Pace Your Story – What Literary Pacing is all about

                                                               ......PACE is the timing by which the major events in the story unfold and by which the scenes are shown. Also the process of stretching out the big scenes by slowing down time and compressing offstage action (speeding up time) to match the reader’s emotional needs. This means that it might crawl along, feel crushed, or flow and slide like a slow river. It might then accelerate, thrusting forward, or hurtle like a booster rocket. Pace  is a tool that controls the speed and rhythm readers are pulled through  events. It refers to how fast or slow events in a piece unfold and how much time elapses in a scene or story. Pacing can also be used to show characters aging and the effects of time on story events.

We usually expect pace to be created from the action, but dialogue and even inner monologue can engender pace. A build-up of  pace and is mostly used to advance the action and create nail-biting  dramatic tension, while drop in pace will create a different mood...dreamy, thoughtful. A slower pace can also cleverly be used to delay the peak of the tension for as long as possible, teasing the reader and gaining an explosion of drama once that pace changes. The technique used is a process of stretching out, by slowing down time and compressing offstage action to match the reader’s emotional needs. As  James Scott Bell explains in Plot & Structure, ‘When you’ve got a handle on the trouble for your character… you are ready to stretch.  Go through the scene beat by beat… Take your time with each one’. 

The opening to a novel is a good place to announce to the reader the sort of pace they should expect. Pace should fluctuate, changing regularly, to create variety within a piece, but it's you – the writer and author of the piece – who decides what the pace should be and when it should alter.

As a writer of crime fiction, sometimes I want my reader to know there will be more pensive moments, even among the thrills. This opening is dreamy and contemplative, despite the subject matter and opens my second novel, where I use devises such as longer words, sentences and paragraphs, deep imagery, and expanded descriptions, upping the pace just a little with action and dialogue at the end; 

The retrieval was unceremonious and without dignity. The woman’s body was winched from the Dunball Clyce at 17.13, dripping with sluice-slime. The hip bones shone white against the sun and there were fish swimming in her belly.

    It had been the hottest day that summer. The mountainous heaps of sand and gravel at the Dunball Wharf Aggregate Works had dried out so completely that a choking dust rose from them. The waters below had heated until their reek oozed into the nostrils. No one wanted to move fast, and sounds were muffled, as if the late afternoon sun had thickened the air. 

    The two detectives had arrived as the body was trundling on the gurney over to the white tent where the pathologist waited like an adjudicator at some macabre contest. The woman was found stripped of any clothing and the technician had thrown a green sheet over her poor mutilated and rotting body for that short journey, but the gurney jerked as its wheels stuck to the walkway, which was so burning hot it was melting the policemen’s thick soles, and the woman’s head slid to the edge, her heavy locks falling free, as if she’d just unpinned them. Despite the river weed and silt, her hair was still glorious; as black as a nighttime lake, not tampered by bleach or dye. 

    Detective Sergeant Gary Abbott had stepped forward, his hand outstretched, and touched the woman’s hair, crying out like a distressed relative. 'Take care with her, for God’s sake!'   (On The Gallows, Midnight Ink Press)

On the other hand, I wanted a more foreful pace to open my fourth novel, although still I hold back a little;

     John Spicer was already waiting, when Larry drove down into Harper’s Coombe.

It was like a lover’s tryst – a lung-drying desire.

Larry pulled the old pickup to a halt behind John’s Audi and jumped out the cab. The ground was so soft he felt his wellingtons sink by inches.  Across the coombe there were patches of shining water, the start of little lakes.

    Bloody rain. It was never-ending. Even down here in the coombe, the wind behind it was throwing water into his face.

    He pulled the fur of his trapper hat down around his ears and went to the back of the pickup. Water pooled on the tarp, trickling down to the metal base as he shifted it, wetting the random items he carried. His fingers were slippy as he spun the combination lock. It was an old-fashioned document case, but it did the job. Empty, of course, because the previous money he’d carried home was now in a Second World War tin box, which had belonged to his father’s father and had previously held old documents and his sister’s first baby shoes. 

    Soon, he would buy a soft leather case with a laptop inside, slender as a slate tile.

As the action grows, I start using very short, active sentences, curtailed paragraphs, stronger verbs and sharper phrases;

    'You’ll need a tow,' Larry grunted. 'You’re in too deep.'

    He mashed his way to the pickup, his jeans stuck to his backside. Somewhere in the back was a bit of good rope they could use to get the Audi out of its predicament.                                            

    He shifted the briefcase to one side. It was still wide open, like a dog waiting for a treat.

    The bastard owes. 

    A double payment.

    Fucking feels sorry. 

    For me.

    Fuckhead.

    He’s in too deep.

    Bloody fluid fizzed inside his brain until it felt like it was oozing out of his eye sockets. He wiped them and looked at his hands. Nothing but mud and rain and hot, invisible tears.

    Blackmail is the bigger crime.

    The back of the pickup was littered with his stuff. Bits from the farm, bits for the car, a spare sack of layer’s pellets. He spotted the fat coil of blue rope towards the bottom and reached down for it. His hand knocked against his shotgun. 

At the end of this opening, a murder has been committed and I've already exhausted my reader, so I open the next section of the story with a much gentler pace; 

   All over Christmas, rain fell over the Somerset Moors – fast rain – hard. It splashed

into the canals and dykes, forcing up droplets, churning mud from the bottom. The waterways swelled, filled and spilled over roads and rail tracks, uprooting power lines as it spread.

