We’ve all read a book or watched a show that we could only describe as soooooooo slooooooow, but what makes a story feel that way? What choices take the plot from zooming along to a painful crawl? The answer is, naturally, a lot of things! This week, we’re exploring a few of them, from multiple POVs to red herrings, all in the name of making sure our stories keep moving and get us the delicious tension we crave.

• The Wheel of Time 

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to The Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’ve written up the perfect opening bit. And it’s only two hours long! You can wait that long for a punchline, right? I promise it’s very good.

Chris: Oh, what about the deleted scenes from this opening bit? Can we add those in?

Oren: Oh yeah, absolutely, that will definitely bump the length up quite a bit. And anyone who doesn’t like those are not real fans.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, if it’s a serious opening bit, it should be at least three hours long.

Oren: No pausing for bathroom breaks. So today we’re talking about what makes a story slow. And it’s not just because we finished the Wheel of Time’s second season recently. But it’s not not because of that either. [laughter]

Chris: Slow is a generic term, but usually when we call something slow, the issue is either pacing or movement; we had a whole podcast on pacing and movement, but what it boils down to is it’s boring. [Chris laughs] But in any case, pacing is more, there’s no tension or excitement, and movement is like, it’s wasting time and not getting anywhere.

Oren: I’ve noticed that there are a couple of very different things that people will describe as being slow. And they look very different, but they contribute to a similar feeling. So there’s… The lack of movement, which you were talking about, and also sometimes lack of tension, although movement is the most common one, and this is where stuff happens but no major arcs are any closer to resolution.

And then there is the multiple plotlines, which also often gets the show or book described as slow. Even if each plotline has movement on its own, if you are constantly splitting your time amongst them and you have a bunch of them, your show feels slow, because you go through a whole episode and ten minutes of real time have elapsed, because you keep cutting back and forth between everybody.

Chris: In each arc, because you’re only getting a few minutes for each arc in, like, the whole episode, they still feel like they’re slow, because for every episode you watch, each arc only moves a tiny bit because you just don’t have any time with them.

Oren: The most blatant example of this in the Wheel of Time second season is the episode where they, at the beginning, bring up that Nynaeve is gonna do a dangerous magic ritual to graduate to the next stage of magic apprentice. And it’s like, okay, that’s neat. Let’s do that. And then, a bunch of stuff happens in the episode, because we have to cut to all one million other characters who are all in different places doing their own thing. And by the time we get back to Nynaeve, it’s like, okay, Nynaeve, are you ready to do the thing? Come back next time.

Chris: Yep, that’s pretty irritating. We’re so sure that we would get to her magic test that episode. Nope. Nope. Multiple viewpoints is the movement killer.

Oren: I have to admit, I have developed some sympathy for this recently. Not that I think it’s good, but because I do a lot of roleplaying. I do a lot of Game Master, GM campaign running. And in those scenarios… A lot of the things that people like are that I’ll give the players a plot hook, there’s some weird, destroyed vegetation down by the lake, and we don’t know why people are doing that, you should go and investigate. They’ll be like, alright, I’m gonna go investigate, and then they stop somewhere to get some equipment, and I’ll mention a character, and they feel like that character’s doing something suspicious, so one of them’s like, I’m gonna go follow that character, and I’m like, alright, that’s where the character is going, so I’m gonna make that a storyline.

And it’s not like that can’t ever be a problem in roleplaying games – you don’t want to let someone go off on a ten day solo adventure that has nothing to do with the rest of the party – but you have so much more leeway in roleplaying games. And it’s hard to remember that you don’t have that when you come back to other mediums.

Chris: I do think a lot of times it is the result, and definitely in Wheel of Time, of having too many characters. We’ve talked about that a lot, where the author puts in too many characters, they don’t want to give any of their characters up, but they also have trouble finding things for all of their characters to do. And this is definitely something that Wheel of Time struggles with. The show writers are clearly struggling with it. And they’re trying to rework it and give the characters things to do when they didn’t really do anything in the books.

So to give them something to do, you start to split them up, because if you have the party together, it’s actually much harder to balance them and sort them apart from each other and give them all a role because there’s just too many of them. If you split them up and have it so that you just have two or three characters together, then you can all give those characters something to do in their storyline, ideally. And it’ll allow you to keep all these characters that you probably should be cutting from your story.

