Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 21.26: Setting the Pace

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-26-setting-the-pace

Key Points: Controlling pace: Cadence, transitions, tone. Dialogue. Informational beats. Rubber banding. Short period of time, but great detail. Contrast.

[Season 21, Episode 26]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 26]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses. Setting the Pace.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] And I get to set the pace. For this episode, I am sitting in the driver's seat of the pace car with my foot on the virtual gas or maybe the virtual brake. And I'd like to talk about how we find those pebbles in our fiction. How do you make the pace car go faster? How do you make it go slower? How do you swerve it out of the way so that they can have a race? The metamor... metaphor may have fallen apart 

[laughter] 

[Howard] at this point. Um, but where's the gas? Where's the brake?

[Mary Robinette] I find that there are so many different tools that you can use to control the pace. Like a lot of what we've been talking about already through the season are just secretly different ways of controlling pace. And I want to go ahead and say right up front that fast does not equal good. Slow does not equal bad. But the three kind of big umbrellas... and then we can if anyone wants to drill into them deeper. The three sort of big umbrella areas that I use when I'm controlling pace are the cadence, like fast versus slow scenes, transitions, how I move from one thing to another, and then tone.

[Erin] That makes sense to me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I mean, I would not want to put holes in any of those umbrellas.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing. 

[Erin] Because then they won't function as well. 

[laughter]

[Erin] But I'm curious when you're talking about cadence, like, it's interesting. Cadence is such a word to me that's speech associated.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] How fast you speak. I have the fast cadence of somebody who grew up in New York City. Other people have slower cadences and some of that has to do with where you're from, how your family speaks. But a story's cadence is determined by the writer. And so I'm wondering, like, what kind of tools are you using in sort of creating that cadence?

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad that you said that you think of cadence in terms of speech, because I always go back to the fact that writing developed to convey the spoken language. Like, the whole idea of storytelling began when people were just telling stories. So, for me, it's the same things that I use when I am trying to control dialogue on a page. But you can do it on a macro scale. There's, like, the length of a sentence, the length of a scene, the length of a paragraph, the length of a chapter. Punctuation, punctuation or white space. That exists to control breath and pauses. So it's how long you talk, how long you pause, and then the contrast between things.

[Howard] I love the... just the statement that writing developed to convey spoken language. Because one of the things that is really useful for controlling pace, and then within it there are lots of pacing elements, is dialogue. If you have... if you want it to sound like people are interrupting one another as they speak, they are stepping on the ends of each other's sentences as they talk, there's the double dash that commonly gets used in comics. I don't know what they use in prose?

[Mary Robinette] M-dash.

[Howard] Yeah, m-dash. Where you... instead of a period or a question mark, you get interrupted with an m-dash and then the next line of dialogue begins. And that's... I mean yes, that creates that pace, but if you throw in a said bookism, that so and so interrupted, then you've dragged the pace back because you added words for me to read. And so in order to use that tool effectively, you have to have established ahead of time for the reader the voice of each of the characters so that it is very clear who is talking without you having to drop those cues because you want the conversation to go fast. You have to leave those bits out.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and part of what happens there also is that when you're doing that, you're leaving more white space on the page. So the reader is literally reading less and that's one of the things that you can control that if the reader is... I mean they are literally spending more time reading words, it can often slow things down. Like if you want to do a slow-mo moment in a book, you can describe, like, the way the bead of water dripped down the side of the glass, each pebbled indentation in the glass catching it... And it's like, oh my god. But you can slow it down that way and you're just literally spending more words on it.

[Erin] What I think is really interesting is that can work both ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. 

[Erin] So if somebody is freaking out, like, about something, they will speak quickly in long run-on sentences. But the thing that you're talking about, which is also more words on the page, feels slow. And I actually think a lot of it is about the speed in which new informational beats hit the reader within that. So you talked about the bead of water, but everything else you're saying is, like, more about the bead, more about the water, and so it feels slow because it's long, but it's all one thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Whereas somebody who is having, like, a panic attack or really excited about something will skip from topic to topic very rapidly in that long period of things, which then feels like information is hitting you faster and so therefore it is a faster paced moment for you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I am so glad you brought this up because this is one of the things I always think about Flounder and Little Mermaid. There's this moment in the movie where he's like, "So, there was a shark and then he chased us and we went into a hole and we came back out and it was and then, then we were safe. Whew!" 

