Most people don't read a book in one sitting. They stop reading during 'lulls', so that they aren't confused when they return to the book later. Ideally, they only do this during chapter breaks. Heck, that's pretty much why chapters were invented.
But if you have a 'lull' in your manuscript, there is a greater chance that they will stop there. And because the book wasn't exciting when they left, they won't be excited to return. If someone doesn't finish a book, their most common excuse is, 'I just couldn't get through the whole thing' or, 'I guess I just never picked it back up again.' This is entirely because the pacing was bad, if even for a single scene.
Pacing is the speed at which events happen in your novel. When I say 'events', I mean the important ones. If you are describing your protagonist brush his teeth or find his keys, those aren't events. Those are actions. A story is composed of events, and if your book does not revolve around them, your pacing will suffer. Your book will be called slow or tedious. Books with a slow pacing tend to have an excess of description or (even worse) useless prose.
This isn't to say that your book should throw events at your reader at a machine gun's pace. Pace can be too fast as well. If things happen so quickly that the reader never has a time to reflect on the events, the pacing is too fast. Character development is stunted because nothing has any depth. You're glazing over everything because you don't have time to present anything but the action of the novel.
Think of it like fishing. (Note: this is likely the ONLY time you will see a fishing metaphor on this blog.) If you just let the hook sit there, unmoving, the fish won't be interested. You have to reel it in slightly, so the bait looks like it's alive. But you can't crank the line in rapidly (or worse, start the motorboat), because then the fish can't catch it. Without proper pacing, you won't hook the reader.
A common misconception is that pacing is directly proportional to length. People see a 1000-page novel and think, 'That doorstop is going to be so tedious to read.' However, a 1000-page novel with good pacing will read faster than a 200-page novel with bad pacing. I've fallen asleep during books that were less than 150 pages long. Consider the following two passages:
Passage 1:
Joseph glanced at his watch, a golden heirloom given to him by his father. It was a quarter past seven, and on Friday evenings like tonight, such a time was a valuable commodity. All around him, couples chatted over baskets of bread and gazed into each other's eyes. Perhaps they were in love. Perhaps they belonged to marriages that hung by a single heartstring. Or perhaps they were only one-night-stands, dressed up as something more in order to impress or deceive. Joseph should have been part of that social dance, but he wasn't. Not now. Not yet. She was late.
Passage 2:
Joseph rose from his table and stormed out of the restaurant. She was late, and he wasn't going to waste his evening waiting for her. He hailed a cab and gave the driver her address. He was at her front door within minutes. He didn’t bother knocking; he flung the door open and shouted for her, furious. He nearly slipped on the pool of blood oozing across the floor. She lay at the bottom of the stairs, unmoving. Looking up, Joseph saw a man in a ski mask pointing a gun at him. The muzzle flashed, and everything went black.
Each of these passages is exactly 100 words long, but clearly the first one has a slow pace, and the second one has a fast pace.
The trick is to find the right balance of pacing so that your reader is always interested, but never overwhelmed. Both slow pacing and fact pacing are exhausting to the reader. Paradoxically, if pacing is too fast, nothing carries any weight, and everything reads like a blunt description. As a result, readers might tell you that a portion of your book is too slow, when in reality it's too fast!
It's hard to figure out if your pacing is too fast or slow. The easiest way is to have someone else look at it. Failing that, though, here are things to look out for:
Slow pacing tends to occur during:
- Excessive description
- Flowery Prose
- Any time the characters are 'waiting' for something to happen
- During the setup of a scene
- Inner monologue
- 'Talking heads' dialogue
Fast pacing tends to occur during:
- Scenes with multiple 'events'
- Descriptions where the author hasn't done enough research
- Transitions from one 'important' scene to another
- The setup for a scene the writer really wanted to get to
- Any time a lot of concepts/characters are introduced at once
As I said, pacing tends to get overlooked by a lot of writers, but it is the primary reason readers will put your book down. Ensure that your book has proper pacing (especially in your opening chapters), and you'll hook the reader and keep them hooked.
1 comments:
Interesting post.
Given a choice, I'd read the book with Passage 2, though it's hard to care when Joseph gets shot. And all those sentences beginning 'He'...
I quite consciously try to give every scene something to keep the reader happy, preferably several somethings (don't know if I succeed) because myself I only ever read for entertainment. I can remember from schooldays how stultifying it is to have to read a boring book.
(How do you do those neat flower bullet points?)
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