Speaker 1: Pacing is one of the more elusive aspects of writing. It's subjective and relies heavily on taste, so I can't give you an ULTIMATE ONE-STOP GUIDE TO MASTERING PACING AND AFTER THIS YOU'LL BE PERFECT FOREVER. But like most of these videos, I can give you tools to help you fix a story that isn't paced well, or something to keep in mind while you're writing down the line. Now, there are two different kinds of pacing when it comes to writing, macro and micro. Macro pacing deals with the overarching plot elements. It asks how fast is the story progressing from chapter to chapter. Micro pacing deals with the actual prose that you're writing. It asks how fast is the scene progressing from sentence to sentence. We can view both types of pacing as a line. The dots along it are the events in the story. The closer they are, the faster the pacing, and the farther apart, the slower. When pacing a story, these points shouldn't be spaced evenly though. They should bunch up and spread out as the story builds up and releases tension. Where these points are bunched together, things are moving fast. The constant plot progression keeps readers engaged. But when things slow down, it gives the readers a break and lets them stop to smell the flowers. There are guides out there that will help you balance where to bunch up plot points and where to spread them out. This is the idea behind Hollywood Beat Sheets that tell you what should be happening on every page of a screenplay. We talked about that more in our series on The Hero's Journey, you can check that out here. If you don't want to use a pre-planned guide for pacing, then you'll have to rely on your own intuition and the feedback you get from people who proofread your story. Now let's dig in and talk about the ways we can balance the different kinds of pacing. Large scale pacing can make or break your book. The key to macro pacing is to make your audience comfortable but also a little on the edge of their seat so they're curious about what happens next. This means you need to balance plot progression with downtime. A common mistake that people make is that they have a lot of plot points at the beginning and end of their story, but not so many in the middle. This can slow the progress of Act 2 and make the middle of the story boring, which may lose some reader's interest. On the other hand, sometimes you can go all gas and no breaks while writing and have constant progress. This is the classic too much of a good thing is a bad thing moment. Never giving the audience the time to relax after you build up tension can be stressful and hard to read. Having a lot of plot points in quick succession gives your reader a ton of information to process. They don't need time to digest what you've given them. There needs to be a healthy balance of plot progress throughout the entire story. Here's some ways to help adjust your pacing. Depending on how prevalent they are, subplots can have a huge effect on story pacing. They can add needed downtime from the main plot. If your story is going lightning fast, you may want to include a B-plot. They can be a nice detour from the main action of the story. But don't go too crazy, spending too much time in B-plots can make things slow and boring. You have to find the balance. Two Towers from Lord of the Rings is an interesting example here. If you watch the movie, Frodo and Sam's story is told in parallel with the rest of the Fellowship, which is in line with modern pacing norms. If you read the book though, it's just the Fellowship for the first half, then Frodo and Sam for the second half. I know these are technically two separate books, but the pacing in the movie is far better. Each story takes turns and keeps you excited about what's happening when you go back to the other plot, while the book can kind of drag on while you're just reading the same story. That being said, I love the Lord of the Rings books, and please don't hate me for criticizing Tolkien. Let's move on to the next topic, thanks. I know the cliffhangers may be super annoying at the end of seasons of your favorite TV show, but they can be useful for switching between main plots and subplots in a novel. This may not be as serious as, DID GLYN DIE, but you can use a type of cliffhanger to keep your audience engaged. More of a cliff question. In our last video, we talked about making the audience ask questions, and that's what you want to do at the end of each section. Make the audience wonder something that makes them want to know more, so they're excited to keep reading. For example, let's say we alternate which plot we're following each chapter. To keep your reader engaged, make them ask a question in your first chapter that doesn't immediately get answered. Then switch to your subplot in the second chapter. Then people will be excited to get back to the original plot, so they'll keep reading. You can use the same method with your subplots, and back and forth. This method keeps the reader engaged, but also prevents them from getting fatigued from a single plot line. Reading takes a lot of time and brainpower, so we want to do our best to make sure we keep our audience's attention. Subplots aren't always good, though. You can have subplots that don't really have a purpose. Remember that they should have consequences for the main story. If you have a subplot that doesn't go anywhere, it's going to be boring and you may lose people. If proofreaders are telling you your story is slow and it's filled with subplots, it may be time to trim some of those C and D plots. This can be a big issue for TV shows, which are often plagued by the notorious biller episode. There are some shows that even have websites dedicated to telling you which episodes