We all know that a boring scene can slow down the story. But what if. The words you wrote. Also had an effect. On pacing? This week, we’re discussing how to use wordcraft to control the speed of your story. Sometimes that means speeding up, of course, but it can also mean slowing down. Readers enjoy a relaxed scene to appreciate the scenery just as much as they love pulse-pounding action. They’re less likely to enjoy scientists explaining stuff for a billion paragraphs, though.

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

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

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Alright, I’ve heard we need to pick up the pace on this podcast. So, what we’ll do is record normally and then just speed up the recording during audio editing and publish that.

Oren: That sounds fantastic. I don’t know what could possibly go wrong.

Chris: Yeah, it’ll be fine. Everybody will like listening to that.

Honestly, I have been told many times that I speak too fast. Supposedly being a good speaker just means talking like you would talk to your friends, but I don’t think that works for me.

Oren: Yeah, I don’t know. I just try to do what I would normally sound like.

Chris: Right. And you sound great. [laughs] But sometimes if I get excited, I start talking really fast and skipping words, and slurring words, and nobody can understand what I’m saying. I hope I’ve gotten better, at least when I’m paying attention. Or maybe I talk slower now because I’m getting old.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: [laughs] This is about pacing in word craft. It’s kind of frustrating that pacing means two different things. But I didn’t choose this. Not my term.

Oren: I didn’t choose the pacing life. The pacing life chose me.

Chris: So, most of the time when we talk about pace—cause we talk about plot so much at Mythcreants—usually when we’re talking about pacing, we mean plot pacing. Which I think is best defined as the level of tension as the story progresses. So that pattern of which scenes are tense relative to which other scenes. And how that goes.

But now we’re talking about wordcraft pace, which is a measure of how verbose you are for the content you’re covering. It’s a little more analogous to plot movement than plot pacing. Cause plot movement is basically, does it feel like you’re making progress on the story? So, wordcraft pacing is like, how quickly are you actually getting the story content in there in proportion to how many words you are using.

Oren: Yeah. It’s the difference between if we’re having a scene that is at an ice cream shop and we’re just hanging out there for many pages. That’s just a slow story choice. As opposed to I am describing an action scene, which could be fast or slow, depending on how I describe it.

Chris: We could go to the ice cream shop, but describe that so concisely that the word craft pacing is fast, but the plot pacing is slow.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: If you do have pacing that is much too fast in your wordcraft, it’s also possible that the story will feel slow because you’ve basically killed all the motion, right? And so, people will get bored and won’t know why. So that happens.

But your wordcraft pace can be too slow or too fast, and people naturally fall in different places on the spectrum. There are people who are naturally very verbose and people who are naturally very concise. So if you have a problem here that are habits that you have to change, it’s not like you are uniquely bad at this. People come at it from multiple directions.

Oren: Yeah. I have an example actually, that I wanna talk about.

I recently read The Shattering Piece, which is the most recent book in the Old Man’s War series from John Scalzi. And I noticed Scalzi’s writing tends to go through phases.

And right now, he is in what I call the scientists-explaining-things-to-each-other phase. Where that’s a fairly large percentage of the book [with] scientists explaining things. And to be sure any amount of exposition is gonna slow the pacing down a little bit. Cause you need to explain things, but I just noticed that the explanations were so long for things that we absolutely did not need to know.

And it seemed like when he starts saying, you don’t have the math for that, it’s like, okay, I get it. That’s a line from the first book. I know. But you’re gonna explain it anyway. Could you just skip the part where you say you can’t explain it? Cause I know you’re about to.

Chris: And this is in dialogue?

Oren: Yeah. This is in dialogue.

Chris: Yeah. So not very long ago, we had a podcast on the five different types of narration. And one of the reasons that’s useful to keep those in mind is if you have a big chunk of the same type of narration, it’s more likely to be your big pause—that is too slow in the narration.

There is reason to have lots of dialogue. Sometimes there’s a situation where one character needs to recount something that’s genuinely interesting and very relevant to another character, and maybe that is worth several paragraphs.

But usually, it’s unusual to have one character talking for that long, especially without interruption. And so that could often be a lecture that is boring and shouldn’t be in there. Sometimes writers want to fit in more in their story than they can reasonably fit. And so instead of making the story about the subject matter, they just have a character do a lecture about all the things they care about that they wish could fit into the story, but don’t have time for.

