There are a lot of components to pacing in your novel. You can think of it as:
The big picture, how fast and slow your whole novel goes. How scenes link together.
The scene, how fast and slow the individual scene moves
The page, how sentences and white space and even punctuation influence how quickly or slowly the reader moves through the story. This is the pacing of each line.
It’s linked to your novel’s structure in those individual scenes and how those scenes cycle through your story (some more active and others not so much). It’s also linked to your style and tone (your sentence length, word use, paragraph length). It also is linked to genre expectations.
When we settle in to Outlander or Game of Thrones, we’re expecting a slower pace than if we’re opening up a Tess Gerritsen novel.
So, it’s a lot, right?
It’s up to us writers to know the expectations (potentially even subverting them) and then slowing the speed up or down.
Typically, the story is the fastest paced at these moments:
1. In the opening
2. In the middle
3. In the climax.
The story tends to go faster when:
1. There’s action happening. So, an action scene. Most authors try to avoid long sentences full of clauses and detailed description and transitions here.
2. Dialogue without a lot of setting details, transitions or other things involved.
3. When there’s a cliff hanger. That’s basically just when the reader is compelled to turn the page to find out what happens next in the story.
4. Scene changes.
5. Scene changes in rapid succession.
6. Shorter chapters.
7. Shorter scenes.
8. Your words are simple and concrete and your sentences are short.
9. Your words are harsh. What do I mean here. Just when they have hard sounds. Like Gs and Cs and Ks.
The story tends to go more slowly when:
1. There’s no action happening. So exposition or setting or a pondering scene.
2. There are a lot of setting details, internal monologue (in paragraph form), backstory and exposition.
3. Longer chapters.
4. Longer scenes.
5. Your words are complex and abstract and your sentences are long and full of colons or semicolons and clauses.
6. Your words are softer. There aren’t those hard consonants and they make you think of more mellow things, so passive language.
Wow. I went very list-focused for this post. I hope you don’t mind. If you ever want me to explain anything more (in this post or any other), just let me know in the comments, okay?
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Sadly, I do not. For instance today I wrote that Acadia National Park has a million visitors. It has four million. Did I know this? Yes. Did I write it? No.
Did someone tell me immediately?
Yep.
Thanks to that person for letting me fix my mistake.
The thing is I am really human and that means I try to juggle a lot of things and sometimes I make errors. I try to tell myself that this is okay. That in a billion years (or 100) nobody will remember me or my errors. Usually that works. But not today.
But all of this just means:
1. I don’t trust myself today.
2. You get to read curated advice from cooler people instead. That’s a win!
Here, this first is from MasterClass. It’s kind of beautiful and pretty concise like art that you get off Ballard Designs.
3 Tips for Creating Mood for Your Story via MasterClass (these three tips are all a direct quote):
“Use a holistic approach to mood. Since mood is made up of a combination of setting, tone, word choice, and theme, it’s important that you as a writer think about all four while you work. If you try to use only one of these tools, you’re severely limiting your ability to create a believable and pervasive mood for your story. A good rule of thumb is to shoot for at least three of these tools to establish your mood.
“Brainstorm mood words. If you’re drawing a blank when it comes to how to create a particular mood, it can help to brainstorm a list of mood words. For instance, if you know you want your story to have a creepy mood, then try making a list of different words that feel creepy to you, like these: gloomy, creak, tiptoe, moonlight, skittering, shadow, rattling. Once you’ve got a good list, pick a few of your favorites and include them in the scene.
“Subvert expectations. While it’s easy to go with the “expected” mood for your stories (for instance, that a story about a wedding will have a lighthearted, celebratory mood), remember that it’s not always the best choice. When you push yourself to subvert readers’ expectations, you can come up with creative and exciting combinations—for example, a wedding story with a foreboding mood, or a ghost story with a funny mood. Innovating with mood can help you create memorable, lasting writing.”
Let’s dive a tiny bit deeper into that first tip. Do I trust myself enough for that? Um, not really. Here goes anyway.
Setting is where the story is located or “set.” Set = setting, so clever a language English is.
Tone isn’t about the reader. Mood is. Tone is about the narrator and the attitude they are putting down about the events.
Word choice is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the words that you the author put on the page. Short words can make things staccato. Long words can make things mellifluous. Swear words can make things tense, emphatic or even humorous.
