In their latest episode, they have James Dashner as a guest and they talk about pacing.

I have been following the podcast now for a short while and still want to listen to all of the old episodes once I get to that, but I have been very positively surprised a few times already. The surprise is that I often get to hear things that I came to on my own, which was especially true in this podcast on pacing. And I always learn a thing or two as well that I did not know, or at least I learn why something works the way it does, which makes it a lot easier for me to use a certain technique or enables me to use it to a better effect.

To sum it up a bit, the podcast was focused on the way to make pacing work for you in a way that the reader keeps on reading. A couple of things were left out or just mentioned on the side, which also are important bits. The main consensus was that cliffhangers are a cheap trick in this regard. Like you say that a character opens a door and… then you stop. Instead the better way to tackle this would be to make it interesting enough to read on. Like the character opens the door and finds a wet card board box with some strange liquid oozing out of it.

This brought me instantly back to Toreas. Am I actually doing the same thing in Chapter 1, right at the end? I’m not entirely sure, and it keeps spinning in my head now. Another thing is the perspective break. Chapter 2 and 3 are about a completely different character. But then again the setup of the chapter 1 ending is a rather dramatic point where I managed to kill of one of the main characters in the first chapter, at least in the readers head. If they are not shocked and confused at that point and eager to read on, in a “what the hell is going on?” way then I have not done my job right.

Now I have another situation where I’m mulling over how it might play out. I really need someone with good English skills and understanding the finer points of writing to look this over or discuss this with.

What also stuck out on that podcast was the use of chapters. Short versus long chapters was discussed. The long chapters might give the person a reason to keep going until they finished the chapter before putting the book away. In short chapters though the idea was that it’s so short, you “just read another one” once you reached the end of one. That last effect I call “Civilization Addiction”. Especially Civilization III had the effect on me to just play one more turn, just one more. While at the beginning one turn can be over in 5 seconds, later on one turn can be half an hour (if you like playing big maps). This can waste an entire day and night. If you book is that good that people can’t stop reading until they have to because they are exhausted, then it should be an illegal substance.

With Toreas I want for shortish chapters, sometimes breaking out and making them a bit longer and sometimes very short, as the situation needs it. Important here is that I need shortish ones, to be able to release them relatively soon. This has also an effect on pacing. I’m mostly telling a small arch, a step inside a bigger one, in each chapter. So once the chapter is done, there is a step being made that in itself is done. It can have effects on other things later on or be affected by previous encounters, but the chapter is always a small unit. It also makes it very tempting to leave the chapter off with something interesting to push the reader to want to know what happens next a bit more than if I would just write it all in one big chapter. And of course it has the handy advantage that I can edit each chapter easier, as I have a limited number of things to keep track of in that one chapter.

At the same time, I have to keep track of the overall story arch. I’m currently pausing writing new chapters until I have at least two more edited chapters out the door (I should always have more chapters released than on hand), but with 11 sequential chapters written down, I still have not introduced one of the major players in this story. He will appear in chapter 13 or 14. By that time the reader will have read about 30’000 words, which is a good way to a novella already and about a tenth of some of the more epic fantasy stories out there. Of course I don’t plan on stopping at 300’000, maybe never. So while pacing out the chapters and the action I still need to keep the whole story in mind.

I’m confident that I’m on the right track, but it would do a lot of good to have some constructive feedback from someone who knows writing fantasy well. Any takers?

To give you a small sample, I’ve taken some numbers from Brandon Sanderson. His book Elantris has 202,765 words. The first book of the Wheel of Time series, called The Eye of the World has 305,902 words. Why Wheel of Time? Brandon Sanderson now is finishing the series, with three more books after the death of Robert Jordan. The first of those, will be Towers of Midnight and is also supposed to be clocking in at about 300,000 words. Besides me loving these books (and waiting for this next one) consider the size in comparison to this post. At the moment, this post is only 134 words long.

So to get into the range of these large books, this post would have to be 3000 times longer. Just typing this took me not long, but searching those numbers did. And that was very simple research.

Let’s look from a different perspective for a moment. Let’s assume you don’t have the luxury to spend 8 hours a day or longer on writing. You can only write, physically, let’s say for two hours every single day, not more not less. Now the average computer user (really average, not those fast typing people) can hack about 19 words per minute. Let’s round up to 20 for this thought experiment. So if you consistently type for two hours, without pause or anything else, you can hack out 2400 words. So in 124 days, or something over 4 months, you would have typed out a novel the size of those mentioned above.

That’s pure mechanical typing. No deep thoughts, plotting, research, anything else. So say you did just that, then you got a gigantic collection of text on your hand. Now you can start editing it. While doing so, you realize half way through that the other half doesn’t make sense anymore. So you can throw away two months of typing right there. Again, pure mechanical writing alone.

Research can eat up our time amazingly fast. If you like what you write about, are into it, you can get sucked into the research badly. You want the melting point of normal iron. Then you read about alloys, steel, and so on and your time has flown away. And in the end you realize you didn’t even need the melting point of iron. The important part there is to not be afraid to throw away research. Even if you spent four hours on something, don’t try to force it into your story, just because you spent time on it.

The name game is one of the worst time sinks I’ve come across. The hours spent on finding names for things (stories and other wise) just blow my mind. Toreas for example took almost three hours to find. I’m not gonna bore anyone with the details, but one thing was that it needed to be relatively short and possible available as domain. Naming characters and places is just as bad. the best advice I can give anyone here is, grab any name, really, any at all and run with it. Thanks to the wonderful feature of search and replace, you can change it later on. Or of you adjust to it and start to like it, well you’re set.

