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Pacing is an unavoidable part of storytelling. Even when you aren’t thinking about it, your story will have a pace because the sections of your story will have a certain length. I realize that “sections” is a little vague since pacing exists on multiple scales. TV shows are a great example of this. On the largest scale, the entire show is broken up into seasons. On a smaller scale, each season is broken up into episodes. On an even smaller scale, each episode is broken up into scenes. Keep looking for scales we use in storytelling, and you’ll find instances of pacing throughout.
By controlling the lengths of a story’s sections, you control the story’s pace. If something important is happening, I’d encourage you to slow the story down and give that section the length it deserves. Similarly, unimportant sections can be shortened or cut entirely from the story. You almost never see characters use the bathroom, commute to work, or brush their teeth because that’s usually so unimportant that it’s not even worth mentioning.
But what do we do if an important section of the story doesn’t take a long time in real life? Your main character scoring the game-winning shot might be the story’s climax, but the shot couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds. What if something that takes months or years, like a character’s training, is less important than its real-world length? In these cases, we need to control the pacing of the story so that the time spent on each section matches the importance of that section. Long descriptions or narration reveal information at a leisurely, measured pace, while action scenes often contain quick bursts of movement. Readers and publishers dislike stories that move too slowly, but moving too rapidly doesn't allow the story to breathe or give readers enough time to process what they're reading. As a result, strong tales unfold at a balanced, flexible pace that accelerates and decelerates as the plot demands. Different storytelling mediums handle this in different ways.
In prose writing, pacing is controlled by how long something is described. If a single event spans several paragraphs, it’s slower-paced than something that happens in a single sentence. For example, in Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone, we get the text: “Harry saw it. In a great rush of excitement, he dived downward after the streak of gold. Slytherin Seeker Terence Higgs had seen it, too. Neck and neck they hurtled toward the Snitch—all the Chasers seemed to have forgotten what they were supposed to be doing as they hung in midair to watch.” This section has more detail than another one, which reads: “Harry was faster than Higgs—he could see the little round ball, wings fluttering, darting up ahead—he put on an extra spurt of speed—” The difference in pacing for both situations is clear.
Movies control pacing in two ways, either using montages when something needs to be sped up or slow-motion shots when something needs to be slowed down. Slow-motion is especially common in action movies, where the most important event is often a punch, gunshot, or explosion that lasts a fraction of a second. Movies can also stretch out important sections by showing the same event multiple times from various camera angles.
Comics can lengthen a scene by making important panels bigger. The graphic novel Strange Skies Over East Berlin does this to great effect. The story is about a strange meteor that lands in East Berlin. This meteor is so important that the first time it’s shown, it’s in a panel that spans two entire pages. The comic is telling readers: “Keep your eyes here, this is important.” There are other ways that comics indicate how long something takes or how important it is that I don’t have time to discuss here. If you’re interested in all the intricacies of how comics convey meaning, I’d highly recommend Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud.
This idea of slowing important events down is so pervasive that you can even find it in places that aren’t typically thought of as having stories. Some fighting games, for example, will freeze to sell how impactful an attack was.
Controlling pacing might sound really complicated, but remember that you (and your audience) already have a sense of pacing. That’s why when a story goes on and on about unimportant nonsense, you might ask yourself, “What’s the point of this?” You’re expecting the story to focus on what’s important, and you’re then confused when it instead focuses on what’s unimportant. You’re confused because the time spent on each section does not match the importance of that section.
That being said, everyone’s sense of pace is a little different. If two people read the same book, one might think it was too fast while the other may think it was just right. There is no objectively correct pace for a story or its sections. You might even really like a story that doesn’t control pacing this way. At the end of the day, it’s important to experiment and see what pace works best for your story. Hopefully, this article can give those experiments a push in the right direction.
About the Authors:
Nadav Schul-Kutas: Nadav's currently working towards a BA in Behavioral Economics at Reed College. He likes reading and writing bizarre, fantastical stories and loves exploring how storytelling techniques are translated between different mediums. He also enjoys bouldering, video games, and attempting (in vain) to befriend wild birds.
Amaani Sadiq: Amaani Sadiq was born and raised in Sri Lanka, a beautiful tropical island in the south of Asia. Amaani considers love and family to be most important to her. She writes by the ocean just after sunrise, then spends the rest of her day collecting inspiration and making her experiments work.