up to a dramatic scene. The other is after a dramatic scene; an author at a workshop I attended last year calls the latter “walking scenes”.
In both cases, though, the details chosen are important. In a building scene, the details should either give us some inkling of and concern about what’s coming and how the character(s) feel. What’s at risk? In a walking scene, the details should reflect what’s just happened and show us how the characters feel… what’s been lost or gained? What’s changed?
An example of poor pacing by an author who’s normally very good at pacing is the camping segment in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Although Harry, Ron and Hermione actually only camp for about 50 pages, it seems much, much longer to most readers— and probably is about 45 pages longer than it needed to be. It’s difficult to build tension over 50 pages, even if you’re J.K. Rowling.
Tonight’s challenge:
Continue the scene of Mary Sue finding the paper, above. In less than 100 words, show us her thoughts and actions up to the point of unfolding the paper.
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