Pacing questions for everyone.

[Tempokai]

Pacing in storytelling is defined as "the speed or tempo at which a story unfolds". As readers, we all can see when the story stalls or goes too fast according to our guts. But, as writers, we can't seemingly find out why reader A said it was "glacial" and reader B says it's"perfectly paced", despite reading the same text. Why?

So, here are questions, and these are 100% hard even for me to articulate why:

1. Why it's hard as a writer to pace the plot according to context? What makes pacing, pacing?

2. Why the speed of story is categorized fast and slow? Why typical guides encourage to cycle between the two?

3. How do we know as readers when pacing isn't balanced? What advantage reader has that writer doesn't have when discussing pacing?

These are trick questions that I 100% intended to question. There are no simplifications or deliberate obfuscation. Even if you can't answer while thinking, at least answer instinctively. I really want to know what you think about pacing.

 

[beast_regards]

Pacing is the speed of the plot advancing in relation to the expectations of the reader?

 

[2wordsperminute]

I'll give #2 a shot: The speed of stories is categorized as fast or slow because it's a simple way to describe how much is happening in any given part of a story or even a story as a whole. The reason it's good to cycle between the two is because while a slow story can turn people off of it, a story that never figuratively takes a breather can be exhausting and might have a harder time showing the characters interact normally.

 

[beast_regards]

Why it's hard as a writer to pace the plot according to context?

Context is irrelevant, only the perception of the reader.

Reader's perception of speed (of the plot) is subjective.

Statistical change that your subjective views are the same as the random reader are very low.

What makes pacing, pacing?

Reader's subjective perception.

Why the speed of story is categorized fast and slow?

If the plot advances faster than the reader had anticipated, the story is fast paced.
If the plot advances sloweer than the reader had anticipated, the story is slow paced.

Why typical guides encourage to cycle between the two?

You don't cycle between it. It's the subjective perception of the reader.

Why typical guides encourage to cycle between the two?

Writing guides are often written by editor. Right choice is whatever strokes the ego of the editor in control of the publishing process the most.

How do we know as readers when pacing isn't balanced?

Because we feel like it.

I.e. we feel sad because our cat died, and we thus complain about every single bit of content we see because we can.

What advantage reader has that writer doesn't have when discussing pacing?

Multiple accounts to down-vote the story.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

The "problem" with pacing is that the ideas often come out at a different speed than would feel natural in the story to the reader (or to the characters). This is one area where authors are more likely to be blind to their own failings than a reader will be, and why editors and beta readers are a good idea - they are more likely to spot pacing issues as they try to read the story, than the writer is, who kind of wants to get to "the next cool bit" or who (I suspect I'm guilty of this one a lot) gets sidetracked by "character moments" (conversations, side treks, etc.).

As an example, my wife was summarizing a bizarre audionovel she's listening to after finding out that the story so far had taken place in four months. She thought it covered a year, a year and a half until one of the characters mentioned four months.
When she related the story to me, it sounded like something that could happen in four months... on a daily soap opera. But, yeah, would take a year or more in the real world. A beta reader or editor should have caught that and had the author slow down the time scale so that it feels more natural (unless there's a pressing reason why the time scale is what it is, like a pregnancy or some other time-derived event).
Or as another example, in the novelization of Jurassic Park, there is a moment where the author got a bit careless and has one character in two places at the same time (I re-read the section four times, trying to figure out where I missed a transition); honestly, I'd say the absolute best experience for that story is to fast forward the movie to where the first dinosaur attack happens, then save it there, read the book up until that point, then shelve the book and watch the movie; the pacing issues were fixed and that part is a lot more fun to watch than to read anyway...

So yeah, I'm dancing around the question because it is not so much a trick question as a question with no single answer.

 

[LilRora]

1. It's the reader that makes it hard, or more specifically the differences between readers. Pace can be considered as something objective, but that is irrelevant to the readers, who may experience the same pace differently and have different feedback about the story. It can be considered in similar terms to, for example, worldbuilding - even though we can point out some trends and nuances in stories and extract something approximating objectively "good" pacing in specific context, it is in the end subjective.

I'm unsure what you're going for with the second question, but I would say what makes pacing, pacing, is the experience of the reader. What they feel when they read the story, how they live through the events, how they process them on an intellectual and emotional level. In some cases, the way the story is written, together with many other aspects of writing, allows for immersion.

2. This is related to the previous point. From the perspective of the reader, a story should ideally be neither slow or fast in its pacing, it should feel natural. The subjectivity of the experience, however, sometimes makes it so the reader either does not have time to fully process the events, or they do so and are left without further stimulus for too long. That is when the pacing feels respectively rushed or too slow. Approaching those bounds, it will be fast or slow.

