Pacing Dialogue and Action Scenes -- Your Story at Your Speed© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
What is pacing?
Pacing is moving your story forward smoothly, at your speed. Not
everyone wants a breakneck race through the pages; not everyone
wants a bucolic amble, either. The goal of this workshop is to help
you take control of your writing pace -- to make your story travel
at the pace you want, so that you can tell the story you want to
tell.
Here are some techniques I've learned for controlling the pace
of my stories.
To Speed Up Action Scenes:
Limit extraneous information.
This is not the time to describe the countryside, the weather,
or what people are wearing. Concentrate on the main characters,
their movements, their five senses, and their emotions as they work
through whatever problem they're facing.
Pull your camera in close.
Let us taste the blood at the corner of the lip, feel the pain
of the broken bone, hear the whistling of the blade, smell sweat,
see eyes wide with shock, the beads of sweat on upper lips. Sense
details create a sense of immediacy and urgency, and make a scene
feel faster.
Keep sentences short and clean.
There are times and places for the hundred word sentence, but the
fast-paced action scene is not one of them.
Be sharp, short, hard-edged.
Use fragments (sparingly). Kill adjectives and adverbs -- be ruthless.
You don't need many, and may not need any. Find good verbs and nouns,
and let the scene run with them.
Examples of action scenes that play well quickly:
- Fight scenes
- Chase scenes
- Critical moments in your plot
To Slow Down Action Scenes:
Offer setting details.
Now you can take a bit of time with descriptive passages, narrative
notes on culture, history or character background, local color,
costuming, terrain details, and even the weather. Caution: To slow
a scene to the point of inducing coma, add a lot of these.
Move the camera out.
Give us the panoramic view of the characters, their surroundings
and their actions from either distant third person or omniscient
viewpoint. We don't need to be inside their heads all the time,
and being outside of their heads slows down the perceived pace of
the scene a bit.
Give yourself a bit more room on sentence length.
If you want to experiment with the hundred-word sentence, you can
do it here. Don't go overboard; your objective is still to tell
a story and move the action forward. But you do have significant
leeway in the slower scene. Moderate (stress MODERATE) use of adverbs
and adjectives. Instead of none, you can scatter a few throughout
the scene. This stuff in like fennel, though -- a tiny pinch of
adjective or adverb goes a long, long way.
Scenes that do well with a slower pace:
- Middle scenes
- Romantic scenes
- Developmental moments in the plot
Scene Practice:
Remember that any scene can be written with either a fast or slow
pace -- and either can work, depending on how it fits with the rest
of your manuscript.
To get comfortable with looking at pace as something you control
(instead of as something that controls you), you're going to write
the same action scene two ways -- first paced as quickly as you
can, and then as slowly. If you have a scene in mind that you would
like to try this with, use that. If you don't have any ideas, then
you can write about either a fight between two people, or one character
trying to get away from another character.
If you are a member of the HollyLisle.com Community, you can try
your scenes out, and see how other writers have handled the same
work, by going to the Scene
Practice Exercise.
If you aren't, you
can join the community from this link. Or just do these exercises
at home.
To accelerate a dialogue scene:
Get to the point.
Start in the middle of the conversation, with the first thing that
a character says being directly related to the problem of the scene.
Don't worry about describing how the characters meet up, or how
they greet each other, or giving us their conversation before they
get to the point. Be direct.
The conversation starts not with:
"Hi, Bill."
"Oh, hey, Fred. Good to see you today. Gorgeous weather, isn't
it?"
But with:
"I couldn't believe it when I heard that Keith Cavernaugh got murdered
last night."
Fred almost dropped his rake. "I hadn't heard," he said.
Avoid most description.
Don't spend a great deal of time telling us what the characters
are doing while they're talking. A bit of this is necessary; otherwise
you end up with two heads speaking into a void. But limit brutally.
If someone is talking while hand-tooling a saddle, we don't need
to know at that time the details of the leather design.
Allow characters to talk at cross-purposes.
Good listeners are nice in real life, but people who interrupt
each other and don't listen because each is talking about what they
think is most important get a lot of information on the page in
a short space, and draw the reader in.
Example:
"So then they found the murder weapon under the kitchen sink, but
no one is talking about whether there were prints on it or not --"
"-- Uh-huh. Anyway, Fred stood me up for our date, and then he
had the nerve to show up three hours late with these droopy, sorry
excuses for flowers and some lame excuse about his car breaking
down."
Lisa sighed. "-- So the police took his wife in for questioning
this morning, and you have to think about her and those three sweet
little children there in the house with him when it happened --"
"Who cares, Lisa? I'm telling you that Fred's a jerk, and you're
telling about people I don't even know."
"We both already knew Fred was a jerk. The guy who was murdered
lives right around the corner from you."
End the dialogue the instant you've achieved your objective.
If you wanted the conversation to throw doubt on the motives of
one of the two speakers, bail out of it the instant the first speaker
becomes suspicious of the second. Don't waste time getting them
out of the conversation. Just cut to the next scene.
To slow down dialogue scenes:
Have characters meander and wander from point to point.
This especially works well in comic dialogue, and is something
Mark Twain did especially well. Imagine conversations you have had
with people who stopped and started, forgot what they wanted to
say, remembered extraneous details that to them suddenly seemed
like something they just had to let you in on.
Warning: A little of this goes a long way. Keep these meanderings
pruned down unless you want your readers to want to murder
the speaker.
Here's a link toThe
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which is an excellent
example of what I'm talking about.
Use more description of what characters are doing, where they
are, and so on.
Instead of:
"I'm not ready to get involved in a murder."
"Then get ready, because you're already involved."
Write:
"I'm not ready to get involved in a murder." Louise wouldn't meet
her sister's eye. Instead she stood there in the kitchen with her
back pressed up against the sink, and with the sun pouring in through
the window catching the fly-away hairs that had escaped her ponytail,
and polished the silver teapot that their mother had left her. The
backlighting from the window made her look like some sort of middle-aged
angel.
Carolyn refused to be evaded. "Then get ready," she said, "because
you're already involved."
Let your characters be good listeners.
But not for too long. Having one person conveying information while
the other person sits there supportively, adding little murmurs
of understanding and appreciation, may be great in real life. But
it's amazing boring to read about.
Go past your main point in concluding the dialogue.
Let the characters wander into other topics to hide the important
information that you've conveyed -- this works well for planting
red herrings in mysteries and in making important story points subtle
instead of emphasized. It's a great way to play fair and still sneak
up on your reader with a surprise or two.
Dialogue Practice
Do two versions of a dialogue between two people, one of whom
is holding information of life-or-death import. In the first version,
get the information across quickly and with emphasis -- make it
exciting.
In the second version, hide the information in the middle of the
dialogue, and make either the speaker not aware that he's let this
info slip, or the listener not catch on to the import of what he's
heard.
If you are a member of the HollyLisle.com Community, you can try
your scenes out, and see how other writers have handled the same
work, by going to the Dialogue
Practice Exercise.
If you aren't, you
can join the community from this link. Or just do these exercises
at home.
Beyond the Basics: Creating the Professional
Plot Outline >>
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