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  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/essays/pacing-is-madness",
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  "path": "/posts/essays/pacing-is-madness",
  "publishedAt": "2024-02-08T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "> | He puts the ship through paces\n> | And paces the halls, pacing is madness\n> | Patience is virtuous, patient of these observations\n> | It was all a dream\n>\n> Clipping - \"All Black\"\n\nAh, pacing. Bloody pacing.\n\nWe all talk about stories being slow reads, or whip-quick and\npage-turning. We speak of sections that drag, or happen too fast.\nEveryone seems to have a speedometer as part of their reading\ncomprehension --- except me.\n\nI don't have an intuitive sense of story pace, and rarely talk about\nhow fast or slow stories are, except in that awkward Chinese room way\nwhere I shuffle around the symbols and associations, carried on by a\nstudied assumption that I'm probably pointing to the thing everyone\nelse understands and I don't.\n\nDoes pacing exist? To some, I've made a fool of myself by insisting it\ndoesn't. It's a meme, we made it up as a joke.  But I can hone the\ndelivery.\n\nBad pacing is oft-trotted out as a critique, yet I've long held that\nspeaking of good or bad \"pacing\" is about as useful as saying a movie\nhas good or bad \"visuals\". You can look at a movie and see something,\nand you can like what you see --- but \"things you like to see\" don't\nconstitute a useful category, whether you seek to understand art or\nimprove your craft.\n\nWhat defines my essays is a pursuit of specific and thoroughly worked\nout advice --- capturing writing process with elegant and scrutable\nmodels.\n\nLet's begin by figuring out what kinds of pacing definitely exist.\nWith some thought, I can think of at least five things that map onto\nwhat people seem to mean:\n\n- Pacing is word choice. Fast paced stories have punchy prose that\n  says exactly what it means with no fluff, and slow paced stories get\n  bogged down in description and metaphor.\n- Pacing is plot progression. The more characters and situations\n  change per wordcount, the faster the pacing is.\n- Pacing is external plot progression. The more fights and travel\n  and visible stuff happening we see, the faster the pace. But if\n  there's a lot of character moments and internal changes, this feels\n  like slow pace instead.\n- Pacing is in-story time progression. The more time passing in-world\n  per word count, the faster the pace.\n- Pacing as the delivery of information. This is a somewhat specific\n  use, but people speak of the pacing of backstory/worldbuilding\n  reveals. The sooner important facts are revealed, the faster the\n  pace.\n\nIf none of those seem quite it, that's because the way this rhetorical\ngame works is that no definition I list off at the start is right, and\ninstead serve to make me look smarter for pointing at the right one\nlater on.\n\nStill, these five are enough to illustrate the paradox of pacing.\nConsider a story that dramatically, breathlessly recounts a rather\nuneventful week.  Consider a story where a novel's worth of events\nhappen in a single day.^Well, take it from me:\n[this, well, isn't exactly\nhypothetical.]\n\nThese considerations aren't even adversarial gotchas --- just\nrecently, I've read Six Pomegranate Seeds, and I was\nfloored by just how relentlessly quick it proceeds, years going by in\nchapters, only for a fellow writer to have the exact opposite\nimpression, dropping it for the slow pace. Quote: \"you can't be fast\npaced if nothing is happening, even if you proceed through the nothing\nat a fast clip in-universe\".\n\nI recently defined what prose is, and on\nthe face of it, it's tempting to reprise that structure. There I\ncontended that prose decomposes into twelve independent facets, and\nthe word itself is too polysemous to be useful.\n\nIs pacing not the same?  Can I speak of the N plot virtues, individual\nknobs that control our gestalt sense of pace?  I'd like to; that last\nessay wound up as one of my most successful.\n\nYet, to my great chagrin, I've found a definition that unifies all\nthese disparate facets of pacing and indeed salvages the concept.\n\nPacing is payoff.\n\nWhy does verbosity matter? Because the more words you lavish on\ndescriptions, the longer it takes to get to the payoff. Why does plot\nprogression matter? Because conclusive change is what we're here to\nsee, and transitional changes promise we're moving closer to some\nsatisfying conclusion. Why do information reveals matter? Because\nanswering questions you've raised is simply one form of payoff.\n\nWhy does in-world time matter? This one's harder to explain. I think\nit's somewhat peripheral --- in order for more time to pass in fewer\nwords, you need to skip over things. This means you only focus on the\nstuff that matters, things connected more directly to the payoff\nyou're building to --- or at least you give the impression that's what\nyou're doing. And if you don't skip over things, even if those\nthings do matter, then that continuous accounting will feel like\ngetting bogged down in minutia.