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And there's no punctuation in that. So, like, it is... You can do that on the page. Like, I think that that's such a good observation about the jumping from topic to topic as moving you through things faster. Which. again, if you go to a macro scale, also happens if you do a montage, like the training sequence. You hit a bunch of different things, but each one is just like five sentences long, and then you go into the next one.

[Erin] It's almost... It reminds me of driving. Now, I don't drive...

[laughter]

[Erin] But I love driving.

[Howard] It reminds me of this thing that I don't actually do, but I've heard a lot about...

[Erin] But I'm often in the car while other people are doing it very successfully, and I have time to look at the scenery around me because I don't have to look at the road. And I think a lot of times, if you are in, like, a not exciting scenery place, where everything is, like, flat. There are, like, those places in the US where it's, like, flat and no crops are grown and there's no interesting geological features and you're just going and you're like in desert land.

[Howard] I drove through those from Utah to Los Angeles. 

[laughter]

[Erin] And it's, like, there's no change, and I think that's what the difference is.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Whereas if you are driving that same distance, but you're in a city and there's, like, thousands of different buildings and there's billboards and there's a mountain and there's a valley. All that stuff makes it feel like you're getting somewhere faster, even though you are not, because there's so much to distract you and to bring you along.

[Mary Robinette] And I think this is also what happens when you put too much information into something. We're going to talk about exposition next week, but I do want to flag that I think there is a limit to how much new information a reader can take in. And if you try to cram too much of it into a moment, that it feels rushed, even if nothing is actually happening in the scene. You can lose the reader because they're like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. I don't have enough time to take everything in."

[Erin] This makes me think of a montage. I'm so sorry. And then I'll be done. This makes me think of a montage, which is... A montage is a way of taking a lot of information and creating a boundary around it, like driving through Vegas and seeing casino after casino after casino. After a while, they just become the casino part of Vegas...

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Erin] As opposed to you noticing necessarily each one. except for maybe one that stands out. And so I think that in order to not make it feel like it's overwhelming, the montage tells us, we're going to get a lot of rapid things, but it all's going to take place in one really cool box that you... The only thing you have to pay attention to is that box.

[Howard] So there's this experience that I had numerous times back in the days when I commuted, which is that I would start my drive and arrive at work and realize that I didn't remember the drive. The drive was about 15 minutes long. And at first, you know, I was very afraid. Did I fall asleep? Was I not paying attention? What happened? And I developed a pet theory which may or may not be supported by actual neuroscience, which is that short-term memory has to get committed at some point to long-term memory for us to remember things. And there are anesthesias that will prevent that from happening. You communicate just fine, but you have no long-term memory of the conversation. And the pet theory is this. If my short-term memory is being filled up with things that I've seen a thousand times before and short-term memory compares to long-term memory and says it's the same stretch freeway as it was yesterday. Nothing interesting has happened. There were no threats. We don't actually need to remember the details. We just need to know what we got there and it doesn't get committed. And then I arrive. And the point here is that for readers with the pacing, sometimes we don't want to commit things to the long-term memory. We just want to get them there.

[Mary Robinette] You will be happy to know that your theory is actually backed up by science. They have studied this.

[Howard] Yay.

[Mary Robinette] And basically what happens is that we will put similar things into the same box. So if you've done this thing, your memory will be like, "Oh, I know this. This gets filed here with all of the other drives." Which is why when you're writing, that if you... If everything is fast or everything is slow, that the pace is going to feel off. It's going to feel rushed as opposed to I'm excited, when you're in the failure mode of one of those." And that's also why having contrast is so important. And one of the contrasts that we personally can do is a break.

