A while back, I wrote a post about using sentence function to pace your novel. Today, I want to get into story pacing on a scene-level instead of a sentence-level. There is a weird correlation between your words on the page and the reader’s perceived passage of time, and it’s important to understand their relationship to perfect your story pacing. Let’s take a look at timing and tension and how they impact scene pacing.
Scene Pacing
Before we get into timing and tension, I want to take a moment to define pacing. Pacing is the speed at which the story is being told. This is not to be confused with the time passing in the story itself. Slow pacing takes pages to describe one minute of story time, while fast pacing can relay the passage of decades in one sentence. It’s about knowing when to dig into a moment in the story and when to skim over details.
Timing
Dwight Swain pointed out that there are two types of time: chronometrical and emotional. By understanding these types of time, writers can improve their pacing and discover the secret to holding readers’ attention at the right time.
Chronometrical time is objective and measured by clocks. No matter what’s happening or who is experiencing it, a minute will always take sixty seconds. Sixty minutes makes an hour, and twenty-four hours makes a day. Those are facts that never change.
Emotional time is subjective and measured by feelings. It deals with the perception of time based on what’s happening and to whom. An hour wedding can feel like an eternity to a woman with unrequited love for the groom, but it can seem like only a few minutes to the bride. A minute under water will feel longer than a minute watching a comedic video. The chronometrical time is still just a minute or an hour, but that doesn’t mean it feels that way to certain people.
While chronometrical time can be referenced within books, it’s not helpful when it comes to pacing. When a person is reading, it’s all about perception and emotions. It’s all about emotional time. Someone can describe a thousand-page book as a quick read because the pacing makes the story seem to move quickly. Likewise, a hundred-page novella can seem long if the pacing is too slow and bores the reader. So how do you use emotional time to create good pacing? That is answered in the next section.
Tension
When talking about emotional time, we said that it depends on a person’s perception of time passing. But what affects a person’s perception? It’s simple: tension. The more tense a person feels in a situation, the longer the time feels. The less tense a person feels, the quicker the time will seem to pass. Because different things make different people tense, one event can seem long to one person and short to another (like my wedding example above).
But what causes tension? Tension occurs when someone fears something will or won’t happen. In the wedding example, the woman in the crowd is afraid the groom will actually get married. She’s hoping he’ll call it off. The bride, though, has no fears. She is blissfully unaware of another woman trying to steal her groom and so she feels no tension. So, tension can be inserted in your story by setting up an event that could happen and then making your character fear the outcome. Will he uncover his father’s secret or not? Will she accept his proposal or not? Will he escape the murderer or not? Just make sure you clearly show the readers that an event is coming so there is anticipation about its outcome. If no one knows the event will happen, then there will only be surprise and not tension.
Writing Tension Through Emotional Time
So, when your POV character is in a very tense situation, you want to slow down the emotional clock. Take time to explain little details, sensory information, and internal feelings. By stretching out the moment, you will signal to the reader the tension the character feels.
Now, slowing the emotional time doesn’t mean the action slows. For example, you can have a fast-paced fist fight and still slow your timing. Set up the fight by examining the opponent, showing your POV’s feelings, and laying out the fight’s potential consequences. Then you can describe the opponent shifting positions and taking the first swing. Most fights don’t last many minutes, but you can show each blow and add in some interiority about the POV’s assessment of his opponent, his feelings, and his plans. While the fight is action and goes fast in chronometrical time, you are showing it on the page in slow emotional time. You could just as easily convey the scene in one sentence, stating they traded blows and the main character won, but there would be no tension.
When tension isn’t present, you should summarize. If a character is relaxed or doing routine things, speed up the emotional clock by summarizing time passing in just a sentence. For instance, if a woman gets ready for work and then drives there, you shouldn’t detail those events for pages unless something tense happens. If you do take pages on simple tasks, readers will complain the pacing is slow. Instead, use one sentence to say she arrived at work (and the reader will assume she also got ready to leave).
When To Write Tension
Part of a writer’s job is to know when to create tension in a story. You don’t want to create tension when a character is brushing his teeth and then keep a scene relaxed during an interrogation. You should slow the emotional clock only when something is important to the plot and has the potential to shift your character’s mindset. Remember, we talked about the importance of story shifts to make a book seem like it’s moving forward. These shifts are key to a good story and should be tense; hence, they should be told in slow emotional time.
Now, each shift shouldn’t be the same level of tension as all the others. For each shift in your story, analyze these three areas: immediacy, difficulty, and impact. The more immediate the threat, the more tense the scene. The more difficult the task, the more tense the scene. The bigger the shift’s impact, the more tense the scene. So, a pinch point will carry less tension than the midpoint, and the midpoint will be less tense than the climax. Each scene should have tension in some way, but it may be as simple as trying to maneuver a conversation to get what he needs for the next step in his plan. If you can go a whole scene without descending into slow emotional time at least once, then you don’t have any tension and can delete the scene.
Final Thoughts
Some of you may have caught on that emotional time can also be described as showing versus telling. Slow emotional time is when you dig into details and show a scene, while fast emotional time is when you tell in summary. When I read Dwight Swain’s explanation of emotional time though, it clicked easier in my mind. His words have stuck in my head ever since, and I wanted to share his method with you. I think emotional time is a great way to look at showing versus telling and scene pacing at the same time. Hopefully, it’s helped you look at your own story’s pacing in a new light.
Thanks for reading!
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