The biggest problem I have in writing is pacing the plot and doling out new information. I can figure out the sequence of events, get the conversations rolling, and pretty much everything else, though of course I still need to work on them all, but pacing eludes me for some reason. Does anyone have some good tips for pacing and how to give just enough info to keep someone interested, but not so much that they get overloaded or bogged down?
It will be based on genre you are writing. Each has it's own pacing. Horror is typically a crawl, where as an Adventure is up and down. Action is the middle ground, keeping a fairly even amount of highs and lows. Hope this helps a smidgen.
I know exactly how you feel, so I won't be able to give any advice, unfortunately. My current story revolves around a conspiracy/plot that has many different pieces, and the main character is trying to investigate. I know all of the pieces and key scenes but, just like you, I am struggling with figuring out how to pace the revelation of new information. Can't be too fast or too slow. And then I feel like I need to put in "filler" in between so nothing is rushed. It's an ongoing struggle.
I've never worried too much about pacing. Probably because I write without knowing where it's going or what might happen. I tend to bullet point ideas plot lines and vaguely aim towards them, but mostly let the story go where it wants. So it kind of keeps pace by itself! Maybe if you write without knowing the exact details, you will revel the necessities at the points that automatically pace well? Either way, good luck with your writing! Rgds
In my opinion, you have articulated one of the most perplexing problems about writing. And you're keeping a clear focus on what the impact of pacing will be on your reader. That's heartening to hear. It's hard to know in advance, but I personally don't like being 'teased' as I read. When I know there's a piece of information missing, and the writer is deliberately withholding it, I can get quite irritated. There had better be a good reason, is my way of thinking. You can consider what the other characters are doing, however, and whether new information will influence their behaviour or not. There might be a plot reason why, for instance, one character keeps information from other characters, etc. If a character is keeping information back, I don't get annoyed. I do get annoyed if the omnipotent writer keeps the information back, though ...hinting all the time, but not spitting it out. Yes, I have found myself skimming ahead to find out what the hints are all about. Maybe see if your surprises can surprise other characters, as well as the reader. That's the option I chose with my own novel, which carries a fairly large surprise that isn't revealed till nearly halfway through. However, the character who 'knows' has to feel safe enough to reveal his backstory before he can bring himself to do so. When he finds the right person to tell, he tells them. While we, the readers, already know part of that backstory (thanks to the Prologue) we don't know all of it, and the main revelation comes as a bit of a surprise to us as well as the character he's talking to. I think it works in this instance, although it was tricky as all get-out to set it up. Good luck with yours. I'd say, in general, don't tease the reader. If there is something they should know but don't yet, just drop it on them at the right moment, and they'll be surprised, but not annoyed. I hope.
You mean don't end a chapter with a cliffhanger? Say, ChapterIII ends with: Finally reaching the top of the mountain, Sisyphus stopped and gasped in surprise. Chapter IV begins with: Meantime, at the Baccus party.... And the reader has to spend another sleepless night tossing and turning before they get to Chapter V, which will finally present them with an answer to what the guy from ChapterIII saw? A lot of writers do this tease *shrugs* It makes you read through the boring stuff in hopes to find the how the cliffhanger got resolved. New information should be just enough. There is no quantifiable measure to it. It depends on how much you want your reader to know at this point. In the above example it's perfectly legit to begin ChapterIV by telling the reader what exactly was that surprising thing that Sisyphus saw on top of the mountain. Then move the Baccus party to Chapter V. But then maybe the reader will be completely out of patience and will see the Baccus party as totally irrelevant, and skip the chapter entirely. But then again, they could also skip the Baccus party in the first version (when it was ChapterIV) and go directly to the place answering the burning question of what Sisyphus saw. If you don't need any filler chapters (let's face it, the Baccus party was not relevant to the main plot) then you can tell us what Sisyphus saw straightaway, then show us what happened next, then what happened after that. That will mean you'll need to have more events to fill up your book
I didn't exactly mean cliffhangers, although I'm not fond of them. I like a chapter to come to a conclusion, except in unusual cases. I meant more the 'if he only knew what was in store' kind of thing. Or 'she opened her purse and took out an object.' That kind of 'tease.' The author is letting us know that he or she knows what these events or objects are, but is playing coy for now. I find that irritating.
You know what this is all making me think of? The storyclock notebook. It was a kickstarter for screenplay writers and novelists to help with the timing and spacing of events in a storyline. I actually have a copy somewhere, mayhaps I should use it. [I know its just a fancy version of an outline but its still neat.] The other thought that comes to mind, is the pacing I prefer in the books I read is usually much slower than others appreciate. I tend to catch myself somewhere between the pace I like (overly meandering with world detail) and rushing to compensate.
I think the trick with pacing is to write a good chunk at once. Stopping and starting to often can leave your prose feeling jerky of uneven. I find it easier to control the story and implement the pace I want if I write a lot at once. Writing less than 1k words at a time can be pointless for some people struggling with pace. It certainly won't help. Also, I'm not a big fan of withholding information from the reader to create some sense of intrigue. I think you can actually lose readers be doing that if it's poorly executed. You don't have to give readers everything at once, but you want them to feel grounded in your story rather than giving them too much guess work.
The whole "withholding information" issue really depends on the nature of the story, I think. For example, if a story is written in first person perspective, the reader will only know what the MC discovers, as they discover it. I can see how that would be an issue in omnipotent types of stories, though. I'm probably the odd one here because I don't mind info being held back by a writer until it can make the most impact. I like intrigue.
New information needs to appear in every chapter. Or, as the popular writing advice goes, every event, or a bit of dialogue etc should advance the story. Every event or dialogue should add a new piece of information. It doesn't matter from whose perspective it is told, first or third person, or omni or whatever. There are plenty of detective stories out there where the story is just as suspenseful in first person as it is when done in third and told from several viewpoints. The pace is not affected by the narrator.