    One morning I got up, booted the laptop up, and on every news site were images of my county, bogged with water. Floods were churning down village high streets, taking cars along for the ride, rising over the hedges. Families leaned from their bedroom windows as they waited for rescue. 

    My house escaped damage. The sluggish, smelly creek at the bottom of my garden moved up several gears, running swift and flush to its brim, but it didn’t reach the top of the gully. I was lucky. Most of Bridgwater had been built above the flood plain, but on the other side of the town, people were sandbagging their front doors.

    On the moors, a hundred square miles lay under shimmering water. In the deepest places only the canopies of bare trees and the roofs of churches jutted through the surface…and a few villages safely on the highest ground. These were islands in past times, and when they get cut off like that, it’s easy to believe the myths and legends of Somerset.

    How the county got its name because the Ancient Britons came here only in summer when the grass re-emerged from the waters, fresh, lush, virgin pasture for their flocks and herds.

    How Joseph of Arimathea sailed from the Holy Land after Jesus had died, landing his boat on Wearyall Hill where he planted his staff as a Christmas flowering tree.

    How early man built roundhouses on stilts and walkways to pass over the marshes.

    Once a week throughout the winter, I drove to Muchelney to visit an elderly client who liked a hand and foot massage, splashing my Vauxhall through surface water until I could go no further. Then I’d wait for the boat, a RIB that had become a bus service now Muchelney was an island again. I shared the boat with the postman, a local farmer, and the district nurse.

    When I stared out over the floodplains, I couldn’t help thinking that anything could be lost down there. 'You can’t see the bottom for the mud.'

      'It’s not just mud,' the nurse had said. 'Sewage, leaking chemicals. Dead animals.'

    'Even the worms are dead.'  (Through the Floodgate Midnight Ink Press)

I'm  slowing pace because I want to produce an absorbing read at this point. To help this, I focus on one subject in a prolonged way (for a crime fiction, at least!) Increasing pace can lose you that absorption, as you replace it with dramatic tension. So I used the rhythm of the writing to enhance the effect, with alliteration to highlight the watery theme and a repetitive start to some of the paragraphs, with 'how, how, how...' 

There are various ways to engender pace, including some quite small, but important adjustments:

• To speed up pace, move more quickly over the parts which have no major impact on the character, especially minor common actions (preparing food, for instance), whilst focusing on any major action. 
• To slow place, expand and dramatise outcomes, actions, especially minor actions (preparing food, for instance). 
• To speed pace, use clipped dialogue, staccato words, shorter sentences, lots of full stops and short paragraphs. In screenwriting, minimise the scenes as you build-up tension. Use what you’ve learnt about about phonetic symbolism.
• To slow pace, use longer words, words with a smoother feel, longer sentences and longer paragraphs. Use phonetic symbolism.
• To speed pace, use the present tense. Reduce your use of the present participle (‘ing’ endings) and check you have not moved into the passive form.
• To slow pace, try including the present participle and the perfect tense (he had seen her) within the simple past where this is might be effective.
• To speed pace, take out most of the character’s thinking process. In acute scenes of action, this can be reduced to almost nothing. (This technique tends to be redundant in scriptwriting.).
• To slow pace, allow the character to be reflective and record the thinking process. Use interior monologue, especially deep, unfiltered thought processes from the narrator.
• To speed up pace, use snappy dialogue, snatches of free indirect discourse and no long speeches.
• To slow down, delve deep into imagery and utilise a more dreamy mood.
• To speed up, make images clear and precise, with sharp sights & sounds. Omit adverbs and avoid as many adjectives as possible
• To slow, explain an outcome…use exposition rather than an active scene to describe something that has happened.
• To speed up, avoid  ‘countersinking’, when the writer allows the actions implied in the story scene to become explicit – ‘let’s get out of here,’ he said, urging her to leave. You can countersink emotions, too, by allowing your character to give blatant and unnecessary clues to his own emotions…I laughed heartily as I told my news...and countersink action description…she rose from her chair and stood up.
• To slow down, allow a little exposition, but be careful that this 'tell' doesn't replace 'show', but is there to do a job. 

Two further techniques can be used to vary pace.

• Cliffhangers hold off the denouement of the scene ending. Some sub-genres of fiction have this as an accepted method of completing book chapters, and it’s particular useful in writing for children, while TV and radio series have employed this technique for many years. Delayed outcomes force readers to start the next chapter, and force viewers to make a note to watch again next week
• Jump-cuts move from an unfinished scene to somewhere else entirely. This is a technique widely utilised by screenwriters, but novelists, non-fiction writers and other scriptwriters can use it too. For scripts, the jump-cut naturally shuttles to another scene. For prose, the jump can move into exposition, interior monologue, or backstory. It can also move to description, but do beware of the caution given above.  Be sure to jump back again, before the previous scene is forgotten.
• Rapid-fire dialogue invigorates a scene. Pared-down dialogue has a natural velocity
• Rapid-firing of situations and events, all occurring immediately, one after another will up the pace dramatically, especially if these events 'bare down' on protagonists.
• Very short chapters, segments and added break-out parts, such as texts or newspaper headlines, turn up the pace. The reader digests them and passes through them smartly, giving the feeling of speed. 

Exercise

• Experiment with slowing and speeding up the pace of your work.
• Take a scene that you know is too slow and use some of the techniques to speed it up.
• Now take a scene which you would like to be more contemplative or introspective and again, try some of the techniques to widen and deepen the voice.

Share your resulting writing by commenting on this blogpost!