Theme. That’s what the story is about and what it’s trying to convey. A story that true love exists and that it will save the world and all the cavorting hamsters within it? That’s going to be part of the mood and atmosphere of the story.
So, when MasterClass is talking about how these elements work (in tip #1), the MasterClass staff authors of that blog post is just saying to weave it all together and make it create that atmosphere.
There’s a demon that infiltrates a lot of our fiction and memoirs and that demon has a name. Learn about White Room Syndrome with us on this week’s episode of Write Better Now!
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
So, white rooms are all the rage right now in 2020 thanks to the Swedish Cozy Minimalist design movement, but what might be perfect in your actual house isn’t anywhere near perfect for your story.
You want to avoid white room syndrome at all costs.
So what is this again? This white room syndrome?
According to inventingrealityeditingservice.com:
Rather than fully imagine such a world, some writers instead create a quick, unformed facsimile of their own. For example, they start the story with the line, “She awoke in a white room.” The white room is the white piece of paper facing the author. This is known as white room syndrome, a term coined a few year ago at the Turkey City Workshop in Austin (a group that has included authors William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker and Walter Jon Williams).
They officially define white room syndrome as “an authorial imagination inadequate to the situation at end, most common at the beginning of a story.” In short, because the world wasn’t fully imagined, it can’t support the story that unfolds from it.
Or as Lauren Mullen says:
The scene is coming together just as planned. Your dialogue is snappy, witty, and poignant. The action is electric, carrying your characters from one spot to the next. You can see it all unfolding to you as if it were happening on a screen…but the setting details are absent. As a result, all your character’s amazing dialogue and action happen in a blank space.
But what I really like that she says is here:
Think of when you go over to someone’s house for the first time, how they decorate and treat their home says a lot about them. Are they the type of person who cleans up when expecting guests or not? Do they keep a lot of books? Collect art? Fan memorabilia? Are there any pets? What are they? A dog owner says something different about a person than a hamster owner. You learn a lot about a person by how they decorate and treat their home, likewise this is why description and setting are so vital to good storytelling.
When done properly, the world in which your characters inhabit can take on a life of its own. It is important to spend as much time fleshing out your setting as you would a persona. This helps the space in which your characters exist feel grounded and real.
How do you keep white room syndrome from happening? Or how do you fix it?
There are some good ways!
First make the decision about how you want the reader to feel about the space where the scene is happening.
Add details that make that happen. Is it a crowded space? A quiet café? A darkly lit jazz club? Are the tables sticky? Does the office smell like onions? Do you hear the fast clickety-clack of coworkers keyboards? Do smells come from another cubicle? From the coffee shop’s kitchen?
Think about how you learn about people from the first time you walk into their homes? Give that feeling to the reader. Is it well lit? Shadowy? Are the salt and pepper shakers shaped like manatees or plastic? That sort of thing.
Allow yourself to set the scene as a stage where the details you choose reflect the emotional struggle of the character and/or the plot.
Use the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) and try to use three of them in each scene. Oh! And don’t have the three you use be the same for every single scene.
Don’t overdo those senses, but do use them a bit.
Why is this important again?
It allows your reader to be fully in the experience of the character of the book.
It’s a tool. The setting can be a metaphor for your character’s internal struggle. If your character is having an anxiety attack and stuck in her job and life, making her hide in a bathroom stall is perfect as metaphor.
It can be a character in your story. The city of Chicago or New Orleans can influence the plot and character a lot. The city can grow too as the character grows.
It helps create tone and conflict. If you’re writing a novel about an apocalypse, the details you choose in your scene’s setting help show that.
It shows class and divisions in society, too.
There you go! A quick and super important writing tip to help you write better now.
For exclusive paid content, check out my substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the other tips and submission opportunties and exercises are there.
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
Last week on our podcast we talked about theme, and we’re going back there again.
We know! We know! So scary. Why risk it again? We risk it for you, dear listener. Like a matyr-parent from the early 2000s, we’re writing your college essays and yelling at the soccer coach and doing the work.
“A theme in a story is the major idea that the story leans or surrounds. It comments on human experience, and more often a story relates to real life situations. All stories have at least one theme.
