Pacing and structure, undeniably connected to each other. In the last few entries, born out of my inability to keep my head up long enough to do any research outside of what I already knew, I’ve discussed the structure of story telling to explain how it relates to pacing. When your structure is good, when your story is built right, the pacing takes care of itself. Someone who is entertained and invested in what you’re showing them will not complain about how fast or slow it’s gone, except the sometimes complimentary, “it ended too soon for me”.

But when I started this, I said that a lot of writers were learning things backwards. Certain more sophisticated structures have been taught as basics – essential and required. It leaves some people unable to adapt to situations that require them to change the way they normally work. If television requires you to write five acts but you’re only comfortable with three, it makes sense that you’d have some troubles adjusting. If you’re writing a novel having learned the three act structure, you may be handling your chapter structure incorrectly. Becoming too dependent on more sophisticated structures and formulas can be an issue that many new writers have to resolve over time.

But there are shared elements of structure and pacing that exist throughout storytelling. Just because the overarching formulas don’t always translate from one media to the next doesn’t mean that the fundamentals don’t exist. But the fundamentals often get muddied and buried by other forms. In fact, many people learn the true fundamentals second or third while others don’t learn them at all.

So today, as my final entry before I start digging back into Alternative Mythologies, I’m going to cover… Continue reading Pacing Part 3 – The Essentials →

Pacing is the lifeblood of what we do as writers. Though there are a lot of ways to make your work sink or swim, poor pacing is one of the most common errors a writer can commit. The old critique that it felt “too short” or, worse, “it never ended” is one that echoes in the dark recesses of our minds. To really progress from amateurs to professional writers we have to ensure that we understand the idea of pacing and how it interacts with audiences on a fundamental level. Though we’ve evolved intelligence, deep down there’s an animal instinct that’s hard to fight.

Too fast and the audience can’t follow, too slow and the audience gets bored. On the surface, these look like two very different problems. But both of these directions often have the same root cause: a misunderstanding of the nature of pacing.

In my last entry I covered how the most commonly taught format for story telling, the three act structure, is actually a product of its origins and may not actually be the “most basic form”. As I described there, novels long ago picked up a structure of their own that worked better for their format when they created chapters. The pacing of a novel depends upon getting a good feel for the length of chapters. The pacing for a comic book depends on understanding that each panel is its own moment in time. The pacing of plays and television shows depend on building acts which peak just in time for the curtain to fall or the commercial to break.

What about the pacing of film? What does film really have to provide it a steady structure? Well for that you have… Continue reading Pacing Part 2 – The Rhythm of Screenwriting →

A few years ago I named this blog as a tongue-in-cheek reference to my sometimes crippling allergies. While many people get simple hayfever over exposure to certain particles in the air, I’ve been known to have flu-like symptoms and migraines.  It’s not completely horrible, however, since the combination of these allergies and my medications either puts me into deep sleep with vivid dreams or a half-awake, half-dead zombie state where I daydream constantly. This would still be horrible for most people, except I am a professional bullshit artist (writer) and these dreams sometimes inspire new ideas. For someone who lives a fairly sober lifestyle, this is a momentary glance into the kind of hallucinogenic state that inspired Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and whoever came up with that Charlie Sheen character.

The problem is that working on something serious, such as this blog, is almost inconceivable when in this altered state. I give it my best shot but at a certain point I’m incapable of tasks such as research, assembling random facts into a coherent form, and most especially making it readable. So, while I had plans for the end of last week and the beginning of this week, I’d forgotten that the whole country was going to dump one mighty fuckton of smoke into the atmosphere all at once.

Point is, plans change and instead of trying to tackle more African mythology as part of the continuing Alternative Mythologies series today, I’ll be writing about one of the few things I could think about in the last few days… Continue reading Pacing Part 1 – Know Your Structure →