The “different panel” at 4th Street this year was on pacing and structure. I’ve been pondering it since then, and this is what I think (or part of it, anyway):
Pacing is how fast it feels like things happen. Not how fast they actually do happen; what it feels like to the reader-this is why sometimes the cure for a too-slow pace is to add more material, and the cure for a too-fast one is to cut something. It has to do, frequently, with how much story-stuff is coming at the reader how rapidly. So for a too-slow pace, you sometimes cut material because the reader isn’t finding out anything new about plot, characters, theme, background, etc. and so the scene/chapter/whatever is dragging…but sometimes, you add material so that the reader does find out new stuff, and that solves the problem.
And sometimes for a too-fast pace, you add in material to slow down just how fast the reader has to cope with these six important things, but sometimes you just cut out two of them that aren’t as important as you thought, or that can be dealt with better elsewhere. Either way, the effect is the same — the read feels slower because the reader has less story-stuff (not facts or factoids-stuff involving plot, characters, etc.) coming at them over the course of three pages (because now the same amount of stuff is spread over four pages, or because now there’s less stuff on the same three pages).
Structure is the pattern of events; where in the story (e.g., beginning, middle, end) things happen. “Beginning-middle-end” is a story structure; so is “beginning of beginning, middle of beginning, end of beginning; beginning of middle…etc.” Structure is independent of pacing-you can have a fast-paced beginning or a slow-paced beginning, for instance. And you can look at lots more complicated patterns than beginning-middle-end; the standard sawtooth plot-skeleton, for instance, or spiral structures, and so on.
The trouble is that people often talk about pacing using the same kinds of up-and-down metaphors they use for structure. Because it is rare for a story to work if it’s all cruising along at exactly the same speed. Cruise control is not a good idea for stories; you normally want variation. Fast bits, and then a slower bit so the reader can catch his/her breath. Not only does this sound a lot like the sawtooth plot-skeleton pattern, one of the easy ways to manipulate how fast something feels is to change the tension. Which means that the peaks of the sawtooth-plot-structure (“We are going to solve the problem this time, for sure!”) quite often feel faster-paced (because they tend to be more tense), and the valleys (“Oh, darn; that didn’t work; now what do we do? Let’s sit here for a while and eat worms”) quite often feel slower.
So the two things can hum along pretty much in parallel a lot of the time, but they’re not actually the same, and you can get into trouble if you start trying to fix the one when the real problem is with the other.
Well, this is another classic. Partly for the pellucid exposition of why pace-control works like that — I can’t have understood it as well as I thought, because if pressed I would have wittered and rambled for more like two pages than two paragraphs.
As for the confusion between content-based and structural pace effects… it’s a fair cop, guv’nor!
Ms. Wrede,
Having long been a fan of your fiction, I finally thought to look up your blog, and find that your non-fiction is also excellent. You say things which I had sort of almost known in the shadowy corners of my brain, but which would trip me up for not knowing them for real.
Thank you, thank you– I find myself wishing for a more hyperbolic phrase which was not also cliched, but just thank you.
Pacing is a tough subject. It’s hard not to have too much of one pace clumped together (whether its too many slow scenes in a row, or too many fast ones.) Thanks for tacking the subject for us. 🙂
So where does tension come into it? To me it’s not the same as ‘pacing’ but I’m hard pressed to articulate just where the difference lies.
green_knight: Ok, this is just my take, but to me, “pacing” is how fast stuff feels as if it’s happening. Tension has to do with how much the reader and characters care about the outcome, and with how worried they are that the desired outcome won’t happen. That’s why a drawn-out scene in a Horror novel describing in detail someone walking up to the back door of a house can just sing with tension: because the reader knows that something awful is going to happen when the person gets to that door. It may not be a fast-paced scene; on the contrary, by rights it ought to be slow as molasses…but the tension makes it work.
Thanks, that definition works for me. As a reader, I often have problems with too much of it – I feel uneasy by long stretches of anticipation. I also prefer books where I discover things along with the character from those where I have seen the villain’s side: if I know there’s a monster lurking in the house the walking scene might have more tension, but I won’t enjoy it more. I already know what will happen, which makes it somewhat boring.
green_knight: Exactly what is “too much” tension is a matter of reader preference. And the particular scene I was thinking of didn’t depend on having seen the villain’s side; in fact, it was a recreation by the detective of a serial killer’s movements on the day of a murder. But it was still horribly tense, because the detective cared so much about getting it right so he could catch the guy.
Even when you see the villain’s side of things, it can work if the author does something unexpected with it. There’s a particular mystery I’m thinkin of, where the villain is seen setting up a really nasty trap that will go off when the detective opens a particular door. The villain gets caught…and in the last sentence of the novel, someone reaches for that door handle, after everything is supposed to be over. The author doesn’t have to show what happens next; the reader’s imagination takes over.