Episode 117: Transcript
Episode: 117: What Makes a Story Feel “Fast” Or “Slow”?
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast about science fiction and society that picks up in medias res. I'm Charlie Jane Anders and I'm the author of the upcoming young adult novel Promises Stronger Than Darkness, which you can preorder right now. It comes out in April.
Annalee: [00:00:18] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, and my latest novel is The Terraformers. It's coming out in January and you can preorder it now.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:28] So today, we're going to be talking about pacing, which is one of those areas of writing and storytelling that's kind of mysterious, but also super important. What does it mean when we say that a story is fast paced, or slow paced? And is a fast pace always better than a slow pace? How do you even control the pace at which people consume your narrative? So, we're going to take our time and think about fast and slow pacing.
[00:00:58] Also, on our audio extra next week, we're gonna be talking about challenges that we faced in our own writing to do with pacing.
[00:01:05] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent?
Annalee: [00:01:11] What?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:11] I know, it's like completely free of any ectoplasms or alien blob creatures. It's just us.
Annalee: [00:01:21] It's not an algorithm…
Charlie Jane: [00:01:23] Not an algorithm. It's not algorithm. We're not created by AI yet, or are we? It's funded by you, our listeners, via Patreon. That's right. If you become a patron, you're helping to keep this show going, you're helping to support us, and we really appreciate it. Plus, you would get audio extras after every single episode. And you also get access to our Discord channel, where we just hang out all the time. Like we're in there right now. Think about it. All of that can be yours for just two or three bucks a month or whatever you can afford. Anything you give goes right back into making our opinions even more correct. Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:02:04] Okay, let's pick up the pace.
[00:02:04] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:02:34] So, let's just start with the basics. What do we mean when we say pacing? Is that just another way of talking about how much action there isn't a story?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:43] I mean, sort of. It's actually really complicated and nebulous and I think that people mean different things when they say pacing. I feel like, to some extent, pacing is a function of rhythm and how the audience's expectations are fulfilled, and a bunch of other stuff that's kind of confusing, but especially when it comes to prose fiction, which does not play at the same speed for almost everybody the same way that a movie or TV show or audio drama might. Shout out to the other weirdos out there who occasionally will watch a movie at 1.5 speed. But I think that when it comes to fiction, prose fiction, pacing is really a function of two different things: how fast the actual sentences feel as though they're moving, and how quickly the events of the story seem to be progressing.
Annalee: [00:03:31] Yeah, that's really interesting about how we don't all read at the same speed. One of the things that drives me nuts about reading ebooks is when the app tries to figure out how quickly I'm going to read. And it's like, I'm figuring it out, oh, you're reading really fast? And it's like, well, yeah, because maybe I'm skimming this book, but this other book I'm savoring, so you're never going to figure out how quickly I read. So, we're all reading at our own pace, different books create a different pace of reading. So, what does it really mean to have fast or slow sentences?
Charlie Jane: [00:04:05] Yeah, I mean, it's really true that everybody reads at their own speed and people will skim. If I'm reading a fantasy novel, where there's like, a four page description of someone walking through the mountains, I might skim that a little bit. I might be like, okay, okay, they're walking, mountains, blah, blah, blah, let's get to the next actual thing that happens. So I plead guilty to that, on occasion.
[00:04:28] But you do have some control over how quickly people consume the words on the page. And, you know, we all know what fast-paced prose looks like. It looks like an airport book or a beach read. Usually we're talking about short sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters, usually also, short words and slower prose can go the opposite way with paragraphs that go for two or three pages, full of long, rolling kind of ponderous sentences with words like crepuscular or lugubrious.
[00:05:04] So Annalee, I picked out a paragraph for you to read from Lee Child’s, Jack Reacher novel Die Trying. Could you share it with us please?
Annalee: [00:05:12] Sure. Okay, here I go.
“She gave him a half smile, which died fast. Then she went quiet. She looked calm, but Reacher could feel in her wrist that she was worried for the first time. But she was hanging in there. And she was wrong.”
