Keep Readers Hooked with Effective Pacing
If you want readers to keep turning pages, continually trim and tighten your scenes.
Pacing. It’s one of the biggest factors that separates publishable manuscripts from those that aren’t good enough. I read plenty of comic scripts and novels that have a great premise and cool plot points, but they’re kinda boring.
The answer isn’t to drop in an action scene or a plot twist you haven’t earned. More times than not, it’s pacing.
Both of my novellas from last year (The Wishing Stone and Santa’s Dark Legacy) suffered from this. They’re both well-written and engaging, but I never felt like I nailed the pacing. They weren’t fast enough. Not tight enough.
If you want to see how pacing works, rewatch one of your favorite TV shows. In the last year, I’ve rewatched the opening seasons of Severence, The Bear, and Ozark. I was shocked at the speed of each episode. At how many beats, plot points, and new clues the writers managed to sneak in.
You probably don’t write television scripts, but one of the consistent elements of all genre fiction is proper pacing.
Writing a comic? Reread a handful of your favorite traditionally published comics. See if you can spot how many beats, plot points, clues, and new bits of information the writer manages to fit in. Now go read your latest draft (or even the latest issue you snagged on Kickstarter). See any differences?
If you’re a novelist, reread the opening chapter or two of your favorite crime thriller or horror novel. Perhaps you remember the author pulling you in slowly, but when you go back a second time, you might be surprised at how quickly that first major plot point shows up. Or how quickly the action gets started.
Of course, there’s more to it than the number of scenes. Many, if not most, early drafts start too slowly, spending unnecessary pages building the character or the setting instead of jumping into the action and moving the story forward.
From there, stories that are going to sell and get a reader’s attention continually move forward. They’re tight. They don’t get bogged down in unnecessary detail. The dialogue sounds real, but it’s also fluid and keeps the story moving, usually because the conversation takes place while the characters are actually doing something.
Many dialogue-heavy scenes in the manuscripts I edit come to a crawl because characters stop to talk. Seriously, go read a popular thriller novel. How often do you see detectives just chatting over a cup of coffee? Or read an epic fantasy. How many battle scenes stop long enough for the soldiers to talk around the campfire? Not many.
Look, I’m not going to solve your pacing problems with a Substack post you’re skimming while watching a YouTube video. But if you’re serious about writing a story that engages readers from page one, you need to constantly evaluate your pacing.
If the details slow down a scene, trim it.
If the dialogue feels bloated, tighten the conversation and reveal the information through action.
If a scene doesn’t move the story forward, cut it, or rewrite it so it does.