Secrets of Writing: Pacing

The ability to pace a story is one of the most important talents you can possess. There’s nothing worse than a story that bogs down with boring scenes or is so frantic it’s over in a flash and you feel empty. Pacing is the technique that controls the flow of the story. This is done with the fine tuning of Rhythm and Tempo. The other component of pacing is Narrative Drive.

You want the pacing of the story to reflect the mood you’re trying to set. If the story is about romance, you don’t want the frantic pace of an action story. If you’re doing an action story, you don’t want the slow pace of a psychological drama. 

Pace helps define mood. Mood creates feeling. The pace of the story will have an impact on how the Audience feels when experiencing it. You want the mood to be exactly what you want it to be, so pay close attention to the following systems:

Rhythm and Tempo

Rhythm is the length of the scenes in a sequence. The length of the scenes effect the ebb and flow of the story, in addition to the polarity of those scenes. If you make the scene lengths short, you speed up the Rhythm. If you stretch them out, you can slow the rhythm down. As a rule of thumb, the act climax scenes are the longest in a story. They are where the most critical moments take place. Building toward the act climax, the scenes are usually short for reasons of tempo.

Tempo is the level of activity in a scene. If the scene involves wild action, that’s a different tempo than a scene with two people sitting on a couch talking about existentialism. You want the tempo exciting when building toward an act climax. The Kinetic Principle is a rule that says the shorter the scenes, the more intense the tempo. In my first comic series, ESPERS, I employed this technique in the fourth issue. The scenes building toward the story climax were short. Sometimes one panel in length. And I added a ticking clock. This gave an intense urgency to the whole build up to the climax.

It wasn’t something I’d read about back then, it was something I came up with on my own. And now you know the reason it works.

Narrative Drive

Narrative drive is the power of the story. If the story has a lot of power and momentum, it will drive the scenes and the pace will be amplified. Even if the pace is actually slow, a strong narrative drive adds more emotional energy.

You control the narrative drive with story values and scene polarity. By carefully choosing the importance of the events in a scene, you can increase or decrease the narrative drive.

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