Charlie Jane: [00:05:26] So I want to point out that like, “Then she went quiet.” And “But she was hanging in there.” “And she was wrong.” Those are all separate sentences.
Annalee: [00:05:31] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:34] And that's what I'd call an example of a fast moving paragraph. There's not a lot of adjectives or adverbs, just really short, choppy sentences. “And she was wrong.”
Annalee: [00:05:43] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:44] And I should add that there are longer paragraphs with more description in the first few chapters of Die Trying by Lee Child, but they're generally in that same kind of spare style, which is what makes this such a fast, kind of zippy read.
[00:05:58] And I also picked out another paragraph for you to read Anna Lee, which comes from the novel Perdido Street Station by China Miéville. Can you play it on us, please?
Annalee: [00:06:07] I'm going to be disappointed if this paragraph doesn't have the word nacreous in it.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:12] It doesn’t, sorry.
Annalee: [00:06:11] Oh, anyway, that’s it.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:13] You can just say the word nacreous randomly.
Annalee: [00:06:13] That's a word that comes up a lot in that novel. In fact, it's where I learned the word nacreous. All right, here's the paragraph.
“Lin’s bulging, mirrored eyes saw the city in a compound visual cacophony, a million tiny sections of the whole, each miniscule hexagon segment ablaze with sharp color and even sharper lines, super sensitive to differentials of light, weak on details unless she focused hard enough to hurt slightly. Within each segment, the dead scales of decaying walls were invisible to her architecture reduced to elemental slabs of color.”
[00:06:51] So, this is a section of a paragraph that's just full of dependent clauses, long sentences, words that kind of roll off your tongue in multisyllabic chunks. And of course, it's not rolling off your tongue if you're reading it to yourself, but it's still rolling off the tongue in your brain. And it feels really complicated and meaty, and kind of gooey, and which I guess, meaty and gooey, that's kind of a creepy thing to put together. But there is something about Miéville’s early prose that is really gooey and slow.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:25] Yeah, and I remember when I read Perdido Street Station, I remember there being these long descriptive passages and these long kind of thinky passages where he does use words like nacreous a lot, and you only read the first half of that paragraph, it kind of goes on a lot longer. I chose those two paragraphs almost at random, but I do feel like they kind of illustrate what we're talking about. The Lee Child paragraph feels a lot faster, because you just don't have to slow down and parse it as much. It just tells you stuff that you need to know in the moment that is important plot information. And there's lots of really interesting little observations about weapons, \ the main character is kind of picking up tactical information from everything that he's noticing. But it's not as gooey, as you said.
[00:08:09] And here's a good place to say that we're not at all saying that, one type of writing is better than the other. It’s just that one is faster, and the other is slower.
Annalee: [00:08:17] Yeah, so I guess I totally feel what you're describing. Like, it is true that the Miéville prose gave us only a tiny amount of action for the amount of words that I was reading. And I guess what I'm wondering is, whether when we're talking about pacing, aesthetics aside, are we talking about something that's just like fast pacing is more action packed, versus say, a prose that's like more ornate for lack of a better term?
Charlie Jane: [00:08:52] I think that's the main distinction, yeah. And obviously, there's lots and lots of variations and gradations. And Lee Child does have action packed description at times, where he'll have like a few paragraphs that are longer and kind of describe the scene. But it's still kind of like getting you into the action in some way, or kind of like setting up the action. And the thing is, when you're writing a story, you can go back and forth, you can speed up, you can slow down the flow of your prose by varying the length of sentences and paragraphs, and sometimes by screwing around with your punctuation. Like, you noticed the Lee Child paragraph had a lot of sentence fragments, and a lot of half sentences. And copy editors will sometimes get very annoyed at me because I will, depending on what kind of feeling I'm trying to evoke, I will throw in lots of sentence fragments or lots of run on sentences, when I'm trying to conjure the feeling of something spiraling really quickly out of control. And this is one reason why I like to read my work aloud, because you can get a feel for the rhythm of your prose and how fast you're reading it and how people are picking up on that. And what feels like it's moving faster or slower, but yeah, generally, shorter and choppier reads faster. And so just lots of active verbs. And then adjectives, adverbs kind of like dependent clauses, more kind of big thinky words, kind of slows it down a little bit.
