I’m giving a talk via Zoom for Orange County Romance Writers on November 9 on Pacing Tips and that has had me thinking about story pacing, and what I see so very often in writing contests. It is not a too slow pace, but actually a too fast pace–the story speeds ahead as if the writer is worried about losing the reader’s interest. The problem with this is that this steps all over immersing a reader into a story.

Now we’ve all read lists of great opening lines–some of them are on the verge of being cliche they’ve been quoted so soften. Pacing is about far more than just a good opening hook, however.

Any story needs to set the pace–and I often think about this in comparison to a horse race or a runner in a footrace.

There’s the short sprint that needs to be fast from the start to the end.

There’s the marathon or race over a couple of miles for a horse that needs for early speed not to be so fast it burns up the energy and leads to a lackluster finish.

You can hook a reader with a great opening line, and then lose that reader in the first chapter.

You can have a great first chapter, and then the book sags in the middle and the reader’s interest drops away.

You can also have a great premise, but weak execution means the reader is not pulled into a fully realized world with fully developed characters.

Dealing with all of this is what I’ll be talking about with those pacing tips, but what I’m talking about here is to just take a deep breath–and imagine more. Slow it down a bit. Figure out and put in those vital details that make the world come to life.

I think too often writers worry so much about a fast pace–a fast start–that what gets forgotten is building a scene and enjoying the process. There’s so much about agonizing about writing that we forget we love words–and love to put them together in fresh, inventive ways. We forget to pace ourselves and hurry to finish the scene or the chapter or the story, and forget to weave in all the stuff we love the most.

I sometimes wonder if we slowed ourselves down–read a book aloud, sat on a park bench and watched the world go by, took a drive into countryside with no destination in mind, strolled down a street without the idea of hurry or losing weight–would that help bring more to the page?

That’s one thing that writing by hand does–it slows us down a bit. It gives a little more room to thinking and imagining and a little less pressure to get a word count done. I think we have to look at pacing ourselves as well as our stories.

But there are still some more practical tips that can help–and those go into that talk for Orange County Romance Writers.