Pacing In A Novel

Learning how to pace your writing is an important skill, but the basics are simple: Sometimes go faster, and sometimes go slowly.

If you go fast, fast, fast, fast you begin to lose impact. It's like someone shouting all the time; after a while you switch off. If you go slow, slow, slow, slow, your readers will begin to drift off.

You need to go forwards in a mixture of fast and slow scenes, though not in such an obvious pattern as fast, slow, fast, slow, fast, slow which will become predictable. And as you get towards the end, the chances are that you'll have more fast scenes than slow ones.

So, what makes a scene fast? Usually lots of action and dialogue, and exciting things happening. A slow scene will more likely include a lot of internal thought and reflection on what's just happened.

If you're unsure, try listing your scenes on index cards. Then lay them out on the floor or a big table along an imaginary central line. Scenes above the line are fast (and the further above the line, the faster they are), scenes below the line are slow (and the further below the line, the slower they are). Ideally, your index cards should zig zag across the floor or table in a varied and unpredictable way.

This is an easy way to check your pace and see if there are any places where nothing much happens for a while (ie several cards together below the line) or if there are clumps of action and excitement (ie several cards together above the line). You can do it for each scene too, and it should show a similarly varied pattern.

And finally, you can check that all your best bits - the ones that you rate highest up the excitement scale - are spread out throughout the novel.

Everything needs to have light and shade and a change of pace to them. Think of a film like Die Hard. Yes, there are bangs and explosions and exciting stuff happening. But there are also sections where Bruce chats to the policeman in a reflective way, the calm before the next storm. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow or quick, quick, slow, quick, slow, quick - it doesn't matter what the order is so long as it is there.

The Saggy Middle

After Writer's Bottom, one's thoughts lead inexorably to the saggy middle, although this time I'm referring to the novel.  Most people have an energy and impetus that propels them through beginning a novel.  Their characters intermingle, act and react.  All is well.  Scene follows scene, but gradually it all starts to slow down.  Writing becomes harder, and The End seems a very long way away.  The dreaded saggy middle has arrived.  

The doyen of scriptwriting analysis, Syd Field, called the solution to saggy middle 'the pinch'.  It was a scene which turned the story into a new direction.  Terry Pratchett once suggested that all a writer had to do was bring on a naked woman brandishing a flaming sword (which would certainly send my novels into a completely new direction).  Basically, something BIG needs to happen.

But when I say BIG the incident may, in itself, be quite a small action.  It's the repercussions which are large.  For example, half way through the film Gladiator Maximus is told that if he gets to Rome and wins the crowd over, he'll meet the emperor.  Since he'd like to kill the emperor, this gives him the will to survive - and his desire for revenge drives the second half of the film.

Halfway through, Cinderella dances with the prince and they fall in love, without which none of the clock striking or shoe losing would be important.  In many detective stories, it looks as if the mystery is solved when - da dah! half way through something happens that points the finger elsewhere (there's another murder which the No 1 suspect couldn't have done, possibly because the victim is the no 1 suspect).

I can remember laughing aloud when I read the mid-point event in Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler, it was so simple - just a line of dialogue, but it turned everything before up on its head by making the main character realise he'd been looking at life from the wrong angle. So, the solution for a saggy middle is an event which changes direction, and not 100 sit-ups.

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Irritating Chinese Proverbs

I was moaning to a friend about the WIP, how it was taking me ages to write, how I'd had a good day but the novel didn't seem to be getting any further.

'Ah,' he said, rather smugly I thought. 'You know what they say...'

'Nope,' I replied. 'What?'

'The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.'

This was particularly irritating because I'd said it to him last year about a book he was moaning about and regretting accepting the commission for, and I have a horrible feeling I was very smug at the time too. But the really awful thing is - it's TRUE.

When we set out on a novel we don't always know where we're going, but unless we take that first step we'll never find out. And then take another step, and another. That thousand mile journey is made up of lots of little steps and if we concentrate only on the enormity of the journey we'll never have the courage to take a single step, and we certainly won't enjoy the process.

So there we have it: the 100,000 word novel is one sentence after another. And there's nothing more irritating than having your own advice quoted back to you.

Why do novels get rejected?

I read a really interesting post this morning by Janet Reid. She's an agent and in the post breaks down why she rejected/accepted the 124 novels she asked to read in full over last six months or so. A lot of the reasons were solvable - slow pace for example, or structural issues. A few needed more editorial work that she had time to give. Others were good novels, but not right for her - these she referred to other agents. In the end she made two offers out of the 124.

It's such a lottery. What Janet Reid may see as being slow, another agent may see as being gentle or subtle. I didn't find The Da Vinci Code to be a page-turner, but I accept that I am a rare exception and not the rule.

If the odds are 124:2 (and that's for novels she asked to see on the basis of a few chapters), then we have to accept that individual taste is going to play a bigger part than we'd like. Not everybody likes everything, in just the same way that I don't like red wine or mushrooms, but love licorice and aniseed. We can't do anything about that. What we can do is make sure that the sortable stuff - pacing, structure, editing etc - is as good as we can make it before we send out. It is a lottery, but we can, with work, swing the odds in our favour.