"Pacing in Writing: How to Control the Speed of a Story"

Pacing in writing is the speed at which a story seems to move for the reader: how much story time passes in how many words, and how quickly one event leads to the next. A fast passage covers a lot of story in few words, or puts quick action on the page in short sentences. A slow passage spends many words on a short stretch of time: a description, a memory, a character thinking. Good pacing is not the same as fast pacing. It is the right speed at each point, and a change of speed when the reader needs one.

Pacing works at three sizes. In the sentence, through length and rhythm. In the scene, through how much is shown moment by moment and how much is summarised. In the whole book, through the order and length of its scenes. Most pacing problems in a novel are at the third size, and they are the easiest to see once you look at a book as a list of scenes with their lengths.

What Is Pacing in Writing?

Every story has two clocks. One is story time: the hours, days or years that pass for the characters. The other is reading time, which on the page is measured in words. Pacing is the ratio between them.

The French critic Gérard Genette set this out in Narrative Discourse (1972; English translation 1980). He found four basic speeds, which he called "the four narrative movements":

Genette says scene "realizes conventionally the equality of time between narrative and story", and calls summary "a form with variable tempo". Every novel is built from these four, and pacing is the choice of which one to use, and for how long.

What Is the Difference Between Scene and Summary?

Scene and summary are the two speeds a novelist uses most, and the idea is older than Genette. Percy Lubbock, in The Craft of Fiction (1921), called them the "panoramic" and the "scenic" way of telling a story, and described the reader's place in each: "in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it."

He did not prefer one. He expected a novel to alternate, and described the rhythm: "we expect to find that the scene presently yields to some kind of chronicle or summary, and that this in turn prepares the way and leads into the occasion that fulfils it." Scenes are the high points. Summary carries the reader between them. A book that is all scene is exhausting; a book that is all summary feels like a report. The same balance sits behind the rule to show, don't tell, which is really advice about when to use a scene.

Lubbock also named the scene that slows a book for no reason: "A scene that is not really wanted, and that does nothing in particular ... is a weakness in a story". That is the first thing to look for when a draft drags.

What Makes Pacing Fast or Slow?

Speed comes from the choices below. None is good or bad on its own; each one is a tool for a part of the book that needs it.

Sentence length is the smallest of these tools, and the easiest to hear. The writing teacher Gary Provost demonstrated it in a passage from his book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, which Roy Peter Clark reprints in Writing Tools (2006): "This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous." The passage then varies its sentences on purpose: "Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music."

In Dwight V. Swain's scene and sequel pattern, a story alternates between scenes (a goal, a conflict, a disaster) and sequels (a reaction, a dilemma, a decision). Swain gives the sequel three jobs, and one of them is "To control tempo." A long sequel lets the reader breathe after a disaster. A short one, or none, keeps the book running.

How Do You Speed Up the Pacing of a Story?

• Cut what the reader would skip. Elmore Leonard's tenth rule: "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." He named the usual culprit: "thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them."
• Enter scenes late and leave early. Start at the first moment of conflict, not with a character arriving and taking off a coat. End on the question, not after the answer has been explained.
• Summarise travel and routine. A week of nothing can be one sentence of summary or a clean time skip.
• Shorten sentences and paragraphs in action. White space reads fast.
• Turn description into action. Let the reader see the room through what the character does in it.
• Raise the stakes or add a deadline. A clock makes every scene feel faster, because each one uses up time the character does not have.

How Do You Slow Down the Pacing of a Story?

Slowing down is just as much a skill. A book with no slow passages gives a reader no time to feel anything.

• Write a sequel after a big scene. Let the character react and decide. That is where the reader takes in what just happened.
• Expand the important moment. At a climax, slow the clock: one second can take a paragraph, so the reader stays in it.
• Use description where the place matters. Put it before the danger, not during it.
• Lengthen sentences. Long, rolling sentences slow the eye and suit grief, calm and wonder.

How Do You Fix a Sagging Middle?

