Monday Mastery: Pacing
A novelist’s approach to engaging readers.
Welcome to Monday Mastery, a series designed to shift your perspective, teach you new techniques, and help you become a more effective writer, one tip at a time.
Reading an 80,000-word book is a much bigger commitment than reading a 1,500-word article. It doesn’t take much — an ounce of boredom, a modicum of friction — for a reader to put a book down.
So when writing a novel, an author has to pay close attention to how they are keeping a reader engaged.
One of the tools a novelist employs to keep a reader engaged is pacing.
On a book level, pacing is the speed at which a story unfolds. But much of the work of pacing actually happens at the sentence level.
Writers control the pacing of each scene — and therefore, the whole book — by intentionally varying sentence length.
Short sentences speed up the pace. For example, action scenes will have shorter sentences to keep the energy high and the speed fast.
Short sentences also snap a reader to attention.
Long sentences slow down the pace. For example, scenes in which a character is reflecting on what happened will have longer sentences, which calm the energy after a rapid-fire action scene.
Long sentences also allow a reader to become more cognitively absorbed in what’s going on.
So how does this apply to shorter pieces of writing?
Varying the pace creates a sense of novelty for your reader, so you can keep reader engagement high by varying your sentence length.
Try it the next time you sit down to write.
Make some sentences longer, and others shorter.
Keep your reader on their toes with a change of pace.