“A theme gives the general view of the story. It gives the reader the insight into how the story characters live to pursue something good, the results of conflicts and how all these choices come to pass in their lives. In a story, there can be major and minor themes.
A major theme is an idea the writer keeps on repeating in his work, portraying it as the most significant idea.
The minor theme is the idea that appears briefly in the story.
“A theme needs to be compelling and captivating. You need to think carefully when choosing a theme for your story.”
Let’s go simple: It’s the idea your story is about and it’s good to include a verb in that idea and a noun/subject.
Some writing coaches will say to never ever explicitly state your theme. Some coaches will say you should absolutely have a character state your theme early on in your story (first act) but have your main character not get it.
Over on the blog writerswrite, they give examples of themes:
Crime pays.
Honesty is the best policy.
Who dares wins.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Home is where the heart is.
The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there.
You never really know anybody.
People are predictable.
People with nothing to lose are dangerous.
Love conquers all.
Blood is thicker than water.
You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.
What does not kill you makes you stranger.
That site uses the Lajos Egri Theme Cheat Sheet, which is from Ljos’s book: The Art of Dramatic Writing.
This is from the writerswrite blog.
And, according to Amanda Patterson who wrote that fantastic post, a theme is important and helps you actually write your novel because you then can make sure that every scene in your novel works toward that theme.
Over on the aresearchguide, they say,
“A theme gives a story meaning and hence creating an emotional impact. A theme creates a difference between a great story that readers can relate to and a mediocre one. The theme adds an in-depth and creates a connection to the story. It is necessary for an author to have a good and clear understanding of the theme (h)as this is the key to crafting great and awesome stories that readers will love.”
But it’s over on Amanda’s brilliant post that the three steps, the three really helpful steps, show up. These are a direct quote.
For exclusive paid content, check out my substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the other tips and submission opportunties and exercises are there.
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
Hi, welcome to Write Better Now, a podcast of quick, weekly writing tips meant to help you become a better writer. We’re your hosts with NYT bestselling author Carrie Jones and copyeditor extraordinaire Shaun Farrar. Thank you for joining us.
It should be a pick-up line at a bar, yet it somehow is not a pick-up line at any bar that I know of except maybe in a New Yorker cartoon or a bar in a town where there’s one of those MFA programs in writing literature for literary people doing literary things.
Anyway, it’s a term writers throw around all the time and it is basically just how we imagine our characters’ lives went before they are in the actual story that we’re writing.
But basically it’s the formative experiences that make your character who they are today in the story of your novel or poem or essay or short story.
I know! How can you imagine that your character had a life before your story? It’s like imagining your spouse had a life before you that wasn’t totally centered around you. Us narcissists have a hard time with that.
Do you know, in nine hundred years of time and space, I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important.…
Developing the understanding of the characters. Like if your dad died of a heart attack in front of you and you couldn’t save him, then your character might have a savior complex. It helps the reader understand your characters’ motivations.
It can heighten the stakes and the suspense. You were once addicted to dating cops. Cops were always bad for you. Will you date this one? NO! YOU MUST NOT.
It makes it real damn it. By the time, you make it into a book, you’re not going to be a blank slate, born out of Zeus’ head or a clamshell fully formed on page 1. We all have prologues.
Here’s a nice link about it for those of you who read this on Carrie’s blog.
Standout asks how much backstory does a story need and answers its own question pretty simply:
If judged solely on complexity, the answer to ‘how much backstory should I include?’ would be ‘enough to pay for the reader’s efforts,’ however you also need to consider immersion.
Standout (source above)
Ah. Okay?
Here is our advice:
Don’t be fake. Don’t be pretend. We all know people who show up at a party, engage in small talk about absolutely nothing other than the weather, the traffic, where they work. There is no underlayment. It’s like they are a rug thrown on the floor, but if you touch that rug it will just slip away because there’s nothing holding it there.
Do not let your characters be rugs.
Ground those suckers with nails and staples if you have to. ModPodge them to the floor, give them a life before you.
Don’t tell us everything about them. We do not know that they prefer Aquafina to Poland Spring water or that they had an ingrown toenail when they were twenty-four any more than you want to know about the guy at the party’s hemorrhoid treatment unless it’s really good. Be sparing. Make it relevant to who that character is now and what’s going on in the story.
Don’t lump all that back story together in paragraph after paragraph of exposition. That makes the forward motion of the story disappear.