Again, we can try look at this objectively, and we will then spot differences in the pacing. Those should always match the emotional impact and the content of the story, that's why pace should vary.

3. If a reader is overwhelmed by the story, pacing is too fast. If there is no engagement, pacing is too slow. I think the basic advantage for readers is the fact they are reading for the first time, which gives them a completely different perspective from authors.

 

[Clo]

I have so much to say about the topic. Pacing is a bit of a passion project of mine.

I am extremely long-winded in everything I write, including forum responses. My pacing tends to be slow—glacial, even—because I linger on small details, I give examples. And as a reader, I look for the same, and I am disappointed everytime a scene or moment is told to me, rather than shown. ("And we watched movies all night, then went to bed.")

But I need to head back to work so I will let someone far smarter than me take over:

“To make something slow is not to make it boring. It is to give it weight.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

 

[melchi]

Pacing is subjective. So there isn't a right answer.

My answer though is fulfilling expectations. Unless you are George RR Martin, stories tend to be around 100k words. So there here premise, and a catharsis with ~100k words as a a budget.

So say there is an isekai and there are 20k words before the plot even gets to another world. That might cause complaints about pacing.

Or say someone is writing a story about making bricks to build a castle. But they don't have a castle at 100k words. Likewise, readers might complain about pacing.

The opposite can be true also. I think Ookami said that it takes about 30k words to establish a character. So if there are 10 important characters introduced in the first few chapters readers might think the writer is rushing things.

 

[lambenttyto]

I really want to know what you think about pacing.

Is it a challenge question?

A reader's perception based on pacing can very much be about taste. Slow fantasies might be boring for people who like sword-and-sorcery (which is essentially the thriller of the fantasy genre.) Conversely, thrillers may seem rushed to readers who enjoy slow burn stories.

Outside of the individual reader's subjective taste, pacing is controlled through narrative, paragraph length, sentence length, the amount of description and introspection vs action and dialogue. A scene containing mostly dialogue will feel fast, while a scene with more description and introspection will slow the story down. After important events, action or otherwise, characters need to take time to reflect for a properly paced story.

He pondered the meaning of the universe and after twenty years he finally realized the answer. One sentence. I could write a whole book about that. Different pacing. The narrative voice is a powerful tool, one of the best. Telling instead of "showing" as they say, speeds up the narrative.

 

[Context5812]

My thoughts on pacing (that I should follow myself):

• Don't rehash stuff. If your story feels like a road runner cartoon, you're going in circles.
• Your descriptions should match the action. Don't drag on about a man's suit for a page and a half if he's falling out of a building
• If your character's actions aren't explained by the story - you're going too fast. A should cause B should cause C and so forth. There needs to be a causal chain of events. Ann can't fall in love with Bob after a cup of coffee.
• Don't have small talk in dialogue.
• Don't write about the mundane.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

My thoughts on pacing (that I should follow myself):

• Don't rehash stuff. If your story feels like a road runner cartoon, you're going in circles.
• Your descriptions should match the action. Don't drag on about a man's suit for a page and a half if he's falling out of a building

Well, maybe if that suit is blue, has an S on the chest, and a red cape... :D

• Don't have small talk in dialogue.

Some of the best character moments, both as a writer and a reader, come from moments of small talk - especially when they somehow tie back into the story at some point.

• Don't write about the mundane.

...unless writing Slice of Life stuff...

I really want to know what you think about pacing.

And I completely missed this last line: What I think about pacing? It's why we keep having to replace the carpets...

 

[Tempokai]

I don't know what I'm writing, so it's just a whole load of stream of consciousness dump here. Everyone gave rough what people think, so I'll think for myself.

Pacing is the way on how information is delivered over time. Sure, it's "the speed or tempo at which a story unfolds", but in communication sense, it's how the information is given to the recipient. There's a thing called cognitive load theory. One liner explanation of CLT is how the brain processes and retains information by managing the limitations of working memory, i.e. how Grug learns how wheel is made from Ug without forgetting about it minutes later in process. That cognitive load is divided into two, with 3rd one being thrown aside. I'll just copy and paste their definitions from somewhere right now:

Imagine you’re in the first class of the semester, excited to learn something new. But unfortunately, as soon as your professor begins lecturing, you question if this is a course you can bear for another twelve weeks—not due to your lack of passion for the material, but how the material is being presented. The slides are full of text, without color or images. Your professor is rambling about something in her personal life. And your classmate is on his iPad watching something that has absolutely nothing to do with the class.