A sagging middle is a stretch, usually in the second act, where the story loses speed: scenes repeat one another, the stakes stop rising, and the reader can put the book down. It is the most common pacing problem in a first draft. To find and fix it:

1. List every scene with its length. Long runs of slow scenes, or one scene far longer than its neighbours, show up at once.
2. Ask what each slow scene does. If it does nothing new, cut it or merge it with another. This is Lubbock's "scene that is not really wanted".
3. Look inside the longest scene. A very long scene is often two scenes, or a scene with a sequel attached. Splitting it gives the reader a break and a new start.
4. Add a turn. A reversal, a new problem or a midpoint change of direction restarts the momentum. A subplot can also carry the reader across a slow stretch of the main plot.
5. Check chapter endings. End more chapters on a question (a cliffhanger is the sharpest kind), and look at how long your chapters are: shorter chapters make a book feel faster.

A Worked Example

The Ice Road is a short story about Nell, a lorry driver making the last run across a frozen lake before the thaw, kept short here so the numbers are easy to read. The first draft has five scenes:

The list shows the problem before anyone reads the book. The middle scene is three times the length of its neighbours, and it is slow. Read closely, it is two things: Nell alone with her thoughts (a sequel, which the story needs, but short), and a stranger at the door who wants a lift across (a scene, with a goal and a conflict of its own).

Split at the knock, the middle becomes a short slow scene of 214 words followed by a fast one of 255. The book now alternates: fast, fast, slow, fast, fast, slow. Nothing has been cut, but the drag is gone, because the reader gets a new scene, and a new question, halfway through what used to be a long wait.

How Do You Check Pacing in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app. Its Outliner shows the book as a board of cards, one for every document, each with a synopsis, and as a list with a word count for every scene. That list is the quickest way to see a book's pace.

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft. Each scene is a card; write what happens in its synopsis.
2. Switch the Outliner to List View with the view button in its header. Every scene is a row with its Words. Click the Words heading to sort by length, and click it again for the longest first.
3. Open one scene and make two labels called "Fast" and "Slow" (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses), each in its own colour.
4. Back in the list, set a label on every row. Read down the list: a long run of "Slow", or one long slow row in the middle, is where the book drags.
5. To split a long scene, open it, cut the second half, then click the + (Add to Draft) beside Draft in the Binder and choose Scene. With a scene open, the new scene goes straight after it. Paste the second half in and give it a name.
6. Back in the list, the two halves show their own word counts and labels, in order.

For moving whole scenes once you see the problem, the Outliner's board lets you drag cards into a new order, and the move is saved to the book.

Who Said "Drama Is Life With the Dull Bits Cut Out"?

Alfred Hitchcock, but the wording is often wrong. It is often quoted as "A good story is life with the dull parts taken out." His actual words, in François Truffaut's book of interviews Hitchcock (1967), are about a film's story: "That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out." He said "drama", not "a good story", and "the dull bits cut out", not "the dull parts taken out".

The five-word-sentence passage is real, and it is Gary Provost's. Online copies often reword it or drop his name. Clark, who reprints it in Writing Tools, credits it to Provost's book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing and calls it a "tour de force".

Common Mistakes

• Thinking fast pacing is good pacing. A book that never slows down is tiring and flat. Speed only reads as speed beside something slower.
• Fixing pace line by line first. Most pacing problems are in the order and length of scenes. Fix those before trimming sentences.
• Backstory in the opening chapters. Long flashbacks and history before the reader cares stop a book before it starts. Feed them in later, in small pieces.
• Description in the middle of action. Put the room before the fight, not halfway through it.
• Cutting every quiet scene. Sequels are where readers feel what happened. Shorten them; don't delete them all.
• Every chapter the same length and shape. Varying chapter and scene length is a pacing tool in itself.

Sources

Retrieved 30 October 2026.

• Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin (Cornell University Press, 1980), the chapter "Duration" (Internet Archive).
• Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921), chapters V and VIII (Project Gutenberg).
• Dwight V. Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer (University of Oklahoma Press, 1973; first published 1965), chapter 4 (Internet Archive).
• Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (Little, Brown, 2006), reprinting Gary Provost's passage on sentence length from 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Internet Archive).
• Elmore Leonard, Ten rules for writing fiction, The Guardian, 24 February 2010, rule 10.
• François Truffaut, Hitchcock (Simon and Schuster, 1967) (Internet Archive).