✪ Rick's Scribbles & Notions 📝

On Pacing

I watched a video last night on how to have better pacing in your stories by YouTuber 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 flow better. The secret, she says, is in creating mini-arcs. Every writer should treat each chapter as if it were its own microscopic story. It should have a beginning, a rising action, a midpoint with a climax, and a resolution. If each chapter can have a self-contained story, it makes the pacing to the next chapter much easier. The next chapter should be another mini-arc, a continuation of the resolution in the first mini-arc. And so forth.

We're all familiar with setting up plot points and creating the overarching birds-eye-view narrative, but this is the first time that someone zooms into the chapter by chapter level and explains it in a way that makes sense for me. I've always known that we need to go from point A to point B (the end of the story) but when it comes down to it, that's not really what the reader cares about when they are reading our story. What they care about is how we take the story from point A to point B. Those things, those mini-arcs as The Second Story calls them, need to have their own satisfying conclusions, their own satisfying resolutions, for the reader to keep trudging along to the next chapter, and the next. Each of those tales build up to the larger narrative and eventually reach the final climax of the book.

I'll leave the video below in case you're interested in watching her go over this. I may not have done it justice when explaining it. Suffice it to say, this new piece of knowledge is going into my notes and I'll be following it from now on.