This all-too-familiar situation illustrates just one way that cognitive load theory is apparent in educational settings. Cognitive load theory (CLT) suggests that there are three types of cognitive loads we process when engaged in learning something new:

1. Intrinsic cognitive load: How easy or difficult the content presented inherently is to learn, which stays relatively constant. In our example, this would be the material presented in the first lecture of your new course.
2. Extraneous cognitive load: How easy or difficult it is to learn the content considering the environment in which it is presented, which varies. In our example, this would be your teacher being off-topic, the text-heavy slides, and your classmate on his iPad.
3. Germane cognitive load: The mental resources required to fit the material into schemas, our cognitive frameworks for organizing and interpreting information. In our example, this would be how challenging it felt to sort and store the new knowledge from the lecture in your head, considering its unfocused presentation.

John Sweller, the educational psychologist who proposed CLT, originally suggested that the total cognitive load is the sum of intrinsic, extraneous, and germane loads when a learner is engaged in learning. He believed that the overarching goal of CLT is to lessen the amount of extraneous load by changing the way instructions are presented when learning occurs.

This excerpt above fits well into pacing problem I've been thinking of. Pacing is how present Character is given to the reader, with external/internal description being the vehicle that gives that information. It's based on how the author delivers the information for the reader in fun/engaging way. Break that by info dumps, uninteresting characters, boring actions, repetitive information, zero action, lack of coherency, and you can see where this going. It's because cognitive load become overloaded or underloaded for the reader to engage with. These two variables of cognitive load define how the descriptions you've wrote as an author affects the reader. There's no difference between a lesson and a story, because they are both are delivering an information that the reader knows and does not.

As I can see, storytelling is how the storyteller gives out information over time to the reader. Even if a reader is disengaged, you at least can think of that person thinking in "right now" when reading the text. That "right now" is shaped by the reader's CCC that lead to this moment. How the material is written means how the reader will engage with it. Therefore, if your writing doesn't find that informational balance, it leads to pacing being "fast" or "slow", from reader's perspective as you all pointed out. What makes pacing, pacing is is how you deliver what over time, filtered through how a reader receives and processes it. Or in other words, Pacing is the perceived rhythm of how narrative information is processed by the reader over time, determined by how that information interacts with their cognitive load.


Now, the question is, what makes the writer to completely miss the pacing problem, only finding out about it through the readers or editors? That's Germane cognitive load affecting the writer. Or, in other words, writer had constructed schema that is a story plot, and is executing the beats instinctively without thinking how that affects the reader mentally. Sure, writer know their story, unless they're pantser, but that's the topic I'll discuss later in this thinking dump. I'll borrow the definition from that article again:

Schemas: Cognitive frameworks that help organize and interpret information. Schemas are developed over time as individuals encounter and process related information, allowing for quicker and more efficient retrieval of knowledge when needed.

What is a story if not a cognitive framework that gives a structure to the information? That's how the story is formed inside of your writerly skull, and you just giving it (imperfect) structure while writing. You're essentially taking the information you want the reader to know, and sending it through the description to make CCC spin yet again. Therefore, the reason it's hard as a writer to pace the plot according to (reader's) context is that they're too absorbed in their internal story framework (schema) to write down that schema to the reader who doesn't know nothing about that story.

This explanation of pacing, therefore is the active version of known/unknown/subtext description. I'm putting the subtext into this because basic explanation of subtext can be "external description that forces the reader to infer internal, and vice versa, that primarily targets reader's Content". The way you show new unknown or known description increases the cognitive load, reader processing the load into CCC reduces it. The goal is to find the balance where you know where the reader's CCC state right now. People have the same brain instincts like you, but with some differences that doesn't affect the overall function the brain has, therefore you need to have reader's (which you have, because instincts) CCC, and find the pacing problem that way.

What good pacing is then, is how you well you translate your inner story (schema) into the words to process using those two loads above. Intrinsic cognitive load is your general plot overall, your authorial intent, your worldbuilding notes, and however many plot points you want the reader to know. Reader expects learn that over time, not in one giant chunk of text. That's extraneous cognitive load, how you deliver that through tone, style, perspective, narrator, characters, et cetera, the thing that the reader is interacting with right now. With that, you can see that intrinsic cognitive load is connected to the Context, and extraneous cognitive load is connected to the Content, to create the schema, or Germane cognitive load, which is Content.

