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hpr_transcripts/hpr2789.txt

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+Episode: 2789
+Title: HPR2789: Pacing In Storytelling
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2789/hpr2789.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-19 16:51:01
+
+---
+
+This is HPR Episode 2007-189 entitled, Pacing in Storytelling, and in part on the series,
+Random Elements on Storytelling.
+It is hosted by Lost in Bronx, and in about 17 minutes long, and Karima Cleanflag.
+The summary is, Lost in Bronx takes a stab at explaining why the pace of your story matters.
+Today's show is licensed under a CC hero license.
+This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
+Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
+Hello, this is Lost in Bronx, and you'll have to forgive the sound quality. I'm in the car right now.
+Today, I would like to talk about pacing in storytelling.
+Now, when you talk about pacing, what do you mean?
+Especially in something like an elaborate tale, maybe a long novel.
+How do you interpret what pacing is?
+Well, you can break it down into, oh, each chapter should be so many words, or you should have
+an action sequence every so often, or you should have X amount of dialogue versus X amount of
+exposition. You could go that route and kind of get in the ballpark, but in reality, it's a
+feel thing. Very often, a person will not know why a story isn't working for them.
+Even though, at least in theory, it's got everything they love in it.
+All of it is supposed to work, and yet for some reason it doesn't come together.
+That can, of course, be from a number of reasons, but one of those reasons that can kill a story
+is pacing. Pacing is timing. Timing is often the word used for a very particular type of story telling
+called comedy, stand-up comedy jokes, telling a joke. You can have the best joke in the world,
+and if you tell it badly, and that is specifically, you could be reading it.
+You could be reading the exact same joke that one of the best comedians in the world told,
+and became very famous from, and yet not do very well with it, or perhaps the joke doesn't work
+at all, and that's all down to pacing, but timing. It is vital, and it's absolutely vital in
+something like that, but it's absolutely vital in larger form storytelling. The thing about
+comedy and telling jokes is that it's instantaneous. You get instant feedback from a live audience,
+whether or not your joke worked. You also get instant feedback regarding things like pacing,
+because you might know the joke is funny. Perhaps you even hurt someone else to tell it,
+and you stole it, yet it doesn't work for you, and that's because your timing is off. Your pacing
+is off. Now expand that out to a larger story or story style, and you have the same issue.
+You can have, say, a film, and it seems to start well enough, but somewhere in the middle,
+it seems to die. It seems to get tired of boring or slow down, at least, and then pick up again
+at the end. That's a very, very common problem with modern filmmaking. They've got it down to
+such a formula that if you deviate from that formula, things seem like they're wrong. Pacing in a
+longer story is absolutely vital. However, you don't necessarily judge it the way that you would
+a joke. It isn't bap bap bap bap bap bap bap bap with the bap bap being the payoff, the big, big thing
+at the end. There are some movies that are like that. There are some books that are like that,
+especially certain styles of writing. We're like the Mickey Spillane. You could say it was almost
+like that. The pacing on that was breakneck, and it always had a big, big thing at the very end,
+a twister payoff of some sort. There are thrillers that are written like that. Mostly thrillers are
+written like that. Not all action stories are written like that, and not all mysteries, not all horror,
+not certainly not all romance, but humor stories sometimes are humorous, but not often,
+actually not often. Those are usually they have their humor sprinkled throughout the entire tale,
+but thrillers that are meant to entertain you, something like a spy story, or even a mystery,
+or just some sort of tale where there's a great deal of suspense. Very often they'll have a quick
+pacing, then a big payoff at the very end. That big payoff, and I've talked about the payoff
+in a story before, but that big payoff directly relates to pacing, but the pacing isn't the same
+for every kind of tale. Now obviously an interior drama, a human drama story, that's going to have
+a very different pacing than say an action tale, or a superhero story, or a horror story. All of
+these are all going to be quite different from each other pacing wise, but pacing is not only
+different from genre to genre, from medium to medium, but it's also different from storyteller to
+storyteller. There are storytellers, there are writers who write very similar styles of genre,
+who are writing perhaps we'll say science fiction, and perhaps we'll say time travel science fiction,
+perhaps they have a series of time travel science fiction stories, but they're not the same.
