Have you ever come across a section of a book where it felt like everything happened at breakneck speed, and you could only just barely read fast enough to keep up? Or have you seen the opposite, where it’s all nice and slow and mellow, and where you’re able to really take your time and enjoy the beauty of the words?
That’s the kind of thing I’ll be musing on today. Prose and pacing. Time and reading.
Do note, this is not about how to pace your story, that’s an entirely different topic.
The Basics
Most writers will at one point or another have heard that a full stop is a signal for the reader to breathe. The shorter the sentences are, the quicker the breathing becomes, like when you’re excited. With longer sentences, the breaths grow longer, and deeper, and you calm down.
And when you write really long sentences and don’t include any commas or other forms of punctuation your reader might just run out of breath and begin to feel a little panicked.
There’s no ideal sentence length to strive for – rather the opposite. Any length is fine, as long as the sentence does its job. I’d say a bit of variety is good though, or the prose might come off as a bit stale. The only time you really need to worry about it is when the pace is important for the reading experience – like in a fast paced action scene or a lazy-Sunday-morning kind of scene.
When the action is tight, you pick up the pace.
Keep it short.
Keep it snappy.
When things are calm, you can pause and show off the scenery, and perhaps you add in a few extra words here and there – for no other reason than to just mellow out and let the imagination roam free.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s have a look at other things that can affect the pacing of your prose.
The Less Obvious Things
Fast and Slow Words
To begin with, words can be fast or slow – similar to how some words are positively or negatively charged. Often, but not always, this is because they imply a speed.
One example is the world crawl – to move one one’s hands and knees. It’s a description of a kind of movement, and while speed isn’t necessarily part of the definition, it’s still implied. To move at a crawl is to move slowly, and usually with effort.
This has implications for how time is perceived in your prose. Consider the following examples:
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The minutes crawled by.
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The minutes drifted by.
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The minutes flew by.
The first two are slow, and the third is fast. Also note the difference in effort between the first and second one. When something drifts, it’s carried by something else and doesn’t resist. When something crawls, it’s forcing itself forward.
What are some other, less obvious, slow and fast words?
Cinematic Effects
Often when writing a description, it can help to visualize your scene as if viewed through the lens of a camera, or played out on a movie screen. It’s advice I myself give regularly, but it’s not always good advice.
Film and books are very different mediums. Some things you can do in a book do not translate well into moving pictures, and the other way around.
A great example of this is the bullet-time effect from The Matrix. It looks really cool in the movies, but does it work in writing?
Imagine you’re reading an exciting battle-scene. It’s the final showdown between the hero and their nemesis. The hero jumps and swings their sword, ready to deal the final blow, and…
Now imagine that the next paragraph is a detailed description of how, for just an instant, the hero hangs suspended in mid-air, as if frozen in time, with their sword held high and their hair streaming behind them like flames from a ball of fire. It then goes on to describe the antagonist, eyes wide with fear, their dagger slipping from fingers slick with nervous sweat, watching helplessly as their impending doom approaches.
I’m sure there are ways to make something like that work, but it needs to be done with intention. If the scene is meant to be fast paced and exciting, be very careful of adding in anything that can slow the pace down, even if it looks absolutely awesome in your head and you already have all the right words for it.
In a movie, a scene like that goes by very quickly. It’s only there long enough for the viewer to register that it happened, and then the action moves on. In text, the longer and cooler the description is, the longer it takes to read.
Be mindful of this. Something that looks cool in a movie might not read cool in a book.
What are some other examples of things that work great in movies, but not in books, or the other way around? How about internal monologue?
When to go Fast, and When to go Slow
In theory, this is easy. You go fast when things are happening quickly, and you go slow when things are allowed to take their time. In practice, it’s trickier than it might seem.
When things are happening fast, there may be a lot to keep track of. It can be difficult to decide what to include, and what to leave out. If you leave out too much, your reader won’t understand what’s going on. If you include too much, it will slow down the pace of the action.
The opposite is true for slow scenes where nothing much is happening. You can describe what a location looks like, and maybe something about clouds drifting by far above, but pretty soon, you’ll run out of interesting things to show the reader while your character rests on a hillside in the afternoon sun.
What I’m getting at here is that deciding what to include in your scene affects the pace.
If your heroes are hunkered down behind a fallen tree, with a horde of raging orcs bearing down on them, it might not be the best time for them to get into an insightful and informative discussion about orc battle tactics throughout history. A snappy joke or two will be all our heroes have time for before the orcs are upon them.
Too much irrelevant information, and the reader will either forget about the orcs, or begin to wonder why they haven’t shown up already.
On the other hand, when the heroes are resting on the hillside after the battle, they may very well reminisce about their time back at the military academy and what the professor told them about orc tactics – and how wrong they were.
Final Words
Pacing the prose will come easy to some writers, while others will find it difficult. It’s far from an exact science, and if you’re having a hard time with it, my best advice is to read more. Don’t worry too much about tips and advice (including mine). Read authors you enjoy, and with time, a little of their way with words will rub off on you.
Speaking of which…
What author do you feel does a good job of pacing their prose well? Or, are you like me, who really only notices when the prose is badly paced?
How about fast and slow words? Is that even a thing, or is it just something I made up to try and sound clever?
Books and movies. In films, intense action is the cool, flashy part, but in books, the best bits come in the pauses between the actions. Do you agree? Why, or why not?
Finally, one of my pet peeves is when writers use while, or as, in a fast paced scene to make it seem like two things are happening simultaneously. To me, it slows pace down to a crawl. How about you?
Thank you for reading. I hope I’ve given you something to think about.
