✪ Rick's Scribbles & Notions 📝

How To Achieve Better Pacing

Today marks the launch of Project Forge—a personal initiative of mine to hammer my writing skills into shape. (Yes, I gave my writing journey a dramatic name. Don’t laugh.) The idea came to me last night while setting up a new Evernote stack for all the writing lessons I’ve been picking up—things to avoid as a writer, habits to build, etc. But I realized the only way to ensure that the stack wouldn't get buried in an already chaotic digital clutter was to make it stand out in some way. And as I was organizing my notes, I thought, You know what this needs? A name. A proper name.

Yep. I know, it's cheesy. But that's okay. The important part is that I'm organizing all of the knowledge I'm acquiring from books, videos, and articles into one place so that I can come back later and go over them whenever I want. Project Forge is how I'm going to learn how to become a better wordsmith. It's going to be the database for all of the lessons (both good and bad) that I learn while trying to improve my prose. So I'm happy about it! I haven’t put this much focused effort into my writing in a while, and it’s exciting to finally get back to it.

Alright, with that aside, let me get into the part of the blog where I talk about what I learned this week on creative writing.

Mini-arcs! Pacing! The rising action! Climax!
(Sorry, I'm just yelling things at you now.)

I watched a video last night. I know, amazing, right? No, listen, I watched a video on how to have better pacing in your writing by a YouTuber called The Second Story. Her video titled, "How to Write Any Story - Why Pacing is Everything" had some really good insights into what makes a story have good pacing. How do we define pacing? If we look at the Wikipedia article on pacing, it says: Pacing is determined by the length of the scenes, how fast the action moves, and how quickly the reader is provided with information. But The Second Story offers a better description of pacing: "Pacing is how an author presents the events of the plot in a way that provides steady, natural progression and flow to the story."

What The Second Story is describing is Tempo. It's how you control the flow of the narrative so that you influence the reader's experience from scene to scene. It's not the speed at which information is presented, nor the amount of words that you use in those scenes, but how you move the acts along and connect each branching story beat together in a way that is satisfying.

So how do we achieve that? The answer, The Second Story proposes, is called the mini-arc.

In her video, she explains that every writer should treat each chapter as if it were its own microscopic story. It should have a beginning, a midpoint (a climax), and a resolution. And then naturally progress that mini-arc to the next mini-arc, connecting the resolution or descending action of the first tiny tale to the beginning and setup of the second tiny tale that follows. In essence, that natural progression from tale to tale is what creates good pacing. It's brilliant!

I'll leave the video below in case you're interested in watching her explain it. I may not have done it justice. Suffice it to say, this new piece of knowledge is going into my notes for the Forge folder!