If you can SHOW the backstory via dialogue or flashback (short ones), it’s so much better than TELLING it in a big, ugly paragraph.
Mine your characters experiences and memories and mementos from those of yourself, famous people, friends, anecdotes.
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.
Stephen King
Writing Tip of the Pod All Condensed
Find the balance in your backstory and your life. Backstory is important, but it shouldn’t take over the current story
For exclusive paid content, check out my substack, LIVING HAPPY and WRITE BETTER NOW. It’s basically like a blog, but better. There’s a free option too without the bonus content but all the other tips and submission opportunties and exercises are there.
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
We’ve all met them. The human at a party, in a line, or god-forbid sitting next to you in an airplane and they talk and talk and talk and don’t pause to breathe.
Do you enjoy those people?
Not usually.
Do you want them to shut the heck up for a half second?
Usually.
Well, writers, we hate to tell you all this, but we are guilty of doing this to our reader. Yes, you, writer, might be the annoying person on the plane talking about Aunt Sally’s hemorrhoids and all the fish you saw in Roatan during your five-day-long scuba adventure.
Don’t be those people. Periods are your friend. We can’t convince our thirteen year old this, but maybe we can convince you.
Periods are the enemy of your enemy: the run-on sentence.
What’s a run-on sentence?
It’s basically a sentence that connects two independent clauses without any punctuation or a nice sexy conjunction.
What’s an independent clause?
It’s basically this … an independent clause is so strong, so mighty, so full of awesome that it can be a sentence all by itself. It doesn’t need any help.
What’s a conjunction?
It’s basically the cruise director of your sentence connecting clauses or words or phrases and getting them all to chill out and hang together.
And then we have a comma splice.
The comma splice is a run on sentence with a comma stuck in there between those two independent clauses.
You want an example. Here you go.
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks, I got a pumpkin spice latte, they put the wrong name on my cup, they were calling out “Rachel,” I had no idea, right, I just stood there and stood there and stood there, I was the only one left, the guy at the counter looks at me and says, “Rachel?” I said I am “Raquel,” it was totally cold.
So how do you fix this?
Make those clauses into separate sentences.
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks. I got a pumpkin spice latte. They put the wrong name on my cup. They were calling out “Rachel.” I had no idea, right? I just stood there and stood there and stood there. I was the only one left. The guy at the counter looks at me and says, “Rachel?” I said I am “Raquel.” It was totally cold.
Use the magical semicolon sometimes instead of a comma.
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks; I got a pumpkin spice latte. They put the wrong name on my cup. They were calling out “Rachel;” I had no idea, right? I just stood there and stood there and stood there. I was the only one left. The guy at the counter looks at me and says, “Rachel?” I said I am “Raquel.” It was totally cold.
Use a sexy conjunction. We call these beautiful mistresses coordinating conjunctions or FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks and I got a pumpkin spice latte. They put the wrong name on my cup so they were calling out “Rachel.”
Use another kind of sexy conjunction called the subordinating conjunction. These show a little-cause-and-effect or relationships.
Oh my god, I went to Starbucks where I got a pumpkin spice latte. They put the wrong name on my cup because they were calling out “Rachel.”
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Don’t run-on, don’t splice.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Don’t run-in bark. The humans yell at you.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
When I started being a reporter, one of my editors took me aside and gave me some candy and two books. One was the AP Style Guide, which is the manual for all the punctuation rules our newspaper followed.
The other was a book by E.B. White and William Strunk Jr., called The Elements of Style. My editor had met E.B. White who had a farm on the same peninsula that he did.
“This,” he told me, “is all you need to know.”
In that small book was a section called “The Elementary Principles of Composition,” and I’m not sure if it was all I needed to know as a writer, but I am positive that it was a pretty big deal.
So we thought we’d share three of those principles during this podcast. The first one is:
“Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic.”
Writers blow this off all the time, but we shouldn’t. We especially blow it off with dialogue and that’s a big no-no.
Why is it a no-no?
Our brains are wired to think of paragraphs as a single idea or an action or a bit of dialogue. You don’t want to clump it all together because it gets confusing.
Sally smiled. “I love her,” Jane said. They each took a bite of calzone and gazed upon the manatee. Sally said, “Dogs are fun.”
