Day 26: Don't Show Your Underwear Unless You Know....
Pacing your novel and stuff.
One of the things a lot of us writers do is we show everything.
We show the character walking to the car.
We show the character changing their underwear.
We show the character picking their teeth.
And here’s the thing: unless your story is meant to be about the mundane nature of life, you’re probably not helping your story by showing these things.
You want to cut this stuff out in most stories. You don’t need to show your character driving to school unless something important happens in that car ride. It’s realistic, yes. But it’s not super interesting.
You want to focus on only the important moments.
If you don’t? You ruin the pacing of your novel and when you ruin the pacing? Readers put your book down and never pick it back up again.
So, basically, don’t show everyone your character’s underwear unless there is a point to it.
I’ve written a ton about pacing, but let me share one of those previous writings here because it relates to this (scenes not underwear).
PACING YOUR NOVEL
There are a lot of components to pacing in your novel. You can think of it as:
The big picture, how fast and slow your whole novel goes. How scenes link together.
The scene, how fast and slow the individual scene moves
The page, how sentences and white space and even punctuation influence how quickly or slowly the reader moves through the story. This is the pacing of each line.
It’s linked to your novel’s structure in those individual scenes and how those scenes cycle through your story (some more active and others not so much). It’s also linked to your style and tone (your sentence length, word use, paragraph length). It also is linked to genre expectations.
When we settle in to a tome like Outlander or Game of Thrones, we’re expecting a slower pace than if we’re opening up a Tess Gerritsen novel.
So, it’s a lot, right?
It’s up to us writers to know the expectations (potentially even subverting them) and then slowing the speed up or down.
Typically, the story is the fastest paced at these moments:
1. In the opening
2. In the middle
3. In the climax.
The story tends to go faster when:
1. There’s action happening. So, during an action scene. Most authors try to avoid long sentences full of clauses and detailed description and transitions here.
2. Dialogue without a lot of setting details, transitions or other things involved.
3. When there’s a cliff hanger. That’s basically just when the reader is compelled to turn the page to find out what happens next in the story.
4. Scene changes.
5. Scene changes in rapid succession.
6. Shorter chapters.
7. Shorter scenes.
8. Your words are simple and concrete and your sentences are short.
9. Your words are harsh. What do I mean here. Just when they have hard sounds. Like Gs and Cs and Ks.
The story tends to go more slowly when:
1. There’s no action happening. So exposition or setting or a pondering scene.
2. There are a lot of setting details, internal monologue (in paragraph form), backstory and exposition.
3. Longer chapters.
4. Longer scenes.
5. Your words are complex and abstract and your sentences are long and full of colons or semicolons and clauses.
6. Your words are softer. There aren’t those hard consonants and they make you think of more mellow things, so passive language.
Wow. I went very list-focused for this post. I hope you don’t mind. If you ever want me to explain anything more (in this post or any other), just let me know in the comments, okay?
PLACE TO SUBMIT
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
This magazine is pretty cool and it has a couple of opportunities going on:
Mysterious Photograph - The Story That Won
Each issue features a Mysterious Photograph. Readers are invited to submit a 250-word (or less) flash fiction story based on the photo. The person who invents the best mystery story receives a prize of $25, and the story is published in a future issue and on our web site. See this month’s winner.
AHMM and The Wolfe Pack, the official Nero Wolfe appreciation society, team up each year to sponsor an annual writing contest that seeks to honor an unpublished work of fiction written in the tradition of the Nero Wolfe mystery stories by Rex Stout. Rex Stout was a master of the novella form and published dozens of novellas featuring the corpulent and irascible detective Nero Wolfe and his sidekick Archie Goodwin. Today, the novella is uncommon, though AHMM has a long tradition of publishing novellas. More information on the contest, including submission guidelines, can be found here.
Writing Exercise: Cutting the Fat – Eliminating Boring Scenes
Objective:
This exercise will help writers identify and remove unnecessary or dull scenes (such as characters commuting, making coffee, or walking to a location) while maintaining the flow of the story.
Step 1: Identify the Drag
Choose a scene in your current work-in-progress that feels slow, repetitive, or unnecessary (e.g., a character driving to work, making dinner, or getting ready for the day).
Ask yourself: Does this scene reveal character, advance the plot, or build tension? If not, it might need to go.
Step 2: Boil It Down
Rewrite the scene in one sentence that conveys only the essential information. Example:
Instead of: Julia sat in traffic, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, watching the red glow of brake lights ahead.
Try: Julia arrived at the office, already irritated by the morning traffic.
Step 3: Seamless Transitions
Look at the previous and following scenes. Could you skip the boring scene entirely and transition smoothly?
Try using a jump cut or brief summary instead of a full scene. Example:
By the time she reached the office, Julia's headache had doubled. The argument with Sam was still ringing in her ears.
Step 4: Replace with Action or Subtext
If the scene contains necessary emotional beats, find a more dynamic way to deliver them. Instead of a long commute where a character broods, let their emotions spill into a tense conversation upon arrival.
Bonus Challenge:
Take a dull scene from a book or movie (e.g., a character walking down a hallway, making tea) and rewrite it to either:
Be condensed into one sentence
Be skipped entirely through an effective transition
Be reworked into an engaging scene by adding conflict, suspense, or subtext