Fast or Slow?  Pacing 101

By Mary Rosenblum

 

 

            Pace.  You hear the word all the time from teachers, critiquers, and editors.  “Nice brisk pace.”  “Kind of slow, pick up the pace”.  “I like it, but the pace is a bit slow in the middle.”  So what the heck is pace and how do we make that slow middle faster or create that brisk pace in the first place?  To add to our frustration, very few ‘how to’ books on writing ever really address it directly.  Why not?

 

            Well, let’s start with the definition of ‘pace’.  Pace is the speed with which events seem to happen in our prose.  If we feel that we are rushing along, then the pace is fast.  If we feel that we are meandering, strolling, then the pace is leisurely -- or too slow, depending on what you are writing!  Clearly, a picnic ramble through the autumn woods should be at a much slower pace than a breakneck flight from a hungry mountain lion!  So just how do we achieve that when we sit down to write a scene?  How do we make that scene more quickly or slowly? 

 

Words, Words, Words

 

            The first factor  that influences pace is simply the number of words.  The faster you physically read the page, the faster the pace will seem to be.  A flowery prose style, full of multisyllable words and multiclausal sentences will seem relaxed, languid, leisurely.  A spare, ‘stripped’ style of writing using a minimal number of adjectives and adverbs will seem much more rapid.  So if you take 350 words to describe our Main Character’s trip to the barn, it will seem much longer than the same trip to the barn told in 100 words. 

 

            Anne strolled down the path to the barn.  Robins filled the air with sweet, cascading trills.  Hard to believe something so pretty was nothing more than a warning to other males to stay way, and a mating offer for any ladies around!  Anne smiled, enjoying the sensual warmth of the spring sun on her face.  She could almost feel the freckles waking up.  Midnight, the barn cat, met her halfway, curving about her ankles, complaining loudly.  “Soon as I get there,”Anne chided her.  But she found herself distracted from the chores at hand, drawn to a clump of purple crocus in the weeds along the path.  Who had planted them?  Or rather, how had they ended up there?

 

            Okay, this is our leisurely example.  Anne is in no rush to do chores.  She listens to the robins, pets the cat, enjoys the feel of the sun and thinks about those crocuses.   Notice that we know a lot about what she is thinking and feeling.  We have plenty of time for that!

 

            Now here is Anne on a bad day, right after her boyfriend, Tim, has called up to dump her.

 

            Anne marched down the path to the barn, ignoring spring altogether.  Tim had been a jerk from the start.  She managed not to kick the barn cat, yanked the door open and stomped inside.

 

            Wow, look at the difference in length!  Here, Anne is Really Ticked Off.  She stomps out that door and marches down the path.  She thinks only about what a jerk Tim is, and when she gets to the barn she is not about to linger and notice the lovely day.  Here, the pacing…tight and angry…suits the angry character.  She is not about to notice robin trills, warm sun, or even the cat’s endearing ways.  Certainly crocuses don’t  interest her right now.   Well, how would we do this if Anne stepped out the door only to discover a hungry young cougar on the roof above her?

 

            Anne raced down the path, heart pounding, yanked the barn door open and flung herself inside.  Safe!

 

            Here, it’s even shorter.  All we need to see is Anne running (with the cougar close behind), and dashing into the safety of the barn.  What else is she thinking about except ESCAPE?   There is no internal monologue, no noticing the landscape.  Anne is only interested in getting safely out of reach of the mountain lion.

 

 

How You Say It Matters!

 

          So we have an example of how to pick up the pace by using fewer words, how to slow it down by using more.  Our choice of words is another aspect of pace.  If we meander, we are not in a hurry.  If we stride or march, we are moving right along.  If our descriptive words show us a lot of detail, we are clearly not in a hurry and we have time to see them.  The delicate, ferny leaves, like emerald lace tells us that we’re spending more time looking than does; the fern’s green leaves.  And if we’re really in a hurry, we might only see leaves. Period.

 

Focus, Focus, Focus

 

            Think about what you notice.  If you are walking the puppy, in no particular rush, you might notice the flowers, the leaves, the bird song.  You see the yellow shirt on the neighbor’s clothesline and admire the bright splash of color, you catch the flicker of a goldfinch in the bushes and admire Mrs. Smith’s new curtains, visible through the window.  You see a lot because you don’t have a lot on your mind.  

 

            But what if you’re late to work?  You might notice the items immediately in front of you…the coffee maker, the clock with its accusing sweep hand. You might even glance at the newspaper headlines as you gulp down your coffee.  But you are late. What if your boss catches you?  He said he’d dock you, next time you showed up late.   So you hurry out to your car, and you don’t have the time to notice those curtains, the flowers, the cat, the yellow shirt.  Who cares?  You are late, you are worrying about traffic and whether there will be a slow-down on the bridge.  Yellow shirt?  What about  a yellow shirt, don’t bother me with shirts….

 

            Here, because our character is in a rush, that person will notice only the things that are part of getting to work on time, and won’t enjoy those details.  Now what if this is a crisis?  We’re at a car accident, trying to get the victims out before the wreck bursts into flames!  In a crisis, with adrenalin surging through out bloodstream, we tend to acquire extreme tunnel vision.  We see only those things that are involved in our survival or success.  We see the seat belt, the man’s arm trapped beneath the broken steering wheel.  Often, too, in a state of shock like that, we will notice tiny details.  As we fumble with the seatbelt, waiting for the spilled gas to ignite, we might notice the bright trickle of blood across the man’s thumbnail.  We might notice the bottle cap on the blue carpet or the scrap of paper with I love you scrawled on it.  That almost microscopic focus is a good way to suggest that your character is extremely stressed, or actually in shock.   Right before a character passes out, he or she might see a single item with crystal clarity.

 

 

Speaking Fast!

 

            Generally we use short sentences to increase the pace and long, leisurely sentences in order to slow it down.  But sometimes, mainly when writing first person or internal monologue, the opposite can be true.  When your first person narrator is under stress, he or she may begin to think in run on sentences.  We have the feel of runaway emotions, of visual images blurring into each other, too overwhelming to separate out and examine individually.  I saw the plane falling, falling, coming right down so slow, like it was one of those big balloons in a parade, only when it touched the house it turned into fire, just like that, all at once, so fast that I couldn’t even see the explosion.  Only the fire.  And  the light. This is a long, run on sentence, with a couple of short, jolting fragments at the end to mimic the emotional impact on the Point of View character.  Our first person narrator is caught up in the horror of watching the plane fall and can’t think of anything else, can only watch it.  This is a good technique for portraying a character’s thoughts during a panicked flight from the monster!  Remember, that your character is not likely to use grammatically correct sentences! 

 

Good Things (and Pacing) Come in Threes!

 

            So we have three basic components of strong pacing:  the actual number of words, the type of description we use, and the focus of our Point of View .  By paying attention to these components you can make that slow middle move faster, or slow down that breakneck rush to the end!