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[Erin] I'm going to be a horrible person right now and refuse to contrast because I'm so excited about something... 

[laughter]

[Erin] That Howard said before the break that I'm just going to drag us back there.

[Mary Robinette] I love this.

[Erin] Which is that I've always thought of that thing where you, like, something feels like it took a lot of time when it was happening, but then it snaps into one small memory as rubber banding. And I thought about this when I trained for a marathon, and, for context, I'm extraordinarily slow and so, like, I would go on these 4 hour runs. And it's like... Actually they were, I guess, different every time, but I don't really enjoy running, I was just doing it because it was on my bucket list. So I'd just be like, man, I'm running, and then during the run, I would have lots of really small micro thoughts that were interesting and kept me upright. But as soon as I got back home I was like, oh, I did that thing, and I just put it all in the box, unless, to contrast with my normal run, something particularly interesting happened that caught my eye. Something that stopped me from doing the thing that I would always be doing. And so I wonder if kind of thinking about our structure and something you said earlier, Howard, we kind of establish this, like, cadence, this feeling like you said with dialogue of what the thing is normally, so that when we have that moment of contrast, it actually does stick out...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because we've established this is the pace, this is the pace, ah! This is different.

[Howard] One of the most commonly deployed pacing mechanisms... applications of pacing is when the things that are taking place are happening across a very short period of time, but we are describing them in great detail, which mirrors a thing that I've seen happen in my own brain, which is that I had an experience which couldn't have lasted more than 10 seconds. But the description of it takes 5 minutes. It was an icy road thing, where I discovered that the car in front of me had the brake lights on, but it was accelerating away. And I realized, oh, there's black ice on the hill. And I looked down at the bottom of the hill and think, well, I'm going to have to find a way to go around this person because they're in trouble. And... but there's cars that are turning on either side of the road down... No, wait, they're not turning. There's piles of cars down there with hazard lights on. And, oh, no, there are like three traffic accidents at the bottom of this hill. I need to make a decision. And the decision I made was I'm going to drive on the wrong side of the road. And I slide over to the wrong side of the road, and realize, wow, there's not even any traction over here. And the road bends a little bit. That driveway, I bet, doesn't have black ice on it, and the yard doesn't have black ice on it. And so I'm going to drive through this person's yard while oncoming traffic passes me, and then I'm going to cut back onto the road. And the whole thing worked. This was on my commute...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] One morning in Utah. The whole thing worked. I've driven past that location countless times and looked at it and I cannot understand how I had time to think all of those things, in time to do any of those things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] But I know that it happened. And as a fiction tool, the ability to take a fight scene and to take the compressed time of a fight and to taffy it out into a description and make it believable that everybody's actually reacting and thinking in this way.

[Mary Robinette] It is. I've had similar things where I come out of an accident and it's just a series of snapshots. Or when something goes wrong backstage. My tour partner and I will have entire long paragraphs of conversation, that are basically, in real time, us looking at each other and going, "Yeah, okay." And then we both know what to do. And I think that one of the things that is happening there is, as you say, it's unusual. It's different. But that takes me back to this tool of contrast. So when I was an art major, my teacher told me that if I wanted to make something brighter on the canvas, that I needed to make the area immediately around it darker. And that... I think it works in text, too. You see varying versions of it. When things go terribly wrong on the page, then it's... or you're watching a film and it's like, oh, they're all laughing right now and it's a horror movie. Well, we got a jump scare coming up. Sometimes it's predictable. But it doesn't mean that everything has to contrast. Like the way I think about it is that when I'm writing, there's high contrast and then there's low contrast. So low contrast is where I want to group similar scenes to do what Edgar Allen Poe calls, like, unity of effect. If you want to create a creeping sense of dread, then whoo... things just... you just keep piling that on. But then you also have high contrast scenes, which is like having a fast scene and a slow scene next to each other, or having a happy moment and a sad moment next to each other. Sometimes in the same scene, sometimes butting up against each other. And that contrast causes you to experience time differently than when you have low contrast. Both I think are useful. It's just kind of where you want to where you want to push the audience.

