How to control your novel’s pace
How to make sure it doesn’t move too slowly or move too fast. seeing it like the gears in a car.
Your novel is like a car moving down the road. You start off in 1st gear and move to the next. Working your way up to 5th gear, gear after gear. You do the same thing with your novel.
You start slow in the first chapter and work your way faster as your book moves along until you get to the end where the story feels it’s the fastest. The reader finishes your novel feeling as though they had been taken on a journey. They enjoy it and offer it to someone else to read.
In this blog, we will learn How to control your novel’s pace..
HOW TO CONTROL YOUR NOVEL’S PACE
Table of Contents
The one thing you don’t want to do is start slow in the first act working your way faster all the way up to 5th gear in the third act only to quickly pull back to 1st gear with a flashback or describing a location with too much detail just as you were about to end the novel with the big reveal. It kills the moment you were building.
Each act is like a new gear. You start off slow in the 1st act letting the reader getting to know the characters, locations, goals, wants and needs. But as you move along into the 2nd and 3rd act the amount of time you spend describing something decreases and the action takes over. Making the novel feel as though it’s getting faster. This works for all styles of writing be it drama, horror, comedy, or science fiction.
FLASHBACKS WILL KILL THE NOVEL’S MOMENTUM
One big killer is flashbacks. They slam on the breaks. Nothing can kill the feeling of progress more than a flashback. It takes you right out of the story. The story feels as though it’s moving forward like a train getting to the station. The reader is enjoying each of the 500 pages of build-up and as you reach the final chapter where all would be answered you cut away to a flashback to a long time ago in the lead character’s childhood. The reader is stunned, wondering what just happened. Right before the final battle between good and evil you cut away. Making it feel as though you stopped the car.
This makes the reader feel upset. You’ll find the reader skimming over the flashback trying to get back to the real story. They want to know how the story ends. All the work you put into the flashback is for nothing because the reader skips it.
Think of the movie “Alien”. It’s one of the best examples of a story that gets faster as it goes along. It starts off with the crew onboard a ship waking up and literally slowly walking. By the end of the movie, everyone is literary running. As the movie moves along they get faster in their movements. Even the music gets faster in tempo. There is no music to start but it starts and moves faster as the movie moves along. The editing gets faster. There are slow camera cuts at first only to get faster by the end.
IT WOULD RUIN THE WHOLE THING
At no point does the movie slow down. Imagine if you were watching and right before the climaxed ending there was a cutaway showing the characters back on earth hanging out with family and chatting. The audience would be stunned. It would ruin the whole movie.
The movie getting faster as it goes along is not luck; the director and editor knew what they were doing. They set out to make this happen. Knowing it would start off slow and move faster as the tension builds. They knew the first half of the movie would be the audience getting to know the characters. The second half would be action. With this technique, we care about the characters because we took the time to get to know them. A lot of movies fail to do this nowadays. They have action from start to finish. The build-up is nowhere to be seen. They start in 5th gear and stay in 5th gear. The whole time we do not care about anyone.
LET THE REST OF THE NOVEL PICK UP SPEED
Keep in mind too much description of the location nearing the end of your novel can hurt the flow. As a writer, you have to be aware of how much description you put into a character or location near the end. It’s best to have character build-up and scene description in the first act. So the rest of the novel can build in speed. Slowing down in the final act to have countless paragraphs describing something annoys the reader. But if you fail to have any description at the start then we don’t know anyone or where anything is taking place.
You kill the moment by describing something in too much detail when in reality the reader doesn’t care “what the inside of a castle looks like” in the final act, they want to know if the bad guy is going to get away with his evil plan.
THE FLOW STOPS AND GOES
You might recall a novel you’ve read in the past where the author puts too much description of each new location at the start of each chapter. Making the flow of the story stop and go. After the scene is described then the action picks back up but only to slow down at the start of the new chapter. Making the novel feel it’s jumping from 1st to 5th gear and in-between all over the place.
It’s tricky as a writer to know if your novel is jumping all over the place from gear to gear. Sometimes you need someone else to read it to get an idea. They can tell you if it’s “switching gears”. Try seeing your novel as a movie. See yourself in a theater watching it on the screen, what are you seeing? a fast-moving or slow-moving movie? Is it stopping and going? How would you re-edit the movie/novel to make it flow better?
YOUR NOVEL SHOULD BE LIKE A ROLLER COASTER
A great novel is like a roller coaster it builds slowly, moving up until it reaches the top and drops down. Imagine being on a roller coaster that builds up to the top, drops you only to stop a few seconds later. Then start back up only to stop again. Having this happen over and over until the end. No one would be happy. No one would want to ride it. All the fun would be taken out with it stopping every few seconds.
A novel is the same way. Once you’ve built up the tension you want your novel to be like a roller coaster and “drop” taking the reader for a fun ride with ups and downs until the end without slowing down. So by the time they get to the end, everyone loves it. The best roller coasters are the ones who have a slow build-up, building tension then release. See if your novel does the same.
CAN THIS APPLY ELSEWHERE?
Some might ask can this apply to a drama or comedy or does this relate to action only? In reality, the idea of a story getting faster can apply to any kind of book. Imagine reading a novel where the pace never moves in any way from start to finish? It would feel dull. Comedies can work just as well as an action novel.
Look at the movie “A Fish called Wanda,” it starts off at a slow pace where a group is sitting around planning a bank robbery. By the end of the movie, they’re all racing as fast as they can to the airport to get away. It starts slowly getting faster as it moves along. It’s only at its fastest pace by the end. You’d never see a movie where it’s the fastest in the middle only to slow down by the end. The movie would not work, nor would a novel.
THE BUILD-UP OF TENSION
The movie “The Exorcist” it’s a slow build-up starting off in the Iraq desert. But by the time they are in the bedroom for the exorcism the movie’s editing has gotten faster. If the movie were just as slow at the end as it was in the beginning it would’ve failed.
Horror movies are a great example of a movie getting faster as it goes. But you do not have to write horror for it to work only. It can apply to any kind of genre, a lot of Shakespeare’s plays move faster as they move along be they comedy or drama.
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