Oren: Well, what makes this book interesting—And this is something that I think Scalzi picked up from his previous two books—which is that it’s not just one character doing this. There are several scientists who are all talking to each other. God, help me if you tried to figure out which one was which. I don’t know. They’re all the same, but they’re technically different characters.

Chris: Yeah. I remember that issue in Kaiju Preservation Society.

Oren: Yes. That’s where I first noticed it, and I liked that book anyway, but it has gotten worse.

As an example, mild spoilers, they go out to a system where an asteroid colony has gone missing, and the information that is actually being communicated to you is that there’s nothing there and we can’t detect anything on any of our sensors. This takes pages to explain.

Chris: Did he study science and now he really wants to share the science he studied? Is that what happened?

Oren: I don’t think so, cause it isn’t very technical. It’s not quite techno babble, exactly. It’s a little more consistent than that. But I wouldn’t call it hard science either.

And the main character’s not involved in any of this—which is a different problem, that the main character has a very odd skillset for this story. So she is kind of watching a lot of this play out—but we could have communicated that there was nothing there, that nothing showed up on their sensors in way less information than it took to do this.

That’s one of the reasons why I got to the end of the book and realized very little actually happened. It’s maybe a novelette’s worth of story stretched out over a novel.

Chris: Yeah. It reminds me: you read Empire of Silence and I didn’t. It’s not out yet, but maybe it will be out by the time this episode comes out. A critique of the beginning.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And that one’s so funny because it is extremely verbose, but at the same time, it’s almost like you can’t judge pacing because there’s just no story to speak of.

Oren: Yeah. There is nothing. Empire of Silence is a weird book because it technically does cover a lot of stuff. It’s just that none of it matters. It is just recounting the main character’s day is the best way to describe that book. Whereas the shattering piece is not doing that, but it is still somehow taking forever to cover a very small amount of in-universe time.

Chris: Yeah. One way that you can tell… a key sign of pacing that is too slow is when the dialogue cannot flow naturally because it’s interrupted by big chunks of text.

And that definitely happens in Empire of Silence, where people should just be talking to each other naturally, but the writer can’t help putting exposition for a paragraph between each line. That’s not what you want your dialogue to sound like. You want it to sound like people having a conversation, which typically happens pretty fast. People don’t wait and then think for several minutes before answering.

Oren: That’s a pretty awkward way to have a conversation.

Chris: You can have large blocks of description, especially if you’re trying to describe something in terms of schematics. And a picture is worth a thousand words. But not in your narration. It is not worth taking a thousand words to describe a picture.

Oren: It’s just not worth that much. I don’t need a picture for that many words.

Chris: I mean, sometimes writers have a picture in their head and they’re like, okay, how do I make readers see this picture. And just… Don’t is the answer. Don’t, don’t do it.

So those kinds of big pauses, those exposition dumps are obviously a huge one. Other kinds of big chunks of narration… Again, sometimes we do need several paragraphs of dialogue, dialogue in particular. But you know, if you have the same type of narration for a while, it’s just a warning sign to check it out and see if you maybe could be a little more concise there.

Oren: And you know, we’ve established by now that this can happen in any perspective. Like Empire of Silence is third—No, first person. Wait. Is it first person retelling? It is first person retelling.

Chris: It can happen in any perspective, but I do think character retellings in particular [do] tend to be rambling.

Oren: Well, that’s good. Cause I was about to talk about other character retellings that do this, and I thought I had to qualify that statement by saying that this other book we just talked about wasn’t a retelling. But it turns out it was. So, actually this is only a retelling problem. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Chris: [laughs] Again, any perspective can have this, but I think that it tends to encourage it.

Maybe omniscient too. I read fewer works in omniscient. Both a character retelling and an omniscient narrator give the writer the freedom to just say whatever they want at any time they want. And with great power comes great responsibility and all that.

Oren: Though it is interesting to see how it can happen in different ways.

Deadly Education admittedly, part of that is just because the magic school is so complicated that there’s no short way to explain that. But beyond the magic school, the main character just rambles a lot and talks about her backstory and magic and stuff. That probably could have been condensed a bit. Which is what we normally tend to think of when we think of slowing down the pacing with rambling.

But then you have something like Shield of Sparrows, which has so much internalization that it just takes forever to get through a scene. Where it’s like, hang on, we need to give the characters like witty internal thought reaction to everything. I like giving the characters internal witty thought reaction to stuff, but I don’t think we need this much. I think we could dial it down a little bit.