So, now we know that pacing is information delivered over time, that reader experiences story in real time, it makes total sense that "fast" and "slow" pacing cycling exists, it's to make the reader to absorb the information presented, to be prepared to the next information. Some information is dense, requiring time to process, and therefore author needs to lighten the information load with additional description so he doesn't cause overload, that has light amount of information load. And in reverse, when information is light, the reader gets bored, so author needs to add information on which the reader can chew upon while nothing is seemingly is happening. That cycle is all about information flow control, and you don't need PhD to know that. You as a human, a storyteller already do that. Typical guides instinctively know that it's how brain processes things, but they apply heuristics towards their recommendations that only makes sense only in their context+schema (therefore failing at delivering a good advice lmao).

The reason the readers know that pacing isn't balanced because their brain fails to process information altogether / accepts the information but fails to make an internal story (schema) inside their head / accepts the information but find it so easy (aka tropey or incoherent mess not worth remembering or not worth their damn time) that it didn't engage their brain hard enough to make it matter. The advantage the readers have is that their brain is processing the story right now, not after the fact the story ended. This is why good stories don't have pacing issues, because bad pacing can be seen easily, good pacing is invisible. Just like you remember a good teacher, showing the information with fun examples fondly, you also remember bad teacher for being so monotonous that it makes half of a class fall asleep and fail their grades. Just like Grug knows where Ug went to far about telling about Father Sky while making a wheel, you as a reader know where the chapter stalled so much it made you bored.

So, I answered all three questions here, but I'll go deeper. I'll How being planner/plotter/pantser affects the pacing because it is directly correlated to how information is delivered and why stories fail pacing in such ways. I'll steal the definitions again from the internet:

Pantser: a writer that does not plot prior to writing but instead prefers to “fly by the seat of their pants.”
Plotter: a writer who plots every turning point and scene in their novel, sometimes to impressive detail.
Plantser: a writer who embraces a bit of advance planning, but not to extensive detail and instead “pantses” their way through the rest.

Pantser's stories are closely resemble reader's CCC, as in both don't know where they're going besides the synopsis in their head/on the page. “I’m discovering the story as I go,” they say, showing their authorial intent, and that's the problem in a long run for the pacing. Their Character is great, because they don't know what that character really is, like reader is. Taking CLT, this is the patter emerges: low intrinsic load + chaotic extraneous load = reader confusion. At the moment it feels great, because there's no plan, no map, just "follow the path through my intent!", their Context is unstable, and Content lacks order, that 100% will have different readers misinterpreting the authorial intent. I can say that it will lead to scenes that meander with no direction, irregular delivery of important info, emotional beats that lack setup, and of plot points introduced, then abandoned because intent is dispersed. They have a great extraneous CLT, but lack the ability to control Context without editorial or reader's intervention. The cognitive load is inconsistent, think like one minute you’re bored, the next you’re overloaded, and there’s no cohesion whatsoever. Chaos.

Plotter instead is deep in their inner Context, creating a perfect inner story for themselves, but not for a reader. They’re so deep in their own mental model that they assume the reader is instantly caught up. This leads to: worldbuilding dumps frontloaded creating unnecessary cognitive load, unrelenting plot beats with no processing time because there's too much information for the reader to understand, and characters as exposition puppets instead of humans because you need to know that tiny little thing the author was thinking for hours. They overload Context, fail to regulate extraneous delivery, and the reader short-circuits, severing the CCC connection between the author and the reader. Planners have the strongest internal schema (their germane load is complete), but they assume readers already have the same context. They mismanage reader onboarding to their schema on the text, thus wrecking pacing, because author thinks that readers are like them.

Plantser is in the middle of them, saying stuff like “I have a plan, but I want the characters to have agency”, maybe planning, maybe winging in some places, making the plot flexible, but often work in instincts. Their failure is roughly like that: moderate intrinsic, moderate extraneous, weak germane = lost potential. They know few parts of their inner story, but they don't have a refined way to deliver the story due to variables in their intent. Their intent is either weak, or undeveloped, because they know what they want, but don't know how to show it to the reader. In other words, their pacing is consistently inconsistent enough to have wildly different cognitive load failures. Plantsers often have good instincts but no systematic control of pacing. They’re constantly adjusting the CCC delivery without managing the reader’s CCC.

Those are the failures the archetypes commonly do. Some mitigate it using editors, beta readers, and whatnot, making the pacing at least palatable for the statistical majority. The best way to do the pacing is to find the balance in information dumping and information withholding, which is managed by CCC and CLT. Pacing is the way how both sides of CCC connect with each other. Or, in cavemen terms:

Ug tells story. Grug brain keep up. Grug happy. Story good.
Ug yell too much? Ug silent too much? Grug confused. Grug leave. Story bad.

Stories by themselves are emotional frameworks. You can make whatever you want, and only when the reader is entertained, thinking, and doesn't complain but asks questions related to story, you're golden because you're communicating with the reader across the language game that is a storytelling.