^[This moment by moment chronicle of\nevents is an oddly common feature of webfiction style. There's a\nblogpost somewhere in that observation, I think.]\n\nBut I skipped over one last facet --- Why do character moments and\nintrospection slow down the pace? Here we cut to the heart of this\ndefinition's utility.\n\nCharacter moments can seem slow-paced due to their subtle, dare I say,\ncerebral nature. It's easy to feel satisfaction at hero confronting\nthe villain --- but a conversation with their ally, exploring the\nnuances of their relationship, full of subtext?\n\nYou read a romance story because you want to see two people kiss. You\nread a detective story because you want to see a mystery unraveled. You\nread an action story to see some ass kicked.\n\nDifferent stories have different appeals, and if we boil the appeal of\nstories down to their payoff, then does \"no payoff\" look much different\nfrom \"payoff I don't care for\"?\n\nOr better yet, \"payoff I wasn't primed for\" --- so much of writing\ncomes down to anticipation. It's suggestive to think the longer you're\nanticipating something, the slower the pacing feels. And if you're\nwaiting for something the story never delivers?\n\n(In correspondence, it soon became clear that aforementioned critic of\nSix Pomegranate Seeds, for better or worse, came in with\nexpectations of the story that it would not deliver.)\n\nI suspect part of why I don't sense pacing as finely (and why my\nwriting ends up so slow-paced) is not only am I open-minded and easy\nto please, tending to approach stories burdened with few expectations,\nbut I deeply enjoy writing on a line-by-line, beat-by-beat level. Slow\npace doesn't bother me as long as the prose sings.^[Indeed, I'm so\nunconcerned with long-term payoff that reaching the end of an\nincomplete story doesn't even faze me --- when a dead fic ends on a\ncliffhanger, I don't despair, I laugh.]\n\nBut back up. Pacing isn't just fast or slow, it's also good or\nbad. Some fics are fast-paced and it rocks; some fics are fast-paced\nand it feels rushed. Why's that?\n\nAren't you already anticipating the answer?\n\nPayoff is famously only half the equation; you never speak of it without\nits antecedent: setup. Setup is quintessentially slow-paced. Just\nuttering the word conjures images of plodding stories that take forever\nlining up dominoes before knocking them down.\n\nIt's not a new insight to say fast pace isn't an unalloyed good, but\nthis makes it clear why. We can improve the definition, render it plain\nand simple:\n\nPacing is how long it takes to get what you want.\n\nThe subjectivity then becomes abundantly clear. Different readers want\ndifferent things, and the same reader will want multiple things, each\ndelivered at a different rate.^[This doesn't even dive into the\npedantry of deciding what \"long\" or \"get\" means, or what the\ndefinition of \"is\" is.]\n\nA different faultline is possible, though --- because it is the writer's\njob to tell the reader what they want. No, to make them want to see\nwhat's coming next.\n\nSetup sounds boring, but why? If I tell you the bombs will drop in\nfive minutes, are you bored as I describe the trails of smoke\nthrough the air, the metal hulls looming closer and closer, the people\nfleeing for their lives?\n\nA much less drudgeful word for setup is build up --- that sounds so\nmuch more promising. I wager endless setup hits different when the\ndirection is clear.\n\nHow much of \"slow\" pacing is the writer hyping and teasing something\nyou either don't care about or don't follow?\n\nAnd it goes with but a cursory mention (heh) that \"rushed\" pacing is\npayoff you weren't adequately primed for, that didn't linger long\nenough to be satisfying.\n\n- - -\n\nI could end this essay here --- this is a fairly cogent exposition on\npacing, but the essay doesn't feel finished. Part of that is the\n(admittedly fitting) anticlimax of this dashed-off final assertion,\nand I suppose part of it is I have a history of longwinded blather I\nwant to maintain even when I've run out of things to say.\n\nBut have I run out of things to say? Suppose your story is slow\npaced, and you want to make it faster. Suppose it's rushed, and you\nwant to make it slower. How do you do that? What are the actual knobs\nwe can turn to manipulate pacing?\n\nI recently watched a video: \"The Arc that broke\nMHA\" by Oceaniz. I\nrecommend it, with a caveat: it is difficult to follow if you aren't\nfamiliar with My Hero Academia. I wasn't, so I struggled. But Oceaniz's\nskill as a video essayist, and his genuine insight, kept me watching.\n\nIt's easy to find people talking about how to write sentences and\nscenes, and if Thanos snapped twice there'd still be no shortage of\npeople explaining the Hero's Journey or a dozen different three act\nstructures. The former lets you write good chapters, and the later is\nfine for structuring a movie, an arc, perhaps even a novel.\n\nBut for truly long-form writing? Serialized fiction, whether fanfic or\nweb novel, can sprawl, and what structure is there, in that\nexpansive morass? No million word saga is so single-minded that a\nstory circle carves its joints, no matter how often writers wax\ntheoretical about snowflakes and fractals.  What I found so compelling\nabout Oceaniz's",
  "title": "Pacing is Madness"
}