Annalee: [00:10:13] Yeah, as you were talking, I was trying to imagine kind of rewriting that piece of Miéville prose with short sentences. And, it was like, Lin looked at the city. Lin had compound eyes and that allowed her to see many things at once. And that would change the feeling of it. It would change, I guess, it would change the aesthetics. But then there's this other bigger question of pacing, that's not at the sentence level, which you brought up earlier, which really does have to do with the speed of events.
[00:10:45] So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about pacing in terms of literally how many things are happening in a scene because that Miéville scene is just a person looking at a city versus the Jack Reacher scene, which is a whole bunch of things are going on. Somebody’s scared, there's like stuff that's… whether she's right or wrong, which is actually an event. Whether a person is right or wrong can be a plot twist. So, talk a little bit about the speed at which events happen in a story and how that affects pacing.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:16] Yeah, I mean, part of the function of pacing is that you don't want everything to happen all at the same time, because then it's just a mad jumble of events that all kind of arrive in a giant cacophony.
Annalee: [00:11:28] Then it's a modernist novel.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:29] Then it's a modernist novel, right? Yeah, I feel like what you want is to space out the events of the story so they have impact. And the question of pacing at the larger plot and story level is, how long does it take for something new to quote unquote, “happen.” And when we say happen, we could mean a big plot twist, a reveal, a change in someone's circumstances, or someone doing something that feels important in the story. And every story pretty much, regardless of stakes, every story has plot points, or turning points or events that matter in terms of like, they feel like a change. And then you usually have some kind of a breather in between them to process what happened and then build towards the next thing.
Annalee: [00:12:13] Yeah. Okay. So, I did bring up modernist novels. And so I'm just going to give you some modernist novel thoughts for a moment, because James Joyce's novel, Ulysses is kind of famous for all kinds of reasons. But one of the things that is really remarkable about it is that it's a huge tome. It's an epic which takes place over the course of a single day. And I think Joyce was trying to kind of make a point that you can explode out the events of a single day, and it can be as consequential and as rich as like a battle that takes place over 100 years or a romance that takes place over a really long period of time.
[00:12:54] So, I guess that leads to my question about what does it mean for something to happen in a story, because if Ulysses can have a bunch of things happening in a single day, does taking a dump, which actually happens in Ulysses, there's a long period where one of the characters is just taking a dump. Is that the same thing as a plot twist, where we learn that the bad guy is really the good guy? Did those both count as happening?
Charlie Jane: [00:13:22] Yeah, I mean, I think they do. And the short answer is that something is an event because the story tells us it's an event. We see the characters react to it, or it changes something for the characters, or it's something that is given some kind of weight or importance in the story. And that's the thing. This is all in the eye of the beholder. I've heard, a lot of people say that Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot books are slow moving, and that they like those books because they're slow moving. But when I read them, I found them super fast paced. I was like, man, this is just moving at a breakneck pace because something exciting was happening on every other page. It's just that the something exciting that was happening was they arrive at a new place, they come to a new understanding, they have a really interesting conversation, they deal with some logistical issue that they have to figure out, or something is just taking place that feels significant to the characters. And so, I feel like those books just never let up. They just zoom. But I've heard people say they're slow paced so it's really about like what the book considers a major event. But also, we're trying to sort of think something has to blow up for it to be a major event. And that's obviously not true.
Annalee: [00:14:30] Yeah, that's so interesting, because you could have a major event with low stakes. And in the first book in the Robot & Monk series, the main character is trying to take their wagon uphill, and it becomes this whole thing of like, can the wagon go uphill? This wasn't terrain that they planned for. And it's actually a major event in the story because it literally changes the course of the character's journey. And I would contrast that with say, pick a Marvel movie where there's a huge fight scene where literally the fate of the frickin’ universe is on the line. Every character is fighting, they're like growing bigger and smaller. They're smashing airplanes, people are getting punched. And for me, I often find those kinds of battle scenes, the most boring part of a movie, even though they're really action packed, and things are blowing up. So like, what the heck is going on there?
