Pacing (Beep, beep!)

A little bit about pacing in a novel. I think I might have spoken to this once before, but somebody asked, so ....

Writers tend to get freaked out about this, but here's my hit on how to keep a story moving.

Up to about 100,000 words, a typical chapter in an action/adventure novel will have three or four scenes. Generally speaking, any scene that runs more than 4-5 pp is probably too long. (For our purposes, a "scene" is usually one setting, with whichever characters you want to showcase. When the viewpoint shifts to a different locale, the scene is over. Not always, but mostly.)

More than a hundred-k, the scenes can be a bit longer, because the volume will allow it. People who pick up an eight-hundred-page novel aren't expecting to see MTV fast cuts, so you can take your time and fill out what you need -- within limits.

There's a story about a old man who goes to circus. He sits down, and a performer comes out leading three elephants. As the audience watches, the guy down in the center ring picks up an elephant and tosses it into the air.

Holy Crap! This is the most astounding thing anybody has ever seen! The crowd goes wild!

But wait! The guy catches the elephant, throws it up again, picks up the second elephant, then the third, and starts to juggle them!

Utterly amazing! The audience is stunned into silence. Impossible! Fantastic!

After a minute, with the guy still juggling three elephants, the old man leans over to his neighbor and says, "Is that it? That's all he's gonna do?"

Even miracles get old. If you get so involved in your research and you want your scene to reflect every bit of it and it runs on for ten pages? It will be boring to a certain percentage of your readers, no matter how fascinating you think it is. If you have two people sitting at a table telling each other stuff they both already know and it runs more than a page or two, that's bad, but even a gunfight palls after a few pages. The days wherein the Waverly novels could spend a hundred pp following the protagonist from his carriage as the strolls up the walk to the manor are gone.

Four, maybe five page for a scene. Past that, the longer it gets, the more a reader will want to skip ahead. Trust me on this. Or don't -- read a book you think really moves well and count the pages. A master storyteller can stretch it, of course, but since I'm not him, I'm telling you how the rest of us do it.

An action/adventure novel needs to be like a roller coaster ride. You can start easy, climb that first rise, then drop like a big rock, slow down to breathe, take off like gangbusters. Mix 'em up, until you get to the last big drop at the end, and then let us hear Goofy's waaaah-hooo-hooo-
hooo-hoooooo -- !

As you get closer to the end, in order to speed things up you can alternate a regular-length chapter with one that is a page or two long. Begin to punch up your language, veer away from "be" verbs and a bunch of adjectives and adverbs and strip the action down. Chop sentences short, use the em-dash, like this:

"Crap -- !"

"Yeah, tell me about -- oh, hell -- !"

What you want is a reader turning pages, not thinking, not looking for flaws in your plot, caught up in what you want him/her to be caught up in.

"I couldn't put it down." is just what you want to hear.