613 – Avoiding Sags in Your Pacing

Every story has its highs and lows, but slower scenes can easily become a slog for readers if we aren’t careful. This week, we’re talking about sags in pacing and how to avoid them. Join us as we discuss ways to rebuild tension after your heroes solve a problem, as well as tips for arranging your scenes to keep the plot from dragging.

Show Notes

• Movement and Pacing
• Tension & Conflict
• Avoiding Confusion During Your Opening
• Four Signs Your Story Escalates Too Quickly
• Freytag’s Pyramid
• Your Plot Is a Fractal
• Legends and Lattes
• Your Story Needs Tension, Not Violence
• Problem-Solving: The Unsung Hero of Every Story
• Five Ways to Restore Tension
• Seven Tricks to Improve Your Minions
• There Is No Antimemetics Division
• Structuring Horror
• Project Hail Mary
• Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.  

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: I know our listeners are used to us getting right onto the topic but what if I just took a nap here? I’m pretty tired.

Oren: [snoring]

Chris: Okay. Well, Oren’s already fallen asleep. He does have a superpower that lets him fall asleep immediately, so it may be just listening to him snore for this podcast. I’m sure listeners won’t get bored. It’ll be fine.

Oren: What could go wrong? I can also talk in my sleep. That’s another power I have.

Chris: So, this time we’re going to be talking about pacing, and in particular, those inevitable sags in pacing and how we might avoid them. So, first, what is pacing? That word is thrown around a lot, and the frustrating thing is it basically means different things depending on whether we’re at the prose level or the plot level that we’re talking about. We’re going to be talking about plot pacing this episode, which is basically the pattern of tension over the course of time throughout your story.

Oren: Does it relate to movement, too? Because movement and tension are linked but they’re not always the same thing.

Chris: Movement can affect it, I think, if the movement is slow, but I think that usually if the tension is actually high, I think it’s unlikely that people would call your pacing slow just because movement is slow. And again, movement is how much it feels like you’re actually making progress on the plot. Like we’ve hit milestones on the way to reaching the ending, and it feels like our main plot is actually advancing, and that the protagonist has reached the next step, that kind of thing. That’s what movement is.

So, I think if the tension is low and the movement is also bad, that can feel even slower. Slow movement does create an overall slow feel, but if the tension is really high and the story’s actually exciting but the movement is low, I don’t think people would say the pacing is too slow. Instead, they would say other things that are more specific to movement like this feels filler or a tangent or characters keep going on side quests that kind of thing or like nothing matters. They’re noticing things that are more specific to movement. So, usually if the pacing is slow there is almost certainly some kind of tension problem or possibly engagement problems in general but almost certainly tension is going to be low for people.

Oren: Right. You can also get a reduced tension if you have other really low engagement factors. Like if you have zero attachment tension will probably be lower because who cares about what happens to any of these characters.

[both laughing]

Chris: That’s a good point because people probably associate high pace with excitement. So, let’s say theoretically we have a main character who readers just don’t like at all and this character is technically going through a lot of action sequences, but they just don’t care if the character lives or dies. They still probably wouldn’t call that slow paced so I guess there are, again, factors in perception other than tension. But I guess we can think of pacing as, you know, does it feel stuff is happening, or is the story just kind of getting bogged down and we’re starting to yawn.

The thing to be aware of with this is that just about every story has pacing sags. We want to do our best because we don’t want a couple chapters where readers start getting bored. That’s no fun. Nobody likes that. At the same time, ideal pacing, like having it from start to finish, is really tricky. So, this is a kind of situation where we’re trying to do our best but there may be places where the pacing sags a little bit and it’s just hard or it’s not worth it to try to get rid of it completely. But certainly, we want to get rid of those where we can.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, I encountered that with the current manuscript that I’m working on. There are just some parts where there are, you know, a lot of relationship things to cover or there’s just some setup that I need to do that is going to take a little while. So, the pacing is not going to be as snappy here as I would like it to be.

Chris: And with setup work in particular, I’ve personally found that sometimes, you know, especially the beginning, usually a lot of setup work happens in the beginning. And if we put it off because we want our beginning to be engaging, because that’s the place where readers are least invested and they’re most likely to quit, is in your beginning. So sometimes writers, they really want their beginning to be exciting, and they put off setup work that’s necessary, it just happens later, and what that tends to do is just move the low-paced area to chapter two. It’s called the Chapter Two Slump, or sometimes it’s Part Two Slump, depending on how your story is divided up. It’s where we had a really exciting beginning, but we still had to do that setup work we just put it off, and so then right after our exciting beginning we have a sag. That’s hard to get rid of.