Charlie Jane: [00:15:30] I mean, we did that whole episode about fight scenes with Fonda Lee, where Fonda kind of talked about how a fight scene needs to have emotional impact and move the story forward and feel significant. And oftentimes when I'm watching a movie, or, in some cases, reading a book, where there's action, it feels like nothing's really happening. And it feels like, okay, this is actually less action packed than the Becky Chambers books we were talking about. I think that this is obviously, again, in the eye of the beholder. But it's good to be honest about what the events that matter in the story are and to recognize that sometimes you have something where there's motion, but it's purely ornamental, in the sense that it leaves everything unchanged and nothing would be different if this had not happened.
[00:16:16] And so, when you're talking about spacing out the big events in your story, or finding the right kind of pace for those events, you have to kind of make sure that we actually care about what happen and that these events actually matter. And that part of finding the right pacing for them is ensuring that they matter because they matter because of what leads up to them, they matter becomes what happens after them. And an event that just happens and then we move on isn't really an event in a way. Because it just feels inconsequential. We have to care about everything that's going on. And so that's part of the reason why you can't just have things happening, happening, happening, without people reacting.
Annalee: [00:16:57] Yeah. So, here's just a craft question, which is how do you figure out how much your big plot points or events are going to be spaced out? How do you make them faster or slower? Do you put them closer together? Do you spread them out? What's the deal?
Charlie Jane: [00:17:13] Yeah, absolutely. I think that this is the thing where you kind of have to often step back and look at the story as a whole. And figure out where it's dragging and where it feels like you're skipping over stuff. But also, this is why I will sometimes outline after I finish writing a book, because I want to identify what the big consequential events are, the big turning points, the big emotional moments, the big plot points, and make sure that they're getting enough breathing room that they feel like they actually get to have some weight. But also that we don't have to wait for too long, for an obvious shoe to drop. If you've got like a thing where it's like, okay, this bad guy is going to attack and then like 300 pages go by, and the bad guy is just like, out there polishing his sword, like, oh, okay, I’m going to attack eventually, like, I just I haven’t finished polishing my sword yet. You know, it's like, get on with it already, dude.
[00:18:11] So, oftentimes, what I will do, and this is in the revision process, is I will sit down, and I'll combine a bunch of scenes into one scene. Or if there's two events that are basically the same event happening twice, I'll combine them into one event. And you know, it's all about striking that balancing act. You want your story to feel like it's moving forward but you also want it to feel like the forward motion is meaningful, which means that you have to, spend time with the characters and understand the context. So, often, I think of it in terms of like a rhythm, of like, building towards something. And then the thing happens. There's kind of the release of that energy and then you cool down and then you build towards the next thing. And all that really changes is how long that process takes, of like build up, big event cooldown, kind of.
Annalee: [00:18:56] Okay, so can a story have fast prose and a slow pace and vice versa?
Charlie Jane: [00:19:06] Absolutely. I think it happens all the time. Not only can you speed up and slow down from scene to scene or section to section, but you can also have very zippy prose that is kind of setting the scene for the next event. And you can also have very, like slow, lugubrious prose in which a lot is happening. I think those two things, they often match up, but they don't always and most books will kind of go back and forth between those two moments anyway.
[00:19:31] Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about how to figure out the right pacing for your story, and whether faster is always better.
[00:19:40] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:19:46] Today, we want to tell you about a podcast called Preconcieved, a show hosted by Zale Mednick.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:53] This podcast examines the preconceptions that shape how we view the world and challenges the paradigms by which we live our lives.
Annalee: [00:20:02] On each episode of preconceived Zale talks to researchers, experts, and other luminaries to examine both our approach to major life choices, but also our perspectives on topics we may have been conditioned toward.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:13] Listen to Preconcieved wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:20:19] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:20:22] So there are a lot of value judgments attached to these questions around pacing.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:29] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:20:29] Sometimes people will talk as if fast paced storytelling is really exciting and slower pacing is boring, but also vice versa, like people will be like, ugh, it's just all action and there’s no emotional depth, and kind of criticizing fast pacing as if it's got problems on its own.