Oren: Yeah, again, I do that in roleplaying games. If I have a group of six people, I very often split them into three and three. Or sometimes three groups of two, because that is easier than trying to run one blob of six people. And in roleplaying games, people accept it because we want to hang out with our friends, and it would be really rude to give one person all of the spotlight time, but you just need to understand that other mediums don’t have that tolerance.

Chris: So besides Wheel of Time. Let’s start at a small scale, because all sorts of things will make a story slow. And so maybe we can talk about the wordcraft level a little bit.

Oren: Eh, but words are hard. I don’t do those. I’m not a word person, Chris. I don’t even see the words. I just look at a manuscript and I seeplot hole, character contrivance, setting issue.

Chris: Shall we plug you back into the narration matrix because ignorance is bliss?

Oren: It’s fine, I just want to eat my delicious, seriously flawed main plot and not have to worry about sentence structure.

Chris: Oh man, they did make that steak look really good in that scene.

Oren: It looked very tasty.

Chris: Even thinking about it makes me want steak. Okay, enough Matrix references. So obviously, if your wordcraft is too verbose, that’s gonna create a sense of slow, it’s gonna slow movement down, nothing can happen because there’s just too many words. And, obviously there’s some common culprits – exposition is notorious for being too much, and that varies from writer to writer. Some writers, yeah, just write mountains and mountains of exposition and there’s nothing happening. Some writers become too extreme on the other end of the spectrum because exposition is so notorious.

But usually if you have tons of exposition and there’s no action happening in real time, you really want to examine what you’re doing and if you have a lot of summary, a lot of time passing really quickly, It’s like, why isn’t there a scene? A real time scene happening, and if you need to change some of the logistics of the events so that you can do real time, you should do that. Other times, exposition is just, we don’t need to know all this. It’s too much.

Oren: We don’t need to know the heraldry and the family trees of every knight and noble who comes to help fight at Minas Tirith, Tolkien. Tolkien, pay attention. We don’t need to know that. 

Chris: Related to exposition, often exposition is thoughts and there can be too much internalizing. I just listened to Martha Wells’ Witch King, and the narration was pretty good, but the main character does a lot of thinking in very time sensitive times [Chris laughs] where somebody will ask him a question and he does a whole bunch of thinking. It’s like, Are you going to respond to that person? And then eventually… Again, the wrong time for that.

But any block of the same kind of text for too long will make it feel slow. Dialogue dumps. If you have a character that is just filling in, this is basically a replacement for exposition. Character that’s just doing a whole lecture. It’s like, alright, maybe we should break that up, get somebody more involved in it instead of just saying it. You might need to show instead of tell again. Or excessive description. This is what Tolkien was known for. That and lots of songs. So many songs. The only book where songs are slowing the story down cause Tolkien just liked writing poetry.

Oren: Tolkien was ahead of his time on that one because in written form, songs, eh, but in audiobooks, the songs are great because they get the voice actor to do a little singing, and it’s nice. It’s like a little musical in the middle of your fantasy book.

Chris: Fair, I did read Lord of the Rings instead of listening to it. But yeah, I think the classic one with a high fantasy is like the characters enter a new city and then we have several paragraphs telling us exactly what the city looks like. Nobody can remember that, alright? You need to give your city some standout traits that make it memorable, and not try to just draw a map inside somebody’s head. That doesn’t work.

Oren: Yeah, but in defense of the writers everywhere, that is a very hard balance to strike. Man, I had so much trouble when my characters get to the big new city. I had beta reader comments that were like, I need more description, I can’t picture this city. And I also had beta reader comments that was like, there’s too much, I’m overwhelmed by this city. Which one is it? Is it a blank, empty void, or is it overwhelming? I, how could it be – I don’t know how to fix it if it’s both.

Chris: That’s tough. I think breaking it up into pieces and doing it periodically is just a lot better than doing it once. And part of it is, I think, when people can’t picture it, maybe what they are complaining about is whether or not you have enough detail that’s evocative. Because if you say something vague, it’s much harder to picture than if you say very specific details in the picture. 

Oren: Then if I say vague things, they can’t pin me down on them later. If I’m specific, I’m opening myself up for someone to notice that my plot doesn’t make any sense.

Chris: If you just don’t tell them how many people are in all of your armies, then they can’t notice that you have weird discrepancies in the number of people throughout the novel.

Oren: Guilty as charged.

Chris: Oh, logistics are terrible, just being vague is better when you can get away with it. Unfortunately, we cannot always get away with it.

