21.26: Setting the Pace

Three umbrellas of narrative pace

0:00This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. Season 21, Episode 26.

0:19This is Writing Excuses, Setting the Pace. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard. And I get to set the pace. For this episode, I am sitting in the driver's seat of the pace car with my foot on the virtual gas, or maybe the virtual brake. And I'd like to talk about how we find those pebbles in our fiction.

0:51How do you make the pace car go faster? How do you make it go slower? How do you swerve it out of the way so that they can have a race? The metaphor may have fallen apart at this point. But where's the gas? Where's the brake? I find there are so many different tools that you can use to control the pace. Like, a lot of what we've been talking about already through the season are just secretly different ways of controlling pace. And I want to go ahead and say right up front that fast does not equal good, slow does not equal bad.

1:24But the three kind of big umbrellas, and then we can, if anyone wants to drill into them deeper, the three sort of big umbrella areas that I use when I'm controlling pace are the cadence, like fast versus slow scenes, transitions, how I move from one thing to another, and then tone. That makes sense to me. I mean, I would not want to put holes in any of those umbrellas. Amazing. Because then they won't function as well. But I'm curious when you're talking about cadence, like, it's interesting.

1:58Cadence is such a word to me that's speech associated. Yeah. You know, how fast you speak. I have the fast cadence of somebody who grew up in New York City. Other people have slower cadences. And some of that has to do with where you're from, how your family speaks. But a story's cadence is determined by the writer. And so I'm wondering, like, what kind of tools are you using in sort of creating that cadence? I'm glad that you said that you think of cadence in terms of speech, because I always go back to the fact that writing developed to convey the spoken language.

2:30Like, the whole idea of storytelling began when people were just telling stories. So for me, it's the same things that I use when I am trying to control dialogue on a page. But you can do it on a macro scale. There's, like, the length, the length of a sentence, the length of a scene, the length of a paragraph, the length of a chapter.

2:52Punctuation. Punctuation or white space, that exists to control breath and pauses. So it's how long you talk, how long you pause, and then the contrast between things.

Dialogue and information speed

3:07I love the statement that, you know, writing developed to convey, you know, spoken language. Um, because one of the things that is, uh, really useful for controlling pace, um, uh, and, and then within it, there are lots of pacing elements, is dialogue. Mm-hmm. Um, if you have, if you want, if you want it to sound like people are interrupting one another as they speak,

3:41they are stepping on the ends of each other's sentences as they talk, um, there's the, there's the double dash that commonly gets used in, in comics. I don't know what they use in, in prose. M dash. Yeah, M dash, uh, where you, uh, instead of a, a period or a question mark, you get interrupted with an M dash, and then the next line of dialogue begins. Um, and that, I mean, yes, that creates that pace. But if you throw in a said bookism, you know, that so-and-so interrupted,

4:15then you've dragged the pace back because you added words for me to read. And, and so, in order to use that tool effectively, you have to have established ahead of time for the reader the voice of each of the characters so that it is very clear who is talking without you having to drop those cues because you want the conversation to go fast. You have to leave those bits out. Well, then part of what happens there also is that when you're doing that,

4:46you're leaving more white space on the page. So, the reader is literally reading less. And that's one of the things that you can control that if the reader is, I mean, they are literally spending more time reading words, it can often slow things down. Like, if you want to do a slow-mo moment in, in a, uh, in a, in a book, you can describe, like, the way the bead of water dripped down the side of the glass,

5:17each pebbled indentation in the glass catching the, and it's like, oh my God. But, but you can slow it down that way and you're just literally spending more words on it. What I think is really interesting is that can work both ways. Yes. So, if somebody is freaking out, like, about something, they will speak quickly in long run-on sentences. But the thing that you're talking about, which is also more words on the page, feels slow. And I actually think a lot of it is about the speed in which new informational beats

5:49hit the reader within that. So, you talked about the bead of water, but everything else you're saying is, like, more about the bead, more about the water. And so, it feels slow because it's long, but it's all one thing. Yes. Whereas somebody who is having, like, a panic attack or really excited about something will skip from topic to topic very rapidly in that long period of things, which then feels like information is hitting you faster. And so, therefore, it is a faster-paced moment for you.