You’ve got no idea what’s going on here really.
Sally smiled.
“I love her,” Jane said.
They each took a bite of calzone and gazed upon the manatee.
Sally said, “Dogs are fun.”
Now you do. Each new speaker always gets a new paragraph for dialogue.
Here’s another principle.
“As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning.”
They go a bit on and on about this actually.
And our third one for today is once again back to the passive voice.
“Use the active voice. The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive:”
They then give these examples.
“I shall always remember my first visit to Boston.”
This is much better than
“My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.
The latter sentence is less direct, less bold, and less concise. If the writer tries to make it more concise by omitting “by me,”
“My first visit to Boston will always be remembered,”
it becomes indefinite: is it the writer, or some person undisclosed, or the world at large, that will always remember this visit?”
S and W
We talk about passive and active voice a lot in another podcast episode. And we’ll be sharing more of these tips in our three week series, Strunk and Whiting It. No, that’s not really the name. We have no name for it.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
I ended up talking to some of my writers about this, this past weekend, so I thought I’d share it with everyone. It’s pretty fun stuff and a helpful thing to know.
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” said novelist Elmore Leonard.
Sometimes writers fall in love with words, and that seems like a lovely thing, right? Words are writers’ commodity. Writers are word merchants. They deal in words, flinging around and ordering about on the page in the hopes of creating an army of sentences that become a story.
But sometimes writers (like everyone else) show off.
And that showing off makes readers go, “Blech.”
Readers who go ‘blech’ are readers who probably aren’t going to keep reading. No writer wants that because then their words and stories don’t have a chance to motivate or distract or move the reader. Plus, crap reviews.
In his book, Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark writes:
“Most writers have at least two modes. One says, “Pay no attention the writer behind the curtain. Look only at the world.” The other says, without inhibition, “Watch me dance. Aren’t I clever fellow?”
He likens these to understatement (the first mode) and overstatement or hyperbole (the second mode).
You don’t want your readers to be noticing all your writing adroitness and flourishes and showing off.
You also don’t want to be so underwhelming during really important moments that the reader shrugs and says, “Should I care that the universe imploded and Lassie died?”
Clark creates a little rule that he says works for him.
“The more serious or dramatic the subject, the more the writer backs off, creating the effect that the story tells itself. The more playful or inconsequential the topic, the more the writer can show off. Back off or show off.”
Here are a couple of examples where I’m writing about the same thing.
So, I was at the Boston Marathon today to take pictures of my friend, Lori, running and then crossing the finish line. Before the marathon I had lunch with my daughter Em. She was nervous.
“I have a bad feeling,” she said. “You need to be careful.”
“You have no faith in me. I am a perfectly capable person.”
“I just am worried.”
“I will be fine,” I told her. I insisted it, actually.
But I did several things that I don’t normally do. I didn’t take the T. I chose to walk from Cambridge to mile 25.5 or so of the race route. I figured out the T route and everything, but I just didn’t want to go on it. Walking was healthier, I figured. I was going to watch a marathon.
Pretty understated, right?
Here’s me writing that flamboyantly.
It is the kind of day where people blossom into heroes in Boston and become a part of a legend, a story bigger than themselves, the day of the marathon, a day of heaving chests, heartbreak hills, strangers cheering them on for just moving forward, step by step, mile by mile, until the make it (or don’t) to the finish line. My friend Lori was one of those people—the hopefuls, the push-your-way-through-its, the runners.
While she was on mile eighteen or so, my daughter and I were having lunch in Cambridge before I’d leave her to the doldrums of college and head out to the race route, somewhere around mile 25.5.
Before I left, my daughter hugged me. She smelled of hummus and coconut shampoo, her windblown hair flinging itself into my cheek as she said, “I have a bad feeling.”
You see the difference, right?
How do you work on this in your own writing?
Look at other people’s writing. Newspapers are great examples of this. What stories are on page one because of how they are written versus how newsy they actually are.
Take one of your own scenes and rewrite it like it’s spare bones. Then rewrite it like you’re trying for a very flowery Pulitzer.
Read humor. Great humorists have really mastered the difference between hyperbole and understatement and use it so well.
I took this when I was running this week. It’s so beautiful here.
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Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.
Want to be part of the team? Send us a quick (or long) email and we’ll read it here and on our YouTube channel.
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