Chris: Yeah, certainly character thoughts can go overboard.

Shield of Sparrows is really funny because if you just read the text, the, the constant, like internalization and thoughts feel more like they’re supposed to be kind of witty or smart ass.

But then if you listen to the audiobook, they get a really good audio narrator—oh, I can’t remember her name—But she makes it sound a little angsty instead, like it’s self-deprecating. And it’s still way too much, but it is more tolerable.

Oren: It does make her seem more sympathetic.

Chris: It makes her feel self-conscious and nervous, instead of just being a smart ass about everything.

Oren: Yeah. It’s a little harder to be like, oh no, poor you. When you’re constantly being a smart ass about stuff, it’s like, I don’t know. Seems like maybe you don’t think it’s that big a deal.

Chris: So, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have over-summary, which I’ve talked about before. This is the worst-case scenario for it being too fast.

Where you have an important moment, something that you really want the reader to experience in full. And if you’re a naturally concise writer I am and Oren too, I think is on the more concise end of the spectrum…

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: By default, you are gonna have prose that just moves too fast because it’s a little too distant and vague and it isn’t getting enough detail. It isn’t narrating moment by moment enough.

So that can be a really big problem because the story doesn’t feel real, it eliminates immersion, and everything just falls flat. Nothing is exciting because, one thing that I’ve been emphasizing lately—cause it’s important that people get this—is that tension requires anticipation. You have to anticipate the threat and have time to feel it. So, if it just whizzes by your head—

Oren: whoosh

Chris: [laughs] …you have no time to anticipate. And so, it can really kill tension too. Something that should be exciting if it happens too fast is actually less exciting.

Oren: Yeah. I noticed that in Fourth Wing. I’m so proud of myself. When we’ve been—spoiler alert—building up the bad guys for a while and then suddenly we just see some and it’s just like, yeah, they’re over there in that town. We see some. Oh, okay. There’s some venin over there. Oh, is there? Are there now?

Chris: Just seeing them as little specs from far away probably isn’t the most intimidating way to introduce the villains.

Oren: I don’t know. I would’ve described it as there’s something, we don’t know what it is. We just see huge gouts of flame or something. Just anything other than just like, those are some venin, I guess. It’s like are there? I don’t know. Do you know what a venin looks like?

Chris: I think Yarros does try to build up the venin with stories about them. But the issue is that we get a basic definition for what they are, but we don’t know that they’ve done anything. And I think that’s because we’re so busy with this idea that their culture has covered up their existence.

I don’t know why. If you had a nationalistic military society, usually you want to exaggerate the enemy threat to keep people in line. You don’t usually wanna pretend the enemy doesn’t exist.

Oren: Yeah. They’re obviously fake. You read that and it’s just like, I’m sorry. Because I’m genre savvy, I know that you’re building to the venin being the big bads. But they just feel like nothing. There’s no detail about them. And what little detail there is, is extremely generic, evil bad guy stuff.

So, by the time we actually meet one, we have really no conception of what these guys are supposed to be, other than evil dragon riders. And the normal dragon riders are also evil. So what does that mean? What’s the difference?

Chris: Yeah. I don’t know. Again, if we saw them do things, I think that is one key thing for a lot of villains is actually seeing them do damage and hearing what they’ve done.

But any case, we digress.

Oren: We do. We tend to do that.

Chris: We do tend to do that.

Oren: I did get some beta reading comments, if I remember correctly, about The Abbess Rebellion, feeling like it was too fast paced. How much of that do you think was due to the word craft? Go ahead and roast me.

Chris: [laughs] Uh, man. Again, because pacing is used for both the wordcraft and for the plot, I would have to know more. That’s just so context dependent. Maybe your big battles. Maybe they were exciting at first, but they got exhausting. Which is what happens when the pacing is too fast in like the plot.

Or maybe it was that the word craft was rushed.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, I do know that at least a couple of my readers wanted more complicated politics. Which isn’t really a word craft issue, that’s a plot issue. But I suspect the wordcraft probably had something to do with it. My prose is utilitarian, would be a kind way to describe it. So, I imagine there’s probably some of that in there too.

Chris: I think Utilitarian Prose is perfectly good prose. I think we all have different preferences and plenty of people love utilitarian prose.

