#i flip back and forth a lot while drawing to keep my perspective fresh and sometimes i forget to flip back to the right side

[engazed]

Hi engazed :-) Do you have any tips to pace a novel? I love the way you have developed your stories so I would like to learn from you.

Oh dear. Here I go. Get ready for a TL:DR.

Pacing is largely intuitive. There’s no clear definition, and no formula to follow to ensure ‘good’ pacing. In that way, it’s very much akin to ‘flow’. I once had a professor who complimented my easy style and the rhythm of my sentences and asked how I had learnt to put a sentence together (not in the grammatical sense, but in the aesthetic sense). At a loss for a more sophisticated explanation, I simply replied, ‘It sounds right.’ But when I say intuitive, I don’t mean instinctual, necessarily. I believe that with enough practise, we fine-tune our intuitions until it becomes more and more natural and just ‘sounds right.’

So it is with pacing. As a writer, it is sometimes difficult to be sensitive to the actual pacing of the novel. A scene that takes you two weeks to write--and therefore feels like it may be long and involved--may take a reader mere minutes to blow through and barely be impacted by. This is why it is critical to read one’s own work, top to bottom, beginning to end, while adopting the perspective of a fresh reader who has never encountered the work before. This is hard to do, but one gets better with time.

I have three ‘rules of thumb’ when I’m writing that, I believe, help me with pacing. The first can be stated succinctly:

1. If I’m bored, my reader is bored.

This applies at virtually every stage of drafting and revising, but I think it is most critical when revising. Before you call something ‘finished’, read it again, like you’re a new reader. If there are paragraphs, scenes, or even whole chapters of your own work that you tend to slog through, skim, or skip altogether, just to get to the good stuff, don’t expect that your reader will feel like it’s fresh and interesting. Moments like that slow things down. So if you’re bored, use that as a rule of thumb that something isn’t working with respect to pacing.

But when it’s working, you feel the energy of the scene as you read it. Even the less critical moments should be significant in some way to justify its existence, by providing new information pertinent to the plot or texture that fleshes out a character. If you can honestly say that it does neither of these things, have the guts to delete it. If it’s doing something important, but not doing it well, rewrite. Keep yourself interested. Delight yourself first, and the right readers will find you.

So how do you make something not boring?

2. Balance texture with dialogue.

What I mean by texture is the internal and external features of a scene. Sometimes less experienced writers prove their inexperience by ignoring the internal thoughts of a character, or forget to paint the scene, or leave us with nothing but talking heads. What I mean by ‘talking heads’ is all dialogue and no action.

Don’t get me wrong; dialogue can be a lot of fun to write. It’s actually one of my favourite things to write, because it comes most easily to me. But if you have straight dialogue and little else, you run the risk of committing another pacing error. Instead of slowing things down with unnecessary stuff, you speed it along too quickly for the reader to really take in. You start writing as if for a screenplay, not a novel (two very different mediums when it comes to the craft of writing).

If I may shamelessly pull an example of this from my own work, Blackbird, Fly, chapter 1, I can illustrate what I mean. Here’s the scene: Mary has arrived at St E’s for a ‘consultation’ with John Watson, intending to seek his assistance as a private detective. Without texture, here is how the scene reads:

‘Good morning, Ms Morstan,’ he said. ‘How are we today? You told the nurse you were experiencing some discomfort—?’

‘Chest pains,’ she blurted out. ‘Trouble breathing.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘‘Let’s have a listen, then, shall we?’

This is literally the conversation, the words passed back and forth between Mary and John. But we’re missing three crucial things that will help the pacing of this scene work: Mary’s internal self and thoughts, brief exposition, and the actions of the two characters.

With those things in place, here’s the actual scene. [I will use italics to indicate Mary’s thoughts, underlining for exposition and description/details, and bolding for actions.]

‘Good morning, Ms Morstan,’ he said, drawing up a swivel chair. ‘How are we today?’

His voice was warm, his smile soft, and when he lifted his dark blue eyes from the clipboard to meet hers, there flickered a moment in which she saw him mirroring her expression, and he knew her, too. But no—she had imagined it, because he recovered himself quickly, cleared his throat, and returned his attention to the clipboard. But a slight flush remained behind to colour his cheeks.

Consulting her chart, he began with a practised air of professionalism, ‘You told the nurse you were experiencing some discomfort—?’

‘Chest pains,’ she blurted out. Yes. That wasn’t a lie. She was definitely feeling some sort of ache in her chest now, a little to the left. ‘Trouble breathing.’

‘Oh.’ He flipped a page, eyes narrowing, and she realised her mistake. Dr Watson was a general surgeon, for whom the abdominal pains she had invented over the phone got her an appointment. In his line of work, he would have little to do with chest pains.