Great question. Great discussion. Writers who do this well hold my interest, for sure. My two cents: It’s not “just” plot and pacing, it’s fascinating and relatively unpredictable and compelling characters that hold a reader’s interest. A couple recent examples that I’ve read: In Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone, the reader is thrust into life in the wilderness with a man that could erupt into violence (and sometimes does) at any minute—so the suspense is ongoing (even when he is not in a scene I found myself anxious that he might show up). In David Joy’s The Weight of The World, one of the primary characters is so unpredictable, that whenever he is present on a page, the reader feels tension. I would say that if you get these elements “right,” dropping your plot information at just the right time is perhaps a bit less crucial. (Although agree all these elements together elevates books to “must read.”)
It's a good thing to remember, to always advance the story. However, this isn't always done with 'new information.' Sometimes it's watching how characters process the information they've already got ...or watching one character react to information that's new to them but that the reader already has. (Think soap opera ...the audience knows the baby isn't his, but HE doesn't....) So all these things come into play as well.
Exactly. Kinda miffed that people are making the wrong assumptions about my comment. New information of ANY sort DOES happen in each chapter of my current story, which is first person. And, @deadrats , you seem to have taken that too literally. It only works with present-tense, then? Also, what I meant by my post was that, in first person, I can't jump over to the POV of characters who are the first to learn about new information, especially if they are characters that the MC doesn't encounter often. Think about real life: Others may know about something important that's going on, in their own world, but that doesn't mean that I'm aware of what's going on. I will find out once the information reaches me, whether it's by watching the news or having someone tell me in person about what happened. That was the whole point of my post.
I don’t agree. The tense is essentially a mechanical choice—the narrator can still tell the story in the order that they discovered it.
I was saying that in first person past tense the narrator already knows what happens. They are not learning things along with the reader. This is where you can have an unreliable narrator.. or not. And of course you can tell the story in order or however you want, but choosing when to tell something and when to hold off, in past tense the narrator does already know what happened.
Again, past tense is a mechanical choice—it doesn’t determine how far “past”. If I come back from the counter and say, “I ordered some more fries,” that’s past tense, but it doesn’t mean that I know that the aliens are about to come through the ceiling. If a past tense story starts with “Let me tell you what happened when I was young...” then, yes, the narrator can be assumed to know the end of the story when the start telling the beginning. But that doesn’t require them to foreshadow—they can still tell the story in order, in just the same way. If Luke Skywalker were telling his story and he got to, “And I heard this weird breathing sound...” his failure to add, “By the way, it’s going to turn out to be my father. My FATHER, got it?” doesn’t make him an unreliable narrator.
I'll I'm saying is that in present tense the reader is in the same boat as the narrator. We are getting a real-time, live account of the events as they unfold. That's how first person present tense is presented and unfolds. In past tense, things happened. The narrator is at least a few steps ahead of the reader. That's how past tense unfolds. You can still choose to withhold information and set up the story however you want, but I see them taking different approaches when it comes to storytelling and deciding to withhold information from the reader or not.
And I see it as a purely grammatical choice. Someone speaking of events that are already finished, even up to and including foreshadowing, can use the present tense, . (“So I’m walking to work, see, and this guy comes around the corner—hang on, this is the good part—he comes around the corner, and there’s a parrot on the shoulder...”) Someone speaking of events that aren’t finished can use past tense. (“OK, I turned the key—no, it didn’t start. Yes, I had my foot on the clutch. No, I—yes, a car drove by, but it wasn’t the tow truck.”) It’s a grammatical choice—it doesn’t prescribe anything about the story. In first person past tense stories, the reader can absolutely be in the same boat as the narrator, and vet often is. In first person present tense, we can be looking back from a point far in the future. Rumer Godden’s China Court uses past tense for story present, and present tense for story past. It works.
Yes, good point. The first person narrator is choosing what to tell the reader AS A CHARACTER. They are not the voice of the writer. They are speaking as themselves. We might not necessarily believe, or buy into, whatever a first person narrator is telling us (because we know they might be lying, mistaken, or holding something back.) I do think we ordinarily trust a third person narration, however. The author may give us ONLY that person's point of view, but we assume it's an honest one, in that the character isn't lying to the author. We assume the writer is honest and knows the scoop, even if the character is lying to everybody else. It's kind of hard to explain, but you don't really find 'unreliable' third person characters, do you? Unreliable in the same sense as 'unreliable narrator.' You tend to take a third person character at face value. If they are lying like a rug, you know it.
You always say things so clearly and make sense of everything. I think the thing is that a third person narrator doesn't have a stake in the story. Whereas the first person narrator is telling you something, whether it makes them look good or bad or is truthful or not, we have to learn as the story goes on just like if we were listening to a person tell a story. The narrator, the person telling the story has a stake in the story and could even feel as though they have a stake in how it is told. It's an interesting POV to play with. And also how distant or close the person is to the events, we as readers or listeners of someone telling a story, we can assume most of the time a conclusion has been reached before the story even begins. First person present tense is a play-by-play of what's going on. It's live so-to-speak. The first person present tense narrator hasn't had time to become a deceptive narrator. They can be a deceptive character, but unless this character is just lying to himself all the time, it would be pretty hard to successfully pull off a first-person, present-tense, unreliable narrator. Am I really wrong here? First person present tense a more trusted narrator similar to third. And if we're talking about a narrator withholding information, I'm not sure why a first person present tense narrator would. They don't know how they want to frame the story because it hasn't all happened yet. That's how I approach these things as a reader. I'm not talking about the actually writing style or anything. I am talking about the reliability of the narrator.