[00:20:48] So, what do we make of this? Like, is it really the case that fast pacing is better or slow pacing is better?
Charlie Jane: [00:20:55] Yeah, I mean, obviously not. You're talking to someone who was completely riveted by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which is a thousand page epistolary novel full of long discussions of virtue and duty. But also, I love reading some YA adventure novels where it's just like racing forward at breakneck speed. I think both are very thrilling in their own way. So obviously, no. One is not better than the other. Every story is different and every story needs its own pace.
Annalee: [00:21:24] So, if faster isn't necessarily better than slower, and vice versa? How do you figure out the right pace for a story?
Charlie Jane: [00:21:31] I mean, I think it starts out by kind of thinking about the story you're telling, and what's going to serve that story well. Obviously, to some extent, this is dictated a little bit by genre. For example, as a general rule, an urban fantasy novel might be faster paced than an epic fantasy novel. And obviously, that's a broad generalization. But you know, also, when I switched from adult fiction to young adult fiction, I had to learn how to pick up the pacing of both my sentences and the pace at which the story unfolds. Like, my editor told me I needed to get my kids off Earth and into space way faster. So I probably cut like, 20,000 words out of the opening section of that book. But also, I really worked on getting my sentences and paragraphs shorter and zippier, on average, just to kind of get that kind of feeling of things are just moving.
Annalee: [00:22:21] That's interesting. So you upped the pace on an aesthetic level, like on a prose level, you made the sentences shorter, but then you also made the important events come closer together and happen more quickly.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:36] And, in particular, we got launched on the adventure, which is really what happens when you leave Earth. We got launched on the adventure faster. And then, also, there was a lot of middle in that novel that ended up getting kind of shrunk down to just be like, okay, we're not going to have quite as many things of exploring different planets, we're just going to get to the confrontation with the bad guy.
Annalee: [00:22:57] So I guess, like, part of it is looking at your genre or your sub-genre, and trying to copy how they do their pacing.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:08] Yeah, I mean, to some extent, that could certainly be a factor. But with the caveat that I've certainly read some YA books that are slower, or that have different kinds of approaches to pacing and to their prose and everything. And every book is different and your main responsibility is to tell your story, the best way that you can. You can't just worry about like what people are going to expect from the type of or genre of story you're telling.
[00:23:34] And that's kind of the second thing that you need to look at, like other things that will dictate the pacing in your book, are the POV and the voice. Like if you have a chatty first-person narrator who goes on lots of digressions about random things that happened 30 years ago, and like, which kind of jam is the best kind of jam, or whatever, or like blueberries versus grapes, that will—
Annalee: [00:23:57] That’s important.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:58] That will slow down your pacing, and it'll be delightful because we love a chatty first person narrator that has lots of opinions and digressions. But if you have a tense third person narrator, who just tells you what's happening as it happens, that might just by itself speed things up. But also, how much time do we need to spend in this world to get what's going on? You know, if you have a secondary world where we really need to understand how things work in that world, before we can see things start to break, we need to see that things would work if things were working, otherwise, we won't really understand that things are breaking. Versus a story that set in New York in 2022, where we don't really need to explain how the subway works. People kind of get what the subway is.
[00:24:43] So, it's really stuff like that. How much background do we need to get? How much do we need to be immersed in the world? It's all sorts of factors like that.
Annalee: [00:24:49] So, what are the pros and cons of faster and slower pacing, do you think?
Charlie Jane: [00:24:55] Yeah, I mean, I think that whatever you do, there are going to be tradeoffs. If you take more time between big events, that lets you build more of a rapport with the characters and get more immersed in the world, so that you're really invested when shit does go down. But on the other hand, there's just something amazing and exhilarating about that feeling of events rapidly spiraling out of control. And that, on its own can bond you with the characters who are caught up in this never-ending stream of terrible events. You have to weigh whether you want more emotional investment or more urgency, and whether you want to take your time and have more meditative passages, or just cut to the chase. And either way is really kind of a personal decision.
