A B N A Vets Forum Pacing?

The best advice I've ever read for keeping a reader's interest (which, okay, may not be pacing?) is as follows (paraphrased):

(I think it comes from Scene and Structure by Jack M. Bickham)

In each scene, a character should have a goal. They should never be completely successful at that goal until the climactic scene of the book. The goal can be phrased as a question, and the answer to that question must never be 'yes'. It can be 'yes, but...<added complication>' or 'no!' or even 'no, and furthermore...<added complication>' -- but things should never, ever, ever work out as they want them to work out.

Certainly, there are exceptions and variations on the technique, but wowiee! This bit of advice just blindsided me and made me look at my writing in a whole new way. And it was fascinating to go through gripping stories (easier with movies than books, admittedly) and look at each scene, figure out the 'question' or 'goal' and then observe how the 'answer' was handled.

Very recently I wrote a scene as planned, and it felt very flat, and I looked at it and agonized over it and then I realized that I'd dictated that my PoV character succeed at the action she'd started attempting at the beginning of the scene. Once I revised it to throw in a wrench or two, the whole scene felt more dynamic and alive-- and easier to write, too.


Have other people learned anything like this?, or had a similar educational moment? If so, please share!

I think that's a very basic truth of artistic expression (save Impressionism perhaps, but you could argue it in a meta-context there):


It's about conflict and struggle.

In writing, there usually is something at odds and what's being described is the struggle or attempt to overcome it. Everything's conflict-driven. It's not always happening at equal intensity and ferocity, and neither should it lest it becomes tiring, but it's there, driving the narrative's wheels.

Of course some artistic works (often less sequentially narrative ones, like paintings and photographs, but sometimes also literary works or films) restrict themselves to putting just the conflict on display and leaving the remaining work of coming to terms with it to its audience.

You describe getting into this difficulty as the result of planning, but it can happen to a pantser too.  That's why revision is so important -- and why I do it in chunks as I write, as well as in general once the first draft is finished. 

What I most have to beware of is tangents -- I go off in directions that seem appealing, and forget the main focus of a scene or chapter.  Yet I hate not to do that -- I can cut it, save it, use it for something else later.

Coming back to this, I think that issues are actually a bit muddled here.

First, a scene should have conflict or struggle to overcome or a goal to reach. That's giving the scene a point, a reason to exist at all. Sounds obvious.

Second, there's the question of its pacing, of the way actions and events unfold, defining its dynamics.
That having the goal reached immediately in the beginning cuts things short, should be quite clear to everyone too. Imagine soccer being played by sudden-death rules and the goal happening two minutes into the game. Should the players stay on the pitch and lazily kick around a lone ball, with no point to it all? No. Hardly worth moving one's own wealthily cushioned backside to the arena for that.

As for a scene's pacing, I have to admit that I largely flew by seat of the pants and trusted my intuition and feel so far.

When it comes to pacing of the whole novel though, I think there are some interesting things one can do to learn from other works. For example, I plotted the volume and tempo curves of Beethoven's Fifth as well as Orff's O Fortuna, some of the most dynamic and dramatic pieces of music around, and by taking a look at the curves found some interesting similarities in the way their dynamics are structured. I used the awareness and thought of this as a guiding blueprint to my novel's pacing when I alternated between tension and relaxation, but when in doubt always trusted my gut feeling.

I would advise everyone to do the same: Take a piece of music, or a film, that feels involving and satisfying to you, and then plot their dramatic arc. Learn from others, even from other art forms. :)