to skip. We're having websites tell our audience which chapters to skip, with the power of good pacing and plotting. This is a great time to tell you about Campfire Pro. It's a great tool for making sure your pacing is on point. Its timeline view has a ton of customization so you can really visualize the pacing of your story. I like to color my important plot points green, and my minor ones blue, so that it's easy to see where my critical moments are. Do I have too much plot progression at this point in the story? Should I add a subplot element here? It's a great tool for planning and making sure that your story is where it needs to be to make the writing process easier. Check out Campfire Pro's 10 day free trial. Once you've identified the spots where your story goes without a major plot point for a while, that's where you can start to trim down. That may be just removing a single plot point from a subplot, or removing a subplot entirely. I can't tell you what the right balance is, but I can tell you we don't need to know every single detail of your character's lives. Micropacing is one of the skills that comes with a lot of practice. You can really tell the difference between a legendary writer and a new one by how they pace their story line to line. I know I always notice when a story has great micropacing, because the reading experience is just so muah. Like I said before, a lot of pacing is subjective and comes down to taste, and that's especially true when it comes to micropacing. Whether you like the long, meandering sentences of J.R.R. Tolkien, or the precise prose of Vonnegut, you should know the effect that micropacing has on your audience. This is one of those classic things that affects micropacing. If your sentences are longer, it slows down what's happening in the scene. And that's not a bad thing. Malcolm Gladwell shared this trick in his masterclass. He talked about how short sentences increase the pace and raise tension. It makes things happen in quick succession, like in a fight scene. But to release the tension made by those machine gun sentences, he likes to end on a long sentence, like a volcano building up pressure, then bursting. Here's an example. The boy stared at the closet. Low scratching emanated from within. His heart quickened. A bead of sweat rolled down his back. He crept toward the door. Inhale. Step. Exhale. Step. He let the long scratch against the wood. He lunged toward the door, grasped the nod, and tore it open to reveal a fluffy kitten trapped inside. You can see how the tension builds up with the first couple of sentences before being released all at once with the last. The next tool is your dialogue. There's two things to consider here. The amount of dialogue and how it's broken up. In some forms, dialogue can slow the pace of a scene. If characters are just small talking and not saying anything important, it can strangle the pace. Again, slowing the pace isn't a bad thing. Maybe we want to see the characters catch their breath after an intense moment. But if you fill your dialogue with a bunch of fluff, it can bring the pace to a halt. I can't really tell you what's too much and too little. Just know that playing with the amount of dialogue in a scene is a great way to change the micropacing. A more concrete way to help your pacing and dialogue is to break it up with action. This is a classic screenwriting technique, but works just as well in regular prose. Long streams of dialogue without any action can be boring and lose your reader's attention. When I say break up dialogue with action, I don't mean add a fight scene in the middle of a script. I mean, tell us what the speaker is doing while they're talking. Do they look nervous? How's their posture? Breaking up dialogue with action helps not only keep the pace up when there's a lot of dialogue, it also helps characterize the speaker. Like I said, having a ton of dialogue can slow down the pace. But that's only one of the three different kinds of text in the novel. There's also narration and description. Description is the action in what's happening in a scene. The more narration you include, the faster your line-by-line pace will be. Description can act similar to dialogue. Page-long descriptions can really slow down the pace of the story. This practice is a common criticism of epic fantasy as a genre, because it tends to take its time. And that's not a bad thing. Like I said, it's up to personal taste. If you don't like slow micropacing, that's fine. Also, you can like both. I'm talking about it like it's a dichotomy because it's easier to teach that way, but I really hate the all-or-nothing mentality some people can have about writing style. It's a spectrum that usually aligns with genre. In fantasy, you tend to find longer and more flowy prose, while thrillers are sharper and quicker with the other genres falling in between. You can choose sides if you want to, but I like to maintain a balance when it comes to the stuff I read. The goal of good pacing is to keep your reader invested in the story. This means that your best tool for learning and fixing your pacing is the people that read your work. I will never stop saying this, but having people you trust give you feedback is an invaluable resource. Fellow writers are your number one way of becoming a better writer. Thanks for watching. Hey, if you liked this video, make sure you leave a like and subscribe. It helps out the channel a ton. If there's an author whose pacing you love, let me know in a comment. Thanks again. You're the best. Have you liked and subscribed to this channel yet? You should. Books. They can be excellent downtime from the main plot line. I didn't mean to rhyme. I do it all the time. This is a crime. Ha ha ha.