 Drama: April 26, 2023 Issue [#11914] |
This week: Enhancing Your Fiction through Pacing Edited by: Joy  
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"I find it enormously valuable to be sure that that the pacing is what I think it is and that the scenes have the shape I think they have musically and dramatically."
Carlisle Floyd
"I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing."
Chuck Palahniuk
“Even the most beautiful of eulogies benefits from the occasional dramatic pause.”
A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo
"Comedy is so hard; it's so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it."
Josh Lucas
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about taking care with the pacing of our stories.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Pacing may mean walking up and down or, simply put, rhythm or tempo, but also a bit more when it comes to storytelling. Since tempo depends on fast and slow motion utilized effectively, good pacing is crucial to the flow to draw the readers into the action of the narrative.
There are many ways to attain a good pacing in a story. For example, some writers write the slow parts and scenes fast and fast parts and scenes slow, hiding any excitement or a clue for the future in the narrative. I think Dean Kuntz is the master of this storytelling trick. As an example, here is a short excerpt from his Nameless.
“The hall lies in gloom, with a doorway to a sun-filled room at the far end. Backlit, she appears and slowly approaches, seeming to drift like a spirit reluctantly returning to this world.
As she draws near, he sees that she carries a can of hornet killer. Set on STREAM, with a twenty-foot reach, such a potent pesticide might provide a better defense than pepper spray.
“Mrs. Dwayne Demeter?” he asks.”
The way the pacing is used may have something to do with the genre of the story. Generally, mystery, thriller, and suspense genres have somewhat faster pacing. Yet, regardless of the genre, a well-paced story will always hold the attention of its readers.
What makes a telling of a story fast or slow has a lot to do with sentence structure. With faster physical motion, your sentences can be short, sometimes with only a subject and the verb, and when there’s a slowing down, your sentences can be longer involving external and internal elements in and around your characters and scenes. In any case, as the writer, you owe it to the readers to have them experience the story through sensory input, emotions, and action.
Even if your story is fast-paced with one exciting thing happening after another, you’ll need to use breathers by adding character emotions and scene details. This is because the readers need to feel immersed in the thoughts, memories, and actions of the characters in order to see and feel as they do in their minds’ eyes.
The opening of a story can be slow or fast or in medias res or the order of events can be changed within the story in a back-and-forth manner. In any case, your story-telling needs to be rich with visual and emotional input. For example, read this setting excerpt from Pat Conroy’s South of Broad.
I climbed the magnolia tree nearest to the Ashley River with the agility that constant practice had granted me. From its highest branches, I surveyed my city as it lay simmering in the hot-blooded saps of June while the sun began to set, reddening the vest of cirrus clouds that had gathered along the western horizon. In the other direction, I saw the city of rooftops and columns and gables that was my native land. What I had just promised my parents, I wanted very much for them and for myself. Yet I also wanted it for Charleston. I desired to turn myself into a worthy townsman of such a many-storied city.
Charleston has its own heartbeat and fingerprint, its own mug shots and photo ops and police lineups. It is a city of contrivance, of blueprints; devotion to pattern that is like a bent knee to the nature of beauty itself. I could feel my destiny forming in the leaves high above the city. Like Charleston, I had my alleyways that were dead ends and led to nowhere, but mansions were forming like jewels in my bloodstream.
Another aspect of pacing is the dialogue. How you handle the dialogue has an effect on the pacing. Also, you’ll need to move your characters physically as they talk and as they look and experience what’s around them. This way you prevent the storytelling from becoming humdrum and tiresome. Here is a small exchange in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.
When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her own information, what the squashed guy had looked like when he was squashed.
I told her.
"Did it bother you?" she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar.
"Heck no, Nancy," I said. "I've seen lots worse than that in the war."
Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that, either. There hadn't been much publicity.
Also, you’ll need to control and reveal any information selectively, with the idea of how important that information is to the core problem of the story. You will probably figure this out during the rewrites, by asking if a certain section of your writing has anything to do with the characters or the central or assisting dramatic questions.
Then, at the end, remember to read your story out loud and get the feel of each scene and its natural rhythm to figure out where to slow down and where to rev up the action. Personally speaking, although variety is the spice of life, I think of a story as a big picture with smaller pictures, in other words--varied scenes, enhancing and becoming a part of the whole. If the big picture loses nothing from its effect and pacing when I change or take out a small picture, that means the small picture may better not be in that story.
May all your stories shine!
Until next time! 
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 This Issue's Tip: In a nutshell: Get specific and trim the fat; replace weak words and sentences; weave information into action and dialogue.
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Feedback for "Is Autobiographical Writing for You?"
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s 
When I started writing, a lot of the incidents I included were autobiographical. In fact, my first few long works, written when I was in high school, my friends had great fun trying to work out who was who. (In primary school, my long work my friends knew because I didn't change the names!)
As I've gotten older, i will use little incidents that happened to me or around me or viewed by me because it just adds a touch of realism to my mind, And considering I write predominantly horror, it helps to make the horror (again, to me) more visceral.
If I look at the story Lines of Communication in my port... the first three chapters happened almost exactly as I wrote them to the coupling pair. The stuff around them was an amalgamation of various incidents from other parties, but they all happened as well. They were both my friends, but after that third year, we'd left school and it just stopped. I just took it and ran with it. The later chapters were based on other things I saw with other couples. Only a few of the incidents actually came wholecloth from my imagination; I just made them into a coherent story. Autobiographical? Maybe.
But it did make it harder to write, because I really wanted to hide who was who.
Thanks for the input. Yes, it does help to hide the real actors and/or create a specific character from several different ones. I guess, you learned all that and more as you grew in years and experience.
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