Pacing

Paragraphs, chapters, and the breaks in between

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about pacing. Normally, when we talk about pacing, we talk about the speed of the plot: how rapidly events happen, how closely spaced they are, and what happens in between the exciting bits so the reader doesn’t get bored.

However, I’ve been looking at it in a very different way. And when I say looking, I mean quite literally: visually looking at the page and seeing where the breaks in the text are.

Paragraphs

I’ve seen a lot of books recently that seem to have adopted that infuriating LinkedIn “broetry” style. (That’s a horrible word, but it’s absolutely perfect.)

This involves having one sentence per paragraph.

Often very short.

Maybe just a couple of words.

And it’s really annoying.

There’s no flow to this style of writing; it’s just a disjointed series of sentences. I’ve DNF’d several novels recently because of this style. Please, for the love of [insert your favorite deity or author here], don’t do that. Just don’t.

On the other hand, reading some older literature is just as bad in the opposite direction. You get writers who have massively long paragraphs, sometimes two or three pages long. (Yes, Herr Hesse, I’m looking at you.) It’s a solid, relentless wall of text that makes you feel like you’re never getting to the end of anything. It’s even worse on Kindle, where those two pages of print end up being multiple screens of non-stop words.

So, how long should a paragraph be? Obviously, it’s vital to vary your paragraph lengths, but the way I see it is that a paragraph is a unit of story or explanation. When you’ve got to the end of that thought or perception, you take a short break to allow the reader to subconsciously digest what they’ve just read.

The subconscious aspect is important. It’s not like they’re going to set the book aside after each paragraph and muse deeply on the last few sentences. But the simple physical act of reaching the end of the line and flicking your eyes back to the beginning of the next one is just long enough to let your brain process it.

It’s like taking a breath. You shouldn’t have to think about breathing: it just happens. If you’re taking a deep breath at the end of every sentence, it doesn’t work and you end up panting; if you have to struggle all the way through a wall of text without even a momentary break, you run out of stamina, and your reader loses the will to live.

Chapters

I’ve seen extremes here, too. At one end, some writers have chapters only a page long. That can work stylistically in the right place, but usually it feels choppy and disjointed. It’s something I’ve seen a lot with novice self-published writers, and it feels as if each chapter is “what I wrote today.”

On the other hand, you find writers who prefer chapters 40 or 50 pages long. Sapkowski’s chapters in The Witcher series are practically novellas. Those can feel exhausting: there’s never a natural point where you can rest.

For me, a chapter is where you can choose to put the book down. It’s the end of an episode, where you’re asking the reader: “Do you want to continue right now?”.

While rewriting Yellow Flowers, I’ve been very conscious of this. In previous drafts, my average chapter length was about 25 pages; in the newer draft, they’re typically around five or six. I deliberately decided to restructure the story so that whenever something dramatic happens, the reader has the clear choice to either stop or keep going.

I try to mix these chapter endings up: some wrap up neatly at a good resting point, while others are cliffhangers. Personally, I love cliffhangers. It’s a great technique to keep a reader hooked, but doing it constantly can begin to become tiresome.

The breaks in between

The third form of break is the “scene break”: the blank line or asterisk in the middle of a chapter which fits somewhere between “taking a breath” and “ending an episode”. It’s a moment to stop and reflect; I imagine it as the time you might take to get a drink or go to the bathroom.

It’s a useful technique for indicating the passage of time. Somebody leaves somewhere. You put in a little break, then you restart the narrative when they arrive at the next place. You’re effectively saying to your reader, “I’m not going to bother describing the bit in between because it’s not important; I’ll leave it blank and you can fill that in for yourself if you care.”

It’s also a good way to shift perspective. You’ve been talking about one character and what they’re doing, but you now need to shift over to another character. Personally, I find that if you’re shifting the focus completely it’s often best to make that into a chapter break, but where it can work really well is a “meanwhile”. You’re telling the reader what’s happening to one character, you put a break in, and when you return you’re saying, “Okay, meanwhile, let me give you this context.”

Alternatively, if you’re rapidly cutting between multiple parallel perspectives every few paragraphs, scene breaks are much better than chapter breaks. It’s a clean way to indicate that all this stuff is happening at once, but giving the reader a clear indication of when you’re switching location.

It’s all about the flow

By concentrating on these breaks, I find my storytelling flows much better. It’s like what jazz musicians say: the notes are fine, but the real music is in the bits in between. When you get the breaks in the right place, there’s a natural ebb and flow to the story, much like the variation in tempo when an actor gives a speech.

I’ve posted before about ways in which I’ve been using NotebookLM as a writing assistant. One thing I’ve found really useful is using it to break a story up in different ways, putting the chapter breaks and scene breaks in different places, while keeping the words exactly the same. Then I get it to critique the different drafts and compare the effect of the pacing. It’s quite surprising how different they feel.

Here’s an example.

• My protagonist is injured and lost in the woods.

• He sees a campfire.

• He approaches it and realizes they’re outlaws.

• He gets spotted.

• They’re actually friendly.

I could choose to break that narrative after any of those beats, and I’d be leaving the reader with a very different impression.

• Lost: Oh no, how’s he going to survive? Everything looks very bleak.

• Campfire: Phew! Is he saved?

• Outlaws: Well, that’s not so good. What’s he going to do: should he approach them or not?

• Spotted: Oh shit, now he’s really in trouble.

• Friendly: That was a nasty moment, but it’s all good. We can relax now.

Any of those can work as a chapter ending, but deciding where to put that break has a remarkable effect on how the reader feels when they put down the book and turn the light off.

Or, perhaps, if I’m lucky, they don’t put down the book and keep reading until dawn.