+They're very very different, even if the details of the tale might be similar on the surface of it,
+the pacing of the tale on its own can differentiate one story from another, one author from another,
+one series from another. The pacing on these things can be deadly, the pacing on these things can
+be break neck, the pacing on these things can be like a wave, it goes up and it goes down, it goes
+up and it goes down, but it depends on the tale. Now how do you know when you have good pacing or
+bad pacing, how do you achieve that? Well very often it doesn't come with your first pass, it comes
+with your later passes, it comes with your editing. Now that's true with film and television,
+it's also true with just writing. You start off by putting down your vision of your tale,
+get it all out there, and then from there you refine, but it is in the refinement where your story
+really comes to life, it's not in the genesis of concept. I think that's a big mistake people make,
+they say oh what a great idea, great ideas are a time it doesn't, they're easy, ideas aren't
+free, they're in the air, you can just reach up and grab one, they're not hard, they don't even
+need to be original, they could be completely hackneyed and old, and you can still get a great story
+out of them. So ideas are not the key, the key is in your pacing, the key is how you are telling
+your story, yes you want great characters, yes you want great situations, yes perhaps a twist at
+the end, the big payoff if that's what you're going for. Yes all those things can really matter,
+but if you have all of those things in line, you've got all that stuff going for you, but if
+you're timing is off, if you're pacing is off, you don't have a tale that anyone is going to
+want to read, they're not going to want to hear about it, they're not going to want to see it on
+the screen, you're pacing really rules your story, you can have very lackluster qualities on
+every other front, but if you're pacing is just right, your story will be entertaining,
+perhaps it won't be as good as it could have been, but it will entertain, people will care about
+your story if your pacing is right. Now again, how do you find that? Well the search is a slow one
+or it can be, you refine, you refine, you refine, and then you look at your sequence because
+in a situation of refinement, you aren't looking at the entire story and trying to get pacing
+correctly, you're looking at pieces of the story to make sure, A, those segments have good timing,
+and B, the timing of those segments fit with the timing and the pacing of the entire tale,
+if you don't have those things together, happening at the same time, you've got a problem,
+that's why your movie has gotten slow in the middle, because while the individual scenes
+in the middle of your tale might be fine, they're not following the pacing of the entire story,
+are you building up to a big ending? Well if you are, the pacing is pretty obvious, you've got to
+relatively slow and then begin to build, the key to this is in the building, in that sort of story,
+in that sort of tale, you cannot start off at the very beginning going break neck, if you do that,
+you've got nowhere to go, your story just continues to rock it along at an incredible speed,
+but with crappy pace, because if you don't let your readers, your viewers, your audience,
+if you don't let them accelerate with the story, their emotions, their enjoyment,
+their attention that they're paying to the tale, if they don't accelerate slowly,
+and then go quickly, and then build up and build up and build up until your big payoff,
+then you will have lost them, because if you start off super strong with action right at the very
+beginning, and you maintain that pace throughout the tale, everything is relative, you do that,
+and it won't seem so fast by the end, because the end is as fast as the beginning,
+you will have lost your audience, first off, some people will find it exhausting, they'll feel like
+the thing is just going way way too fast, others will become ignored and they will not find the
+ending all that exciting, with that kind of tale, you start slow and go fast, move your way up,
+it's a curve, but that's only one type of pacing, and it's for a very specific effect,
+other types of pacing, especially mystery tales, who done it, those have very very intricate
+pacing qualities, especially the more clues you're throwing out, the more intricate and twisted
+your plot is, the more tension and time time is pacing, the more time you have to spend on those
+clues, on revealing those clues, on your detective figuring out what's happening in this story,
+figuring out where the mystery lies, what the motives are, what all the clues are, these things
+can be slowed, now perhaps you have some action sequences in there as well to punch it up,
+well if you don't integrate them into the story, they're going to be obviously in there simply
+to punch everything up, that's ham-handed and not very well done, it can work, you can get by with it,
+but it won't be as good as it would have been if you had integrated it into your pacing,
+throughout this series that I've been talking about stories, that's a recurring theme