Oren: Yeah, and it can often result in a situation where the beginning, while exciting, is also very confusing. Or even, it’s technically exciting but the reader doesn’t care because they haven’t been given the context that would make them care. That can also happen sometimes.

Chris: Personally, I like opening with a problem but sometimes having a problem that’s not your highest stakes big world problem oftentimes isn’t the best problem to start with. Where something that’s much smaller scope and more personal to your protagonist generally allows a little bit more time. And we don’t have to open immediately with a fight. If your story has lots of fights that still might be a good option, but you don’t necessarily have to open immediately with a fight so that you have a little bit more time. And again, just building attachment to that protagonist so that we can feel tension later is just a good investment. But every beginning is different. Beginnings are super tough as is pacing. So let me just describe for a bit what ideal pacing looks like. We’ve talked about this before, but it’s been a while.

Oren: This is the ideal pacing graph. You may not like it, but this is what Peak Tension looks like.

Chris: [laughing] Uh, yeah. So, we want a point, what we call the pointy escalator. We could call it a series of mountain peaks but, basically, it’s a staircase but the stairs are too pointy. They’re like little sharp spikes that go upwards instead of regular stairs.

Oren: Yeah, it would be very uncomfortable to use this escalator.

Chris: Because what this is, this is just a graph of what we call the story’s throughline, which is the big main plot that holds it together and then that’s divided into smaller arcs called child arcs and each one has a problem and a resolution to that problem. And what we want is kind of like a slow climb of tension where each scene is tenser than the last until we reach some kind of peak, which is like some kind of exciting conflict is going to go there. Especially if it’s an exciting action scene, we don’t want that to go on forever, after a while, the audience is going to be ready for a change. They’re going to start to get exhausted if we have super intense action for too long, and so we want to resolve that and give them some satisfaction. And so, then we have a sharper decline in tension, so it drops a bit as that arc concludes, and then we want to slowly climb again to the next peak, and then sharp dropoff that’s shorter. But we want each peak to be higher than the last, and each valley that comes right after the peak to be higher than the last.

One thing you can do to create that shape, let’s say you do have some setup scenes that you need to get done, but it’s flexible where they go, so you can put your smaller, your personal, slower, maybe they’re a little more emotional, those scenes, put them right after your action scenes or your most exciting scenes. Just by doing that placement that will help because after something exciting happens is when the audience is really ready to slow down and take a breath and that variety is really refreshing to them. So that’s when they will feel the least slow and to be the most tolerated. And then ideally after you have that slow down breather scene, you start building up again and try to have each sequence that you put afterwards be a little tenser than the last sequence and build up. That’s kind of what we want. And again, this is all relative, so some stories are going to have a lot more tension than others. This doesn’t just apply to exciting action stories. This also applies to cozies and to low-stakes lifestyle stories. This applies to Legends and Lattes and its million imitators.

Oren: Yeah, it’s just a question of scale. Some stories are going to have much higher peaks in general, but that same shape will be there. When I was editing, there was a distinct feeling I got used to where we would have something exciting happen and then the main character would go and, like, you know, have a nice, relaxing cup of tea with their friend or spend some time petting their cat or something like that. I’d be like, “Okay, this is a nice change of pace. This is nice. This feels relaxing.” And then they would go to the library and check out a book and I’d be like, “Wait, hang on. Okay, this has been going on for a little while.” And then they would go swim some laps in the swimming pool. So, I’m like, “No, this is too long. Get me back in there. I need to get back in the excitement. We’ve been doing this for too many scenes. You’re out of time.” And I got very used to that feeling just because pacing’s hard and a lot of authors really struggled with having enough things for their characters to do to keep the pacing up.

Chris: Yeah, the total tension is almost less important than the relative tension from one part of the story to the next. So, if we see a sequence of several scenes and they’re generally going down in tension, instead of going up in tension, the same scene could feel boring or really interesting depending on where it’s placed, because once the audience gets used to higher tension everything else seems more boring in comparison.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: Until they’re ready for that change. Once we reach a peak we can go down again but that should be the climax of something happening, a big step, that child arc, and them making progress. So, we continue to see it’s never even. It’s never perfectly even, the slope, if we’re climbing up. It’s never perfectly even. It’s a fractal. There’s always more little pointy escalators. There may be pointy escalators even within a scene but that’s the general pattern that we are trying to create from start to finish where we can.