6:19Yeah. I am so glad you brought this up because this is one of the things I always think about Flounder in Little Mermaid. There's this moment in the movie where he's like, so, there was a shark and then he chased us and we went into a hole and we came back out and it was, and then we were safe. Whew. And there are, there's no punctuation in that. So, like, it is, you can do that on the page. Like, I think that it's such a good observation about the, about the jumping from topic to topic as, as moving you through things faster, which, again, if you go to a macro scale,

6:54also happens if you do a montage, like the training sequence. You know, you hit a bunch of different things, but each one is just, like, five sentences long and then you go into the next one. It's almost, it reminds me of driving. Now, I don't drive, but I love driving. So, it reminds me of this thing that I don't actually do, but I've heard a lot about. But I'm often in the car while other people are doing it very successfully and I have time to look at the scenery around me because I don't have to look at the road.

7:25And I think a lot of times if you are in, like, a, you know, not exciting scenery place, you know, where everything is, like, flat, there are, like, those places in the U.S. where it's, like, flat and no crops are grown and there's no interesting geological features and you're just going and you're, like, in desert land. I drove through those from Utah to Los Angeles. And it's, like, there's no change. And I think that's what the difference is. Whereas if you are driving that same distance, but you're in a city and there's, like,

8:00thousands of different buildings and there's billboards and there's a mountain and there's a valley, all that stuff makes it feel like you're getting somewhere faster, even though you are not, because there's so much to distract you and to bring you along. And I think this is also what happens when you put too much information into something. We're going to talk about exposition next week, but I do want to flag that I think there is a limit to how much new information a reader can take in. And if you try to cram too much of it into a moment that it feels rushed, even if nothing

8:34is actually happening in the scene, you can lose the reader because they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I don't have enough time to take everything in. This makes me think of the montage. I'm so sorry. And then I'll be done. This makes me think of the montage, which is a montage is a way of taking a lot of information and creating a boundary around it, like driving through Vegas and seeing casino after casino after casino. After a while, it just becomes the casino part of Vegas, as opposed to you noticing necessarily each one except for maybe one that stands out.

9:07And so I think that in order to not make it feel like it's overwhelming, the montage tells us we're going to get a lot of rapid things, but it all is going to take place in one really cool box that you, the only thing you have to pay attention to is that box. So there's this experience that I had numerous times back in the days when I commuted, which is that I would start my drive and arrive at work and realize that I didn't remember the drive. The drive was about 15 minutes long.

9:39And at first, you know, I was very afraid. Did I fall asleep? Was I not paying attention? What happened? And I developed a pet theory, which may or may not be supported by actual neuroscience, which is that short-term memory has to get committed at some point to long-term memory for us to remember things. And there are anesthesias that will prevent that from happening. You communicate just fine, but you have no long-term memory of the conversation. And the pet theory is this. If my short-term memory is being filled up with things that I've seen a thousand times

10:15before, and short-term memory compares to long-term memories as this same stretch freeway as it was yesterday, nothing interesting has happened. There were no threats. We don't actually need to remember the details. We just need to know what we got there. And it doesn't get committed. And then I arrive. And the point here is that for readers with the pacing, sometimes we don't want to commit things to the long-term memory. We just want to get them there.

10:47You will be happy to know that your theory is actually backed up by science. They have studied this. Yay! And basically what happens is that we will put similar things into the same box. So if you've done this thing, your memory will be like, oh, I know this. This gets filed here with all of the other drives. Which is why when you're writing, that if everything is fast or everything is slow, that the pace is going to feel off.

11:17It's going to feel rushed as opposed to I'm excited. You know, when you're in the failure mode of one of those.

Applying structural contrast

11:25And that's also why having contrast is so important. And one of the contrasts that we personally can do is a break. I love fried chicken, and I thought I was pretty good at making it, but sometimes it just didn't come out right. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. The solution was a thermometer. It sounds obvious, I know, but starting the frying at the correct temperature is not the secret. The secret is understanding how the oil changes temperature when the chicken goes into it and how long it takes to come back up.

11:57More chicken, the more shocked the oil is, and the longer it'll take to reheat. And you can't really see that without a thermometer. And even then, you can't really use the thermometer's numbers until you know what they mean. Thomas Keller explained all that to me in Cooking Techniques 2, Meats, Stocks, and Sauces, Episode 5, exclusively available on Masterclass. There were a dozen different things in there I didn't know but needed to, but the big one was what the numbers mean and why they're so important to the home chef.