Oren: Yes, that’s definitely true. Plenty of people love your prose, Oren. it’s fine. It’s fine!

Chris: [laughs] I’m not sure if when it comes to [The] Abbess Rebellion, lots of people are gonna be like, that was the perfect prose for me. I wanna pick it up just for the prose.

But I do think there are a lot of people who are like, I don’t wanna think about the prose. I don’t want it to be showy. I just want it to be ”invisible”.

Oren: My ideal audience is people who don’t care about the prose [laughs]

Chris: [laughs]

There are also errors that you can have in the prose that it doesn’t have, right? It’s also not invisible if it’s convoluted or hard to understand or awkward or all of those other things. So it utilitarian prose still take skill, okay.

Oren: What if it had the phrase “rain of arrows” nine times in one chapter? Be a really nice thing if the copy editors caught that. Thank you, copy editors.

Chris: Oh man. I had one short story that Ariel copy edited and she’s like, you’re just using the word “know” way too much. And I looked at it, I was like, wow, I really am using that word a lot. It felt like such a normal word. I wouldn’t have to worry about it repeating, but…

Oren: Such personal attacks from the copy editors. I know.

Chris: I know maybe there is some writer out there who is perfectly able to keep track of all of their usage of all terms and phrases and make sure they never repeat too much. I don’t know that I know that person.

Granted now that I say that, somebody will pop up on our Discord server and be like, oh, I have this software. And I can perfectly keep track. There’s always somebody, but that seems unusual to me.

Yay for copy editors.

Oren: So here’s another pacing question: How much does sentence length matter?

Chris: Technically it is an independent feature, but I do feel like people who use longer sentences are more likely to be verbose. Technically you could have a rushed long sentence or a run on sentence where everything happens. But I tend to think that people who use longer sentences are often the verbose kind because they’re trying to stuff in more words.

But I also have people who have sentences that are really hard to understand because they’re putting really important things in a subordinate clause. Or mentioning really important things just in passing. Like, no stop, that’s too important. You gotta slow down and introduce that properly.

I also see that so it can go either way.

The ultimate measure of how rushed it is—we’ve talked about comparing it to real time. So ideally, the time in your story world does not pass faster than reading time. So you should basically be able to act out what’s happening in the story in the time it takes you to read it. So of course, that’s subjective.

Hilariously, I do have some speed readers in my family that complain about books being like too much of a emotional rollercoaster because the story goes by so fast for them. And I’m just like, well, should you maybe not speed read if it’s, if that’s an issue.

I mean, maybe they can’t. Maybe they can only speed read at this point, but they did specifically learn a speed reading technique, so…

Oren: They shouldn’t have to change, Chris. The book should have to change.

Chris: [laughs] But yeah, if you’re a speed reader, maybe judge this by reading out loud. But it’s also a very rough measure. We don’t have to be precise.

But if you do find that you’re having this problem where you’re rushing things too much and you’re wondering why everything falls flat, you need to add more small actions in between what you have. And almost certainly more description. Usually more description is necessary, possibly more thoughts and feelings too.

And that’s kind of the cure to moving too fast. I’ve had it described as savoring the moment, but I found that very vague. When my writing was washed and somebody told me to savor the moment, I didn’t know what that meant.

Oren: Chris, just stop and smell the flowers.

Chris: So I tried to get more specific than that, so you know what to do.

Oren: What about length and complexity of the words themselves? If you’re using a lot of big words, is that slowing your pacing down?

Chris: Well, it’s slowing down the reading speed. Not necessarily, no. It’s more about how vague or specific you are. Even if you’re in like a reasonable range there are still important choices you can make that help shape how different moments in your story feels and different moments in the story can call for a different pace.

So again, when we talk about too slow and too fast, obviously there’s a lot in between, huge explanations like we talked about, and rushing past everything so that you can’t actually feel anything. And this is basically a balance between immersion and immediacy.

So immersion—we’ve talked about before—basically it’s how real everything feels. So, the reason why over summarize prose feels dead, just doesn’t come alive, is because immersion is completely lost. So a story has to feel a little bit real for us to feel emotion.

Another way we talk about immersion, of course, is if something interrupts your immersion by calling attention to itself, like an error. So that would be lost immersion because something throws you out of the story, for instance. But otherwise we’re just talking about a more slow gradient with the level of realness.

Oren: Like you thought you were reading a high fantasy story and suddenly someone talks about genetics. It’s like, hang on, you guys know what genes are.