So, Oren talked about one way this goes wrong, which is that we have an exciting moment and then we have too many quiet scenes after this exciting moment. I feel this is particularly likely for writers that haven’t gotten used to structure yet, and they know, “Okay, I’m supposed to do something exciting periodically,” and so then they have a random fight scene or a random action sequence or something terrible happen, but they haven’t learned to build. You know, you want to start by introducing a problem that comes with possible consequences, that threat, those stakes, to build tension, and that should be looming over the protagonist for a bit and then come to a head at our conflict. If everything’s fine and we’re just doing our swimming laps and having tea and then suddenly the bad guys burst in and there’s a big fight that’s out of nowhere, that’s not really integrated into the story structure. Instead, it’s like, “Oh, the bad guys are coming. I need to find somebody who can help me deal with that. What if I have tea with this really important person who can help me deal with these bad guys who are going to burst in in two chapters?”

Oren: Yeah, there we go.

Chris: That’s what we should see, is that there’s a looming issue, and then the protagonist is trying to deal with it, and then it comes to a head. Not like everything’s totally fine until, you know, random action sequence.  

Oren: Yeah. The one that gets authors a lot is the failing to restore tension. That one is particularly insidious because a lot of authors are getting some of their cues from video games, and video games, by the nature of their medium, are more likely to get away with having you fight the same boss over and over again, and have that kind of work, because the video game can just make the boss more powerful and then you as the player just have no choice but to accept that that is the new reality because you’re interacting with it. Which is not to say that it always works. I’ve still played video games where it feels, I feel bad beating this boss again for like the fifth time.  

[Chris laughing]

Oren: But it is more passable in a video game just because, you know, a video game has numbers that it can say, “The numbers have gone up” and now I have to deal with those numbers. Whereas in books, yes, even LitRPG, the numbers are fake. None of them are real. So that isn’t going to work. And so, this is a problem that a lot of books run into and is one of the reasons why we recommend you not really having direct confrontations with the villain early in the story.

Chris: Yeah, let me expand on that a bit. Oren mentioned restoring tension, just reminders of what we were talking about with that. Tension depends on this feeling of uncertainty where we have to be kind of a little nervous about whether the protagonist is actually going to succeed in avoiding disaster or not. And how likely they are to avoid problems matters to that uncertainty. So, what technically happens during most stories is that your protagonist is probably going to get some kind of wins. They’re going to take some forward, make some kind of progress. They get a new enchanted sword, they, in a worst-case scenario, beat up the Big Bad early, like Oren is talking about, or maybe it’s just they beat up a minion early. Something is going to go well for them and it’s going to make it look like this problem is easier to solve than before and tension is going to go down as a result.

And again, we talked about tension being very relative, so we’re trying to keep it going up, not going down. This typically happens a lot after, like we talked about, having come to a peak, and then tension can drop, but we don’t want it to drop too much. We can have a quiet scene for a change of pace but we still want it to feel like there’s that looming disaster that the protagonist is going to have to deal with and that it’s going to be really hard to deal with. So, you want to do something after your protagonist gets any kind of win to show actually, no, this is still going to be really, really hard. In many cases you just make the problem harder in some way. Sometimes it just works if, for instance, they got a victory but it’s now that you’ve gotten that enchanted sword you have to go fight an entire army by yourself. And if they know the next thing they have to do is going to be really dangerous, for instance, that can be enough, just so that we have another source of tension to kind of pick things up after they get a big win that makes everything look easier. So, in the case of a video game where your protagonist is just fighting the same boss again and again, we wouldn’t want to do that in a story because that history of wins is just going to make this boss look like a pushover.

Oren: Yeah, and you also need to keep in mind how you’re going to make things look more difficult because it’s very easy to fall into the trap of, well, my hero has gotten a win, and especially if it’s a new power, and it’s not just like my hero has gotten a win like, “I was able to stop my family from being evicted or something. It’s like, my hero has gotten a win, now they can shoot fire from their hands. You need to avoid just feeling like, all right, well now I’ve given the bad guys a symmetrical upgrade to maintain parity. Otherwise, it’s going to feel like your characters are on a treadmill