Trouble at Mermaid Bay, Episode 7: The Nautilus

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 9: Trouble at Mermaid Bay

Episode 7: The Nautilus

Trouble at Mermaid Bay, Episode 6: The Shark

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 9: Trouble at Mermaid Bay

Episode 6: The Shark

Trouble at Mermaid Bay, Episode 5: The Jellyfish

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 9: Trouble at Mermaid Bay

Episode 5: The Jellyfish

Trouble at Mermaid Bay, Episode 4: The Octopus

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 9: Trouble at Mermaid Bay

Episode 4: The Octopus

Starting and Stopping is Killing my Pacing

 

On my last revision of my novel, I was working through a lot of pacing issues.  Parts were accused of being slow, and I argued, "It can't be slow!  It's a fight scene!  It's exciting!" and "It can't be slow!  It's witty banter!  They're cute!"  But no, I was wrong, and it was slow.

In the past, when my critique group noted that a section felt slow, I would trim.  I would trim down interiority, and I would cut words and cut clauses and just generally shave down sections until the word count was lower.  After all, writing advice givers always talk about using strong verbs and cutting adverbs and filler words.  Surely I needed to scrape all that off to make the section more streamlined.

But then when I would send my critique group the section again, they would comment on how it was missing some of its charm.  I felt the same way, but when they said it I would get defensive.  They asked me to do this horrible thing!  They can't have it both ways!

But I realized on this set of revisions that that's not the issue.  To try to make the scene read faster, I was stripping out the voice, and the voice actually did work to propel the reader through.  The voice-y-ness, with all the words that people who give advice about writing hate, was not the problem.  I had not improved the pacing.  I had only made it slow and soulless.

So what was the problem?

The problem was stopping and starting.

So in this novel, there's a lot of sparring with a martial art that I made up from a meshing of other martial arts.  In a section towards the beginning, the main character is sparring with a bunch of people one after another.  He fights with one partner, notes a problem in their technique and fixes it.  He fights with the next partner and does something cool.  Through this we learn that he's great at this martial art and also a great leader and teacher.

And everyone said it was slow.  I didn't want to believe that because there's lyrical language all throughout this that should propel a reader forward, and we're learning about our main character, so the scene is doing two things: both character building and world building and with the final partner it forwards the plot.  Also it's cool!  Swords are cool!  Are you not entertained?!

The thing was that he would spar.  And then he would spar again.

Even though he executes a seamless transition from one partner to the next, any tension that has built during the first spar is cut with the next partner.  The tension has to build again.

The same with the sections of dialogue that felt slow.  I wanted to fit, say, four pieces of information into this conversation.  They are cute and flirty with each other and the first piece of information was presented to the reader.  And then the conversation would lull.  And then it would build again to get to the second piece of information.  It was one long conversation, and yet it felt as if it started and stopped.

That conversation needed to build throughout.  Instead of having the conversation around each bullet point resolve (which cuts tension), one piece of information needed to lead to the next.  This reminds me of that piece of advice that when you tell your story you should always use transitions like "because" or "so" rather than "and."  I always took this advice to be on the scene level.  For example, Luke Skywalker's family dies, so he has nothing holding him back from going on an adventure.  But I think it could also be used on a much smaller scale.  "So" acts to increase tension and push the reader along, whereas "and" is another thing for the reader to keep track of and separates them from the tension that was just happening.

Once I noticed this, I started finding it in my friends' writing too.  They'll have two scenes that do similar things.  The scenes "need" to be two scenes because otherwise the timeline of the story gets messed up.  But really the second one feels slow because the scene started and then stopped and then started again.  Or my friends will have a conversation that goes on a bit too long, and then I'll notice that actually they ended a conversation and started a second one.