[Erin] I really like when you can find that contrast also between, like, the... I don't know why I'm always wanting a difference between what the reader's experiencing and what characters experiencing, but when characters are in one emotional moment and the reader is in another. So, for example, if the reader knows that one love interest, like, was unfaithful to the other, but they're having this, like, amazing moment of, like, coming together, or actually there's the musical The Last Five Years, which is about... or, I think it's called The Last Five Years, which is about a couple basically going from loving each other to the divorce and they go separately in time. So, you start when one person is happy and the other person is sad and you end with the woman singing this amazing song about like, I'm so excited. I met this guy. He's the best and we're going to be happy forever. And he's singing the song that where he's leaving her, which will immediately lead into her like fir... first song that we experienced at the very beginning. And I think it's one of the most, like, beautiful and tragic things,,,

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Because you get that contrast at the very beginning, because it's always happening in the show, but by the last moment you fully understand why she is so wrong to be so happy in this moment. And that knowledge as the person watching makes it feel like the fast pace of her thing is, like, also feels like the creeping dread of the rest of the show.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Probably the most powerful application of contrast... of pacing contrast in what I've read was the three shakes chapter in Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears. We end the chapter previous with a nuclear weapon has just been set off at a football stadium. It's a huge disaster. Okay. And there's a lot of tension building up to this and as the reader you're like, oh my gosh, a thing... it's, wow, what's gonna happen? And then the three shakes chapter is all about physics and it describes at a minute level what happens... the first wave of neutrinos, the first wave of high energy neutrons, the first wave of electrons, the fact that these electrons... that there are TV satellite antennas aimed at the stadium, where the because the TV trucks were there, and that those were like one of the first things that gets hit by these antennas, causing an information blackout over the stadium. And all of these details, and as I'm reading it, I'm fascinated. I don't know how long the chapter is. I think it's only like three or four pages. But it totally puts the brakes on. We just set off a nuke. And the aftermath of that doesn't happen until after I've gotten three pages of physics level aftermath describing the consequences that are going to unfold when the next chapter begins. 

[Mary Robinette] You have just reminded me that two days from now... as in two days from when you all are listening to this, as opposed to two days from when we are recording it... a new book by Hilder Nut... Knutsdottir is coming out which I translated and it has one of the best examples of this that I have ever seen.

[Howard] Ooh.

[Mary Robinette] It's called Dead Weight, and I can tell you about this without doing any spoilers. But a really horrific thing happens, and she slows down and gives you every, like, deep description of the really horrific thing. And then there are also places in that same scene where time for the protagonist moves so fast that she doesn't actually realize that she has moved or not moved because everything... it's really upsetting and she takes her time. She does this beautiful thing and then the next chapter the entirety of the chapter is, I made the tea. And it is this... the contrast of this complete mundane experience with everything that happened right before it. You know... there's so much white space around that moment. There's so much stillness that you are like, oh yeah, that is what shock feels like. You can only concentrate on this one thing directly in front of you. And it was like, experiencing it as the translator, and hitting that moment for the first time. I was like, hoh, and then I have been desperate for people to read it. So I'm so excited that all of you can.

[Howard] So the book is called Dead Weight?

[Mary Robinette] Dead Weight by Hilder Knutsdottir. I just went... I was like, as we were recording, I was like, hang on, I think this book is about to come out. Yes.

[Howard] Outstanding. Well, really the next big subject here with regard to pacing is the tool of exposition. And that is such a big tool, we're just going to put it in its own episode. So, I think it's homework time. 

[Howard] Here's your homework. Take a scene, take an event, and write it in two ways. Write it so that it is paced so that the reading of the event takes about as long as you imagine the event itself taking. And now, write it so that the pace is... the amount of time it takes to read it is like 20 times what the event took. Like someone was seeing photons moving in slow motion. Write it in both ways, and have that experience for yourself because it'll be fun. 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.