12:28See, in a commercial kitchen, the massive fryer pots don't get shocked much, and there are fancy computer controls keeping the oil in the right temperature range. At home, well, you have to ride your little fryer with a steady hand and a weather eye on the thermometer. That class elevated my fried chicken game. I learned something simple and obvious that I just hadn't been able to figure out on my own. That's what Masterclass is best at. Delivering the information you didn't think you needed, but whose absence has been holding you back. There are over 200 classes across 13 major categories, and you can fit them into just

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13:34Head to masterclass.com slash excuses to see the latest offer. Mileage may vary, but in my home, Masterclass has paid for itself in homemade fried chicken alone. I'm going to be a horrible person right now and refuse to contrast because I'm so excited by something that Howard said before the break that I'm just going to drag us back there. I love this. Which is that I've always thought of that thing where you like something feels like it took a lot of time when it was happening, but then it snaps into one small memory as rubber

14:08banding. And I thought about this when I trained for a marathon. And for context, I'm extraordinarily slow. And so like I would go on these four hour runs and it's like, actually they were, I guess, different every time, but I don't really enjoy running. I was just doing it because it was on my bucket list. So I'd just be like, man, I'm running. And then during the run, I would have lots of really small micro thoughts that were interesting and kept me upright. But as soon as I got back home, I was like, oh, I did that thing and I just put it all

14:38in the box unless to contrast with my normal runs, something particularly interesting happened that caught my eye, something that stopped me from doing the thing that I would always be doing. And so I wonder if kind of thinking about our structure and something you said earlier, Howard, we kind of establish this like cadence, this, this feeling, like you said with dialogue of what the thing is normally so that when we have that moment of contrast, it actually does stick out because we established this is the pace, this is the pace.

15:12Ah, this is different. One of the most commonly deployed pacing mechanisms, applications of pacing is when the things that are taking place are happening across a very short period of time, but we are describing them in great detail, which mirrors a thing that I've seen happen in my own brain, which is that I had an experience which couldn't have lasted more than 10 seconds.

15:44Uh, but the description of it takes five minutes and it was an icy road thing where I discovered that the car in front of me had the brake lights on, but it was accelerating away. And I realized, oh, there's black ice on the hill. And I looked down at the bottom of the hill and think, well, I, I, I, I'm going to have to find a way to go around this person, uh, because they're in trouble. And, but there's cars that are turning on either side of the road down, no, wait, they're not turning.

16:15There's piles of cars down there with hazard lights on. And, oh no, there are like three traffic accidents at the bottom of this hill. I need to make a decision. And the decision I made was I'm going to drive on the wrong side of the road. And I slide over to the wrong side of the road and realize, um, wow, there's not even any traction over here. And the road bends a little bit. Um, that driveway, I bet doesn't have black ice on it and the yard doesn't have black ice on it. And so I'm going to drive through this person's yard while oncoming traffic passes me.

16:50And then I'm going to cut back onto the road. And the whole thing worked. This was on my commute one, one morning in Utah. The whole thing worked. I've driven past that location countless times and looked at it and I cannot understand how I had time to think all of those things in time to do any of those things. But I know that it happened. And as a fiction tool, the ability to take a fight scene and to, to compress, to take the

17:26compressed time of a fight and to taffy it out into a description and make it believable that everybody's actually reacting and thinking in this way. It, it is, I've had similar things where I come out of an accident and it's just a series of snapshots. Um, or when something goes wrong backstage, my partner, tour partner and I will have entire long paragraphs of conversation that are basically in real time, us looking at each other and

18:00going, yeah, okay. And, and, and then we both know what to do. And, and I think that one of the things that is happening there is, you know, as you say, it's, it's unusual, it's different, but that takes me back to this, um, this tool of contrast. So when I was an art major, my, my teacher told me that if I wanted to make something brighter on the canvas, that I needed to make the area immediately around it darker. And that I think it works in text too.

18:32You know, you, you see varying versions of it, um, when, when things go terribly wrong on the page, then it's, you know, or, or you're watching a film and it's like, oh, they're all laughing right now. And it's a horror movie. Well, we've got a jump scare coming up. Sometimes it's predictable, but it doesn't mean that everything has to contrast. Like the way I think about it is that when I'm, when I'm writing, there's a high contrast and then there's low contrast. So low contrast is where I want to group similar scenes to do what, uh, Edgar Allen Poe calls

19:08like unity of effect. You know, if you want to create a creeping sense of dread, then things just, you just keep piling that on. But then you also have high contrast scenes, which is like having a, having a fast scene in a slow scene next to each other or having a happy moment and a sad moment next to each other, sometimes in the same scene, sometimes butting up against each other. And that contrast causes, causes you to experience time differently than, than when you have low contrast, both I think are useful. It's just kind of where you want to, where you want to push the audience.