Annalee: [00:25:39] Yeah, it's funny, when my first novel Autonomous came out, I was begging various writers to read it and maybe blurb it and so Neal Stephenson read it, which was super rad. And I was like, so what did you think? What did you think? And he was like, kind of almost done with it. And he was like, yeah, how long is this book? Because he was looking at a manuscript. He didn't have like, the physical copy. And I was like, it’s like, I don’t know, 85,000 words or something. He was like, what? Oh, I thought it was like, way longer. And I was like, not really sure how to take that. I mean, I think he liked the book. But I was like, does that mean that I wrote something really slow or that felt really slow? Or did it mean I packed so much shit in there that it felt really long? I wasn't really sure because of course, he writes these like massive tomes, right? So, I don't know if it was just, he thinks everything is long.
[00:26:33] But it made me wonder, like I said, whether I was writing too slowly, somehow. And so, I always come up against this question of like, whether slower pacing is kind of a necessary evil. Is there something kind of wrong with it?
Charlie Jane: [00:26:48] Yeah, I think people do kind of talk about it as like, well, it's slower paced, but it's really interesting, or whatever.
Annalee: [00:26:53] Yeah. It felt really long, but I liked it.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:58] Yeah as though the slower pacing is just the thing that you have to do in order to get the good stuff in the story. So, you know, it's just, it's a different type of groove. Sometimes you want to listen to a bouncy disco album. Sometimes you want to listen to a slow jam. There's just something really nice, though, about somebody taking their time, and letting you really just sink into the story, instead of just rushing you through it. You know, sometimes you just want someone who's going to cook a five-course meal and kind of serve you wine and give you little amuse-bouches between every course and just hang out.
[00:27:35] And really, when we talk about fast-paced or slow-paced, we're talking about two different aspects of reading pleasure. It's pleasurable to get swept along by a torrent of events. But it's also extremely enjoyable to feel like you can really get to know a place and its people. And I think that's one reason why people flock to these giant fantasy doorstoppers which often feature either prose or storylines that move at a more leisurely pace. Because it's really lovely to just get immersed in something and feel like you have gotten to know the place and the people over a period of time.
Annalee: [00:28:11] I think that also, it's really important with pacing, as you were saying earlier, to kind of vary it. It’s really annoying when it feels like you're in a novel where everything is arriving on schedule. Like, okay, now you're leveling up. Now you're doing the next thing. And each section of the book is kind of roughly the same size and characters are kind of doing the same thing like, oh, I'm solving a puzzle. Now I'm solving the next puzzle. Now I've found the key. Now I found the door. And I mean, as a reader, I feel like I want things to be more like real life where sometimes you're just sitting in a room for four hours. And sometimes you're experiencing the whirlwind of an early romance or a political disaster. Two things that are not the same, but are both very fast paced.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:02] Yeah, and you know, that's the thing. When you play around with pacing within the story and kind of speed things up and slow things down. This is a lever that you can use to kind of keep the reader on their toes and surprise them. And the reader might think that oh, we're in the middle of a period of downtime, we're going out to pick berries and it’s gonna be a long berry picking sequence. And then like, bam, some goblins show up to attack us during the berry picking sequence and they carry away one of the characters and now we have to get that character back. And it leads to other stuff. A lot of the function of pacing is not just to feel as though the story is progressing in a very steady way that feels both exciting and immersive. But it can also just keep everybody guessing and keep everybody kind of wondering by suddenly having things happen when you least expect it.
[00:29:50] And this should, hopefully, be fun rather than mechanistic. And there can be happy accidents like sometimes I'll be writing a sequence and I'll be like, oh, but what if this suddenly happens and then it just opens up a lot of possibilities.
[00:30:02] So I feel like you have to be open to just things happening out of nowhere sometimes, or things kind of slowing down out of nowhere sometimes.
