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?