Second worst in time suckers are dead ends. The hero rushes into the room. The door closes shut, no way out… and what now? I’ve seen writers digging a hole just to dig deeper after that. And the deeper they dig, the less likely they gonna find a way out. The easiest way is to back track. Find the point where you wrote yourself into that hole and then change the story there, dropping the part where you ended up in that dead end. Of course if you realize that late, you might have a lot to drop. If you keep writing deeper into the dead end, digging a deeper hole, there is even more to drop. You can write through it, as in write your way out of it by going forward sometimes, but usually, it’s a rather uninspired journey that makes your story as a whole suffer. Backtracking has so far improved the story every time I had to employ that strategy. Writing out of it, never did the trick really, if I was even capable of it.

Number one for time is always editing. With more experience, the writer usually creates more “good” raw material than bad. But even the best writers do not just print what they wrote down the very first time they had a thought, in it’s entirety. Before it is sent of to the printers, it will be read, changed, read again, and so forth. Scenes and entire chapters get moved, deleted, changed, rewritten and reinserted all over the book. This takes a lot of time. In most cases, editing takes longer than any other process.

In my rough estimation, the actual writing text process takes somewhere in the 5 to 10% of the time of the over all product. To come back to the two hours a day example of the 300,000 words book, it would take not 4 months, but closer to three and a half years.

Much more realistic though is a number of 1000 words a day (including all those time suckers above) and 200 days of working on it a year. This is including any time for promotion and all that other side stuff you need to take care of. So a 200k novel a year is a more realistic thing, even if you do write pretty much all the time.

Even if you type very fast and not very precise, such as me, and use all the other tools like spellcheckers to keep you in line, you still not getting anywhere fast enough. For many people I have met, that are writing in one way or another, it’s the physical part of writing that’s actually hindering them. If they had a BCI or Brain Computer Interface, they could just think the words and a computer would record them, then their actual writing process would be in sync with their though process.

Personally, I’d welcome that technology, though I must say that chances are high that you also get a lot of garbage flowing out of your brain if you did that. Then editing that all out will take a lot of time too.

To round this up, this post took not a full hour to write (physically) but almost two hours including the research editing it, and so on. It clocks in at 1130 words, so just another three hundred more posts like these and it would have the length of a novel.

In the failed quest for said plugin I came across multiple solutions for writers. Many of them even opensource. I came across one I would like to link but have lost the url for. The gist of this free tool is that you write scenes, not pages or chapters. Then you group scenes into chapters. Now moving scenes or chapters around is rather simple. Myself for example, I currently have each chapter in it’s own text file. Now moving a chapter is rather ugly, as I have to rename everything to match the correct numbers. So that scene approach sounds like a good plan, even though I don’t think I’ll do it that way.

See, the biggest problem here is the style of writing. If you write a book, your goal is to produce this large block, that you release as one solid thing. The book consists of tons of scenes, chapters, maybe even multiple parts. But as long as you have not released the book, you can move around pretty much anything as you like, write and rewrite things as you damn well please.

With a series of books you get into a problem though. Once book 1 is out, you have laid certain things “in stone”. You can change anything you want in book 2, but everything you have laid out in book 1, you better stick to it or some clever reader will find it and rub your nose in it (and everyone elses too). Unless you write a south park episode, nobody cares how many times you kill Kenny then. So although you have a monolithic (and often chaotic) writing inside the one book, the second book has to follow sequential rules.

Now Toreas is an even bigger problem in that regard, as it’s sequences are chapters. So once I have released something in a chapter, I might be able to get away with correcting some spelling and grammar, but I can’t save a character or kill one, just because it would benefit my writings later on. This is very sequential work and makes editing a nightmare.

Writing is for the most part a very creative thing. The time thinking about the story, rereading it and chaning it, outweighs the typing by far. Writers block is all too common and people who paint also know the same feeling under the title artists block. So when the muse strikes, it’s neccessarly at chapter 2, but could be somewhere in chapter 200. Although you want to finish and publish chapter 2, the chapter 200 thing needs to be written down. You feel it’s good and you want to write it, so you do, but again, chapter 2 get’s delayed. Currently I have 5 of the first 9 chapters either done, or near done. I also have 21 more chapters in a raw written form, without any editing done to them yet.

So although the writing process is rather chaotic in nature, the release process is rather sequential. In Toreas to the extreme even. So sometimes, it can take a long time for one chapter to be released, even a short one, but sometimes it could happen that multiple chapters are released together. My goal is not to have a regular update schedule, but rather have a good story out there, at the moment I decide it’s worth to publish it.

I have to keep track when I released which bit, so I can see how my release speed is doing over time. That might be a good section for the statistics about Toreas.

So since this is so sequential, I decided to change the strategy on how to handle the files behind the scenes a little. The chapter that should be released next will have it’s own file, but everything else is in mostly one big file. In that big file, I can write short story bits, then expand upon them. I can move around content, decide where to draw the lines for new chapters and so on. I might keep some blocks of new chapters, like say I wrote a sequence of 5 chapters for the far future, in a separate file though and maybe just write a note in my work file about what happens in that block and how I named it. If this works out, I should be more agile in writing the sequential ways of the story rather than fall back into the chaotic ways of writing a book.

Fantasy is great, but I always hate it when they come to an early close. There are few short stories I like a lot, and with short I mean maybe one book. Elantris was one such story. But I like stories that give you a lot of time to get to know the characters and experience their journeys a lot more.

And so I have finally decided to release a story I have been carrying around with me for decades. Take a look at it and let me know if you like it.

Best of all, it’s entirely free. You can read all of it for free. And it’s released directly as public domain, so you can take it and do whatever you want with it. So please share it with anyone you think might like it!

Read Toreas