Annalee: [00:30:12] So do you find that you want to commit to a particular kind of pacing, when you start a project? Like, okay, this project is going to be like super fast paced or it's going to have like six gooey scenes in it or whatever,
Charlie Jane: [00:30:26] I'm going to plan those six gooey scenes. The levels of gooey-ness will increase over time.
Annalee: [00:30:32] And they will happen at exactly 30-page intervals. So every 5,000 words there will be a gooey scene.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:37] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:30:37] Actually, I don’t know if 5,000 words equals 30 pages. But you know what I mean.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:41] I don't know. Anyway, yeah. I mean, I definitely will try to think about the pacing when I'm starting a project. But it’s never going to be realistic. You never really know going into a book or a story, what the pacing is gonna be like until you've written it, and then you look back and you're like, okay, well, I thought that this, this, and this was gonna happen. But actually, these other things happened and now we've got to make them fit. And I feel like a lot of this stuff, a lot of the pacing, both at the sentence level, and at the story level, is something that you kind of end up tweaking and adjusting in revisions. Which is another reason why I'm so big on outlining after I write. I’ve never, literally never written a piece of fiction that didn't drag in the middle. It's one of the banes of my existence. And we'll talk about this more in the audio extra.
[00:31:32] Or sometimes things that feel like they rush past an event that really just, we needed to spend a beat, like a few pages longer, to feel like that event was actually meaningful. I never get the pacing right in the first draft. I never really know what the pacing is going to need to be, I might have a sense of what the prose style is going to be, but even that is going to change in revisions. I’ll often realize that, in the third or fourth draft, that things are kind of bogging down, and the characters are spending way too long beating their heads against a particular wall that’s just not interesting after a while. This is one of the many reasons why I will enlist so many of my friends as beta readers as well.
Annalee: [00:32:09] Yeah, I think the thing that's so amazing about pacing in reading and writing, as opposed to in, say, a film or something where, like you said, your experience of that narrative in time is going to be the same as everybody else who's in that theater. Pacing is about taking someone through a period of time with you. It’s about playing with time. And this is the thing that we don't acknowledge enough, I think as people, which is that time is always getting longer and shorter. We experience time in such a variable way, even though every minute is obviously the same on every watch and every place. But a minute can be a really long time or a really short time. And I think that's one of the joys and the aspirations of writing is to recreate that feeling in your reader of passing through time, in different ways and having different scenes have different weights of time. And when I say weight, I mean, I guess both weight as in how long you're reading, but also weighthe as in how heavy something is.
[00:33:24] So I made a pun, yay! But I think that's part of the beauty of it. And I love the fact that it's something that can happen both at the sentence level, and also at the level of plotting. And so yeah, I mean, every story is a bargain about time spent. It's a kind of conversation about how long things take at some deep fundamental level. And I just think that's super cool.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:52] Yeah, so what we're really saying is we want more novels where someone pooping is really kind of a major event for the story. And we take our time to really explore the ramifications of that. I think that's really the takeaway from this episode.
Annalee: [00:34:03] Yeah, if you learn nothing other than the fact that in the novel, Ulysses, there is a poop scene. I can't think of very many other novels where there's a really profound poop scene, but, uh…
Charlie Jane: [00:34:16] I mean, God bless James Joyce, you know.
Annalee: [00:34:18] Yeah, he loved poop. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:19] Poop poop!
Annalee: [00:34:21] [Laughs]
Charlie Jane: [00:34:22] Okay, so thanks so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just randomly stumbled on us we're available in all the places where podcasts are found. And if you like us, please do leave a review and comment at Apple and wherever else you can do that. If you want more information, we're on Twitter at @OOACpod. We have a Patreon.
Annalee: [00:34:43] We do?
Charlie Jane: [00:34:43] We do. At patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And we really appreciate everybody who supports us and hangs out with us in our Discord.
[00:34:51] We are eternally grateful to Veronica Simonetti, our heroic and valiant producer, and also to Chris Palmer, who produced our music. And we'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Next week, we'll have an audio extra and if you're a patron we'll be seeing you in Discord.
Together: [00:35:10] Bye!
[00:35:10] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]