Chris: So generally, a slower pace often helps with this, but not exposition.

Oren: but not exposition.

Chris: Exposition is not immersive because—I pretty much define it by being stuff that is not the here and now. So, we’re imparting general facts. We’re imparting something happening somewhere else or in the past. Because it is not the here and now, it is not immersive.

That’s one reason it’s so bad to overuse it. But it’s also so easy to overuse because it’s so flexible. You can say anything in exposition.

Oren: That’s why you should never say anything in exposition. Just don’t do it.

Chris: Noooo, don’t do that. That’s bad.

Oren: Just trust your readers to pick up on things, Chris!

Chris: You need exposition!

Oren: Trust your readers.

Chris: [laughs]

Description though is really immersive, which is why, if you’re over summarizing, it’s usually really helpful to add more description. Action is immersive. Dialogue is immersive. Internalization and thoughts like, hmm, maybe. A little bit can at least maintain immersion. But if you start to go overboard, then I’m not sure that’s so good for immersion.

Oren: Although it should be pointed out that dialogue can be used for exposition and it doesn’t magically become not-exposition if you put it in dialogue.

Chris: It is true. We tend to think of dialogue as exposition when it feels a little bit forced. And it doesn’t feel like that’s what the character would naturally say in the moment.

So basically, you want your really emotionally powerful moments—Usually they benefit from higher immersion, and so it makes sense to have more description, be a little bit more verbose. Dig in a little bit and let readers appreciate the moment.

I also think that a slightly slower pace with more description is really great for building anticipation and atmosphere. It’s not so great though, when you want something to be really exciting because you’ve got fast-paced action or something that feels desperate, it feels like an emergency.

For that, usually you want higher immediacy, which is basically urgency on steroids. So, you still don’t wanna over summarize, but generally that calls for a little bit conciser language that moves the action a little faster. Thrillers would typically have a lot more concise language for those fast moments.

Oren: Yeah. You would have your more elaborate description of the underground base when your character is brought into it for an interrogation, less so when they’re trying to escape it as it’s exploding.

Chris: So, in a scene, you can vary it from one to another, even during dialogue. You can create a pause during the dialogue. Characters stare into each other’s eyes and describe their eyes for a little while to create an emotional moment.

Even during fights, sometimes it is useful if there’s a particularly tense moment in the fight to put this fight into slow-mo so that you can experience the tension of the moment. Your character is pinned down and somebody is bringing a blade down on them and they can’t move. Like that’s a good time to like, actually, I’m gonna slow down a little bit here and build anticipation for that strike instead of making it feel fast and desperate.

Oren: And what does that look like exactly? I don’t imagine we’re saying and then time slowed or is that what we’re imagining?

Chris: No. There is a difference between when you slow down, it does make a difference what words you use. As I said, description is usually a really good way to slow down because it adds something, it adds immersion, and it can also be used for atmosphere. As opposed to if you’re just wordy or you have overly technical language.

Like, they brought down their blade at a 75 degree angle from left to right or something like that. That’s obviously technical language that does not add to the moment. But if you say their blade flashed in the firelight and the grimace on their face, their red eyes bore into me as they brought their blade to bear or something.

Oren: That is what red eyes tend to do as a blade is brought to bear. Conventionally speaking.

Chris: Yeah. Unsurprisingly, I’m not very good at coming up with great description on the fly, but yeah, something that is embellishing. Oh, the villain pressed on close and I smelled their breath or something. And describe what their breath smells like.

Oren: Ew. Do we have to?

Chris: [laughs] But the point is, that’s very visceral. And so, it helps get you in the moment. And so that’s the kind of thing that you wanna use to slow down, typically.

And if you’re not sure what to do, whether you wanna be faster or slower, I would just focus on: what are important actions right now? What matters?

Like narrating the protagonist, reaching out the hand, turning the doorknob and swinging the door open does not matter. That’s trivial, it’s not important.

Whereas if you just said, then Sally knocked Sam out. That would be very vague. Like, okay, wait, we seem to be missing things here. Did Sam see Sally coming? Did he have a chance to react? What did Sally actually do to knock Sam out? Swing a frying pan or what? There’s lots of things missing from that picture. By default that’s what you can use to judge.

Oren: Well, now that we’ve covered all important frying pan pacing issues, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you found this episode useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.

And we will talk to you next week.

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