Before she could flounder and fluster in correcting herself, Dr Watson rose from the stool and took out a stethoscope, settling the tips in his ears. He wasn’t questioning her. He wasn’t calling her out on her obvious deceit. Instead, he just smiled, a close-lipped and kind smile, and said, ‘Let’s have a listen, then, shall we?’

Mary wondered if she was being indulged in the lies of a hypochondriac.

Clearly, many of these moves can happen simultaneously, and they should feel seamless upon reading/re-reading. But they add richness to the scene and set an appropriate pace. Different scenes will call for different kinds of pacing. Short paragraphs are great for action sequences, rapid lines of dialogue are great for arguments, etc. But getting a feel for what’s ‘right’ or what ‘works’ takes practice while you’re fine-tuning your intuitions.

3. Rule of 3

Finally, I want to talk about my own inclinations to plot things in three stages. As any of my readers know by now, I am writing a trilogy, but each book in that trilogy is divided into three parts, and each part has a three-point arc, and each chapter in that arc also follows a three-part model. This isn’t painstaking plotting on my part; it sort of naturally evolved because that’s how I ‘feel’ a story is told. Remember what I said about making sure your reader doesn’t get bored? And how you shouldn’t allow yourself to get bored? Well, one of the ways I make sure that I don’t get bored is by working toward mini climaxes, as it were, well before we reach the big one at the end.

Let me use Ten Days as an example. This book has three parts. The first one ends at the end of chapter 9, the second at the end of chapter 22, and end of chapter 30. Each of those parts had an arc including an ‘inciting incident,’ ‘complications,’ and ‘turning point.’ Let me use Part 1 of Ten Days to explain.

Stories begin with a moment of crisis. It’s exactly why there’s any story at all to tell. If your first chapter doesn’t contain it, you haven’t started the story yet. You’re lips are just flapping in the wind. For Ten Days (and, incidentally, for the whole of The Fallen), the moment of crisis is when John Watson is abducted off the streets of London after buying a wedding ring. If that doesn’t happen, there is no story. That’s why it’s the inciting incident, and the reason a reader will keep on going. A crisis has been introduced, and it is in want of a resolution. In this case, the resolution we are seeking is rescuing John.

Complications keep the plot moving forward. They come in the form of obstacles that keep characters from reaching the sought-after resolution. Complications are introduced in Part 1 in the following manner: Lestrade isn’t allowed to work on John’s case and must do so secretly; John’s abductors turn out to be torturers, and his life is now at risk; Sherlock returns but continues to play a dead man; Anderson and Donovan suspect something is afoot; Sherlock deduces a mole in the Yard; Mary is abducted.

Complications are where the plot actually happens. It’s not merely this event occurred, then this one, then this one. It’s more purposeful, and it’s what distinguishes stories from others of like ilk. There are a lot of stories where John is kidnapped out there. What makes them different? The complications that follow after the moment of abduction, the events that seek resolution but are thwarted. And thus, story is born.

We finish Part 1 with one of the major turning points in the novel: the death of Mary Morstan. This is a mini climax itself, a point of great tension, and thereafter things are not, and cannot, be the same. These are game changing moments that precede the final resolution. Before this point in the novel, John was tortured and afraid, but he was still fighting and hopeful of rescue. After Mary dies, he stops talking and longs for death; the abuse hadn’t broken him, but losing her does, and now we, the reader, are left to wonder how a resolution is even possible. The stakes become clear, but the solution does not, and this kind of tension can motivate a reader to keep going.

Part 2 ends with John’s rescue, but through the series of complications and character developments, we have come to realise that saving ‘John Watson’, the resolution we’ve been seeking, isn’t quite so simple. It’s not just saving him from Moran. It’s saving him from himself, and that’s why Part 3 is needed. You can take the man out of the torture chamber, but you can’t take the torture chamber out of the man, as it were. Hell, that’s why Books 2 and 3 are needed. We’re still on a mission to resolve the kidnapping in chapter 1. We still need to save John Watson. 

(As a side note, ‘saving John Watson’ is exactly the point the whole of the BBC Sherlock as well, start to finish. I have many thoughts on that subject as well.) 

What does this have to do with pacing? Everything. These three-point arcs can happen on a macro and micro level, but they must happen, because it’s the roller-coaster that keeps your reader interested. If gives the writer a series of destinations to reach, not just one. If you’re thinking large-scale, that is, if you are hoping to write a novel-length work, pacing becomes a critical factor, and thinking in terms of three (three acts, three-point arcs, etc.) can help facilitate an easier, more natural story-telling rhythm.