19:42I really like when you can find that contrast also between like the, I don't know why I'm always wanting a difference between what the reader's experiencing and what characters are experiencing. But when characters are in one emotional moment and the reader is in another, uh, so for example, if the reader knows that, uh, one love interest like was unfaithful to the other, but they're having this like amazing moment of like coming together or actually there's a, uh, the musical the last five years, which is about, uh, or I think it's called the last five years, which

20:15is about a couple basically going from loving each other to the divorce and they go separately in time. So you start when one person is happy and the other person is sad and you end with the woman singing this amazing song about like, I'm so excited. I met this guy, he's the best and we're going to be happy forever. And he's singing the song that where he's leaving her, which will immediately lead into her like for, you know, first song that we experienced at the very beginning.

20:45And I think it's one of the most like beautiful and tragic things because you get that contrast at the very beginning. Cause it's always happening in the show. But by the last moment, you fully understand why she is so wrong to be so happy in this moment. And that knowledge as the person watching makes it feel like the fast pace of her thing is like, also feels like the creeping dread of the rest of the show.

21:14Probably the most powerful application of contrast, uh, a pacing contrast in what I've read was the three shakes chapter in Tom Clancy's, some of all fears. We end the chapter previous with a nuclear weapon has just been set off at a football stadium. It's a huge disaster. Okay. And there's a lot of tension building up to this. And, uh, and as the reader, you're like, Oh my gosh, a thing it's wow.

21:48What's going to happen. And then the three shakes chapter is all about physics and it describes at a minute level, uh, you know, what happens the first wave of neutrinos, the first wave of high energy neutrons, the first wave of electrons, the fact that these electrons, uh, that there are TV satellite antennas, uh, aimed at the stadium, you know, where the, cause the TV truck,

22:19and those were like one of the first things that gets hit by these antennas, causing a, an information blackout over the stadium and all of these details. And as I'm reading it, I'm fascinated. I don't know how long the chapter is. I think it's only like three or four pages. Um, but it totally puts the brakes on. We just set off a nuke and the aftermath of that doesn't happen until after I've gotten three pages of, of physics level aftermath, describing the consequences that are going

22:58to unfold when the next chapter begins. You have just reminded me that, um, two days from now, um, as in two days from when you all are listening to this, as opposed to two days from when we are recording it, uh, a new book by Hildur Knut's daughter is coming out, which I translated, and it has one of the best examples of this that I have ever seen. Ooh. Um, it's called Deadweight. And I can tell you about this without doing any spoilers.

23:30Um, but a really horrific thing happens and she slows down and gives you every like deep description of the really horrific thing. And then there are also places in that same scene where time for the protagonist moves so fast that she doesn't actually realize that she has moved or not moved because, because everything it's, it's, it's really upsetting and she takes her time.

24:03She does this beautiful thing. And then the next chapter, the entirety of the chapter is I made the tea. And it is this, this, the contrast of this complete mundane experience with everything that happened right before it, you know, there, there's so much white space around that moment. There's so much stillness that you, you were like, oh yeah, that is what shock feels like. You can only concentrate on this one thing directly in front of you.

24:36And it was like experiencing it as the translator and hitting that moment for the first time. It was like, oh, and then I have been desperate for people to read it. So I'm so excited that all of you can. So the book is called Deadweight. Deadweight by Hildur Knut's daughter. I just went, I was like, as we were recording, I was like, hang on. I think this book is about to come out. Yes.

Pacing homework and wrap up

25:00Outstanding.

Pacing homework and wrap up

25:01Well, really the next big subject here with regard to pacing is the tool of exposition. And that is such a big tool. We're just going to put it in its own episode. So I think it's homework time. Here's your homework. Take a, take a scene, take a, an event and write it in two ways. Write it so that it is paced, so that the reading of the event takes about as long as you imagine the event itself taking.

25:41And now write it so that the pace is, the amount of time it takes to read it is like 20 times what the event took. Like, like someone was seeing photons moving in slow motion. Write it, write it in both ways and, and have that experience for yourself because it'll be fun. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

26:12Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.