Oren: I definitely think that authors should need to apply for a permit if they want to use a first person retelling narrative. Because I love first person retelling, I think it has a lot of value, but man, some authors use it as an excuse to just go off on tangents because, technically speaking, unlike with an unfolding narration, a retelling narration can, theoretically, break the timeline as often as the author wants to, without the main character just sitting there thinking for two hours. Because this is the main character’s later, future self, thinking about all these things. But that doesn’t mean you should spend 19 pages describing how your magic school works in the first chapter.

Chris: Yeah, I was gonna say, did A Deadly Education hurt you, Oren?

Oren: A little bit. You could say it was… Deadly.

Chris: [pained] Oooh… Yeah, no. Retelling narrators, first person retelling narrators are notorious for being really long winded. Not that they always are, though. The Murderbot Diaries are also first person retelling. They’re fine. No pacing problems there. Sometimes the action is a little confusing, but being too long-winded is not one of their issues.

Oren: I think all books should just be Murderbot from now on. That’s my solution to this problem.

Everyone just write Murderbot.

Chris: Yeah. The other thing that can happen at the wordcraft level, if you end up filling in stuff, that just doesn’t matter, you gotta use your power to time skip when necessary. You don’t have characters come in and just make small talk about the weather before they get to the point, right? Or just little actions that don’t matter. You don’t have to have your character walk up to the door and knock on it and somebody answers. You could just skip to when they’re inside on their visit. So that’s just a habit thing in practice. You get used to trimming off those little unimportant bits and making that natural, but that’s another thing that can slow things down on a wordcraft level.

Oren: I had a really hard time in the epilogue of my current novel. I needed to describe the scene that they were in, and it was a new location because plotwise, there was no previous location they could go to for this epilogue to make sense. So I had to describe it and I just felt so conscious of every paragraph. I was like, this is so much description at the end of the book. And we’ll see. Hopefully it’s okay, because the main plot has already resolved itself and this is like the saying goodbye period.

Chris: And also, people can always just, if they get bored, they can put it down. Right? The story’s already resolved, they’re not missing anything.

Oren: That’s the hope, but oof, man, I felt every single line. This is so much description, I am asking so much of people at this point.

Chris: But the assumption is that we’re saying goodbye. It had a little bit different purpose. But yeah, at the upscale, we’ve got the scene level. Extra scenes. Good scene design, good scene selection: also very important for keeping readers entertained and keeping the story from feeling slow. This is one reason why I tell people who are outlining in some detail to just block out their scenes. You tell me what’s going to be a real-time scene ahead of time. Figure that out so that you don’t get into weird situations where you have, for logistical reasons, a whole bunch of scenes where people just talk to each other to make the plot work, but not because that’s exciting, or there’s anything interesting happening.

Oren: Yeah, it’s like, when you describe all these things, is this gonna happen in a scene, or is this just gonna be summary? That’s actually very useful for an editor to know, if you’re doing content editing on an outline, is to just know when this is a real time scene, and when it’s summary.

Chris: Yeah, because if it’s not blocked out, we have to guess, and that determines whether this section of your story is going to be too slow or not.

Oren: And if we guess wrong, that can really warp our perception of your story, right? And we try to correct – we ask questions, we try to get clarification – but if I get the really strong impression that this story is too slow because I thought that these were all going to be scenes, and in the author’s mind they were just some summary, that can color my judgment later, and it can make it harder for me to give good recommendations.

Chris: But yeah, of course, there are tons of stories where the author also just wants to squeeze in extra scenes where heroes introduce a couple of characters that I really like that I just made up, or here’s a scene just to advertise some of my world building that I worked so hard on. 

Or repetitive scenes. That’s another big one. Again, this is another movement issue, is that things need to keep moving forward, right? If you have a character who is struggling with something, you don’t want to show three scenes of them struggling with that thing without anything changing. You want to use your scenes to show how things change. Something’s got to be different, or else it’s just going to feel repetitive.

Oren: Yeah, in terms of pacing, I generally recommend one high tension scene followed by one quiet scene. There are some reasons to break that pattern, but in general, if you have two low tension scenes, one after the other, something’s probably gone wrong.

Chris: Yeah, if you have two scenes, again, I think the important point is that you escalate and so the tension goes up every scene until you get to something that’s exciting, and then you can drop it again. So, what you don’t want is two scenes that are about equal in tension. You want the second scene to be higher in tension than the first on so that things are ramping up. And then once it gets exciting again – and what exciting is depends on your story. That’s one of the hard things, is this is all relative.

And that’s another thing that can make something slow is if you have a high tension arc, right? Something that’s really exciting, and that arc is not complete and it’s urgent, and then characters are like, okay, let’s react, relax, and go to the beach [laughter] people are just going to resent that beach scene, even though it might be a really cute interpersonal character moment, because it’s being drowned out by the higher tension arc that feels very urgent. It’s like, but there’s people dying over there. Why aren’t you helping them? Or people could die over there. Why are you at the beach when people are suffering right now?

Oren: You do not have time for a low key social event, right? You’re in the middle of a ticking clock. Stuff’s gonna happen.

Chris: And this is also partly why the filler episode problem becomes a problem, is that, especially now when all of these show writers are making much more serial short shows for streaming services than they used to, and they’re used to something like Buffy has 22 episodes per season, and we do have a big bad for the season, but there’s no urgency there. So we don’t really worry about – the villains there, but we know that we don’t have to take care of the villain now, so we can just have our little monster of the episode, and sometimes it doesn’t have to be that much tension per episode.

But then when you take something like the Mandalorian, and it’s only eight episodes, and now there’s a really urgent problem that always exists, in which bounty hunters are like, hunting down Baby Yoda. And you’re like, okay, we’re just gonna have a small scene where Mando tries to make some money. People start to resent that, and resent that that’s not part of the season arc, because we made the season arc feel overwhelming and urgent, as opposed to Buffy, where the season arc didn’t feel important for most of the season.

Oren: Yeah, it’s just a question of if you want a lot of these self contained episodic storylines, you need the throughline to not feel as urgent. That’s just the way it is. You ramp up to the throughline feeling urgent rather than establishing it in the first episode. If we’re talking about sort of the episode or maybe several scenes level, one thing that also makes stories feel slow is red herrings, because you have someone working on a plot or looking for a clue or whatever or fighting a bad guy, and you get there, and nothing happened. You fought those guys, and it didn’t matter. They got away, everything’s the same as it was. And even if that was an exciting action scene, it’s still gonna feel slow, because it didn’t bring the big conflict any closer to being resolved, one way or the other.

Chris: Or if you retroactively remove your character’s agency. So there’s nothing that they did mattered. It felt like the plot was moving forward, and then it’s like, oh, actually, none of that. You were just dinkering around.

Oren: That’s why we always recommend that with red herrings, it can be something other than what the protagonist thought it was, but it shouldn’t ever, or almost never, be just a complete dead end. They should still find something that moves the story forward, even if it’s not what they expected to find, or what they wanted to find.

Chris: And sometimes you can have them move the story forward by giving the villain a win. The protagonist chased a red herring they shouldn’t have and now, that gave the villain time to capture a side character. But that still moves the confrontation forward because now the protagonist has to go and rescue that character, bring them one closer to their final fight with the villain, for instance.

Oren: That’s the old, fun little dance where you need to both move the story closer to a conclusion, but also make it seem increasingly more difficult to resolve in the protagonist’s favor.

Chris: Yeah, the red herring should make a difference somehow. We don’t want to just realize, oh, that was all for nothing and we haven’t actually moved the story forward like we thought. That’s disappointing. What about at the throughline level? Oren, what have you seen?

Oren: Well, we were talking about multiple points of view earlier. You can also have too many plots with a single character. It’s rare, but it happens. This is, there’s an animated show. It’s from the Philippines. I believe it’s called Tress, or Trés [spelled Trese]. I believe that’s how they say it in the show. And that’s, I think, the main character’s name. And she has weird errands that she goes on. There’s an investigation that she’s working on, and then she gets called, and now she’s working on a different investigation. And that feels really slow. It’s like, hang on, what about the first one? We’re not moving, nope.

Chris: So rather than focusing on one investigation at a time, we do it in a more realistic manner where she’s got a whole plate load of investigations, but that means they all move very slowly.

Oren: And that’s actually one thing I was wondering about, Chris. Maybe you can solve this for me right now, podcast. Is there a way to do that correctly? Because it feels like that should be a thing you could do, of having a character who’s super overworked and having all these problems they need to solve that aren’t necessarily related to each other.

Chris: Honestly, I think the way that you would do that is make them secretly related to each other. And you can’t, it would still though be a problem if they all seem to be separate until the end. And only at the end when they come together, that’s still going to be a problem as long as they’re separate. We need that chain of causality, is what creates movement. And as long as all of them are on a separate chain of causality, we’re going to have that feeling of very slow movement.

I suppose it’s possible that the different investigations could affect each other somehow without having the same root cause. A lot of times what happens is the protagonist will investigate one thing and it turns out that one thing is the result of the other, the villain they are looking into, or something like that, so that they were always underneath related to each other. I suppose you might be able to have something where, for instance, the protagonist is investigating two different villains. As a result of those investigations, the villains come into contact with each other, start fighting or something, or start working together so that their presence in the protagonist’s life ends up linking them together so that they influence each other in some way. That would be interesting, but I think it’s less common.

Oren: Also at the throughline level, a big cause of a lack of movement is just not knowing what the throughline is, from either an authorial or a reader perspective. Because sometimes you have books that start off with what looks like a plot, and then they resolve that plot, and then you’re just left wondering, what is the story about now? And this is tricky because as the writer, you don’t want to just lean out from behind the page and be like, oh hey, the story’s about this now. You have to show that in character.

And an example that I always go to is the Art of Prophecy. It’s a novel I’ve talked about on the site a few times. It starts off with this kinda interesting premise of the protagonist being a wizened old mentor who has to train the hot shot young chosen one to face the bad guy. And it’s okay. That’s an interesting concept. But then the bad guy, spoilers, dies a few chapters into the book. He’s just randomly killed by some soldiers, and at that point the book stops knowing what it’s about, and we briefly have a storyline about trying to keep the Chosen One alive, because now all the political factions want to kill him. But then we resolve that pretty quickly, and so now we have the mentor is gonna go look at some records to see if maybe there’s any more plot material for this Chosen One to do. And the Chosen One is gonna hang out at a training hall for a while, have some kind of nebulous character arc.

Chris: Here’s the thing. I would say that your throughline ultimately is the biggest source of tension. Now, generally, we can set up an episodic story where there’s a lower, overarching sense of tension in episodes, but generally, especially in a novel, right? And I think that the mistake that writers make is they think of, this is my problem, but then they don’t think of what is actually generating the most tension, and usually, the easiest way to find that is with the stakes,  because the stakes are generally the biggest part of what determines how high tension an arc is. So, what is the thing that is a big deal that is bad that could happen? What is creating that sense of threat? And find that, and then that has to be sustained.

And I think the mistake that people make is, their sense of tension is coming from the threat that, for instance, this chosen one the protagonist is training, will be killed by the villain, but then when the villain dies, the stakes are gone. The tension is gone, and then we can start up tension again, but now it feels like a different story then it was before. It feels like we’ve ended one story and we’re starting a new one.

We have to use, we want to use some kind of causality so that our earlier threat, if we want to kill off that villain, we almost need – I don’t want to say another villain behind that villain, because that can definitely get overplayed. But let’s say this villain turned out to come from a bunch of people who were very angry and they have been sending out multiple warriors and this villain was just one of them. So we’ve moved the root cause of that threat somewhere else. Then we can kill off that villain, but the threat is still there, and have the threat sustained all the way through.

Oren: Yeah, I could be wrong, but with that book it really feels like a big part of the problem is that the author wanted to subvert a trope that they really needed. And it’s hard for me to imagine, if that’s true, it’s hard to imagine what a solution would be, because the trope they wanted to subvert was, oh, you thought we were gonna fight the bad guy, and now they’re dead. And it’s like, sure, we could replace them with someone else, but then that’s not going to be subverting the trope the way this author wanted to.

And if that’s the case – I’m guessing, right? I don’t know what this author actually wanted, that’s just what I’m guessing from the text. If that’s the case, that would be really hard to fix. Because at that point the author would be trying to do something that is just sabotaging their own story. And that would be a tough one. If someone came to me with a project like that, and I haven’t had that specific one, but I have had a couple of clients who their core concept was a thing that was negatively affecting their story, and I can’t do anything about that.

Chris: [dramatically] At what cost?

Oren: Yeah, I’m not a miracle worker. Alright, with that, I think we have come to the end of our throughline. We’ve worked our way up from the small stuff all the way to the big stuff, although we started with the big stuff to make it a little more confusing. Maybe it’s gone in a circle.

Chris: If you’d like to keep us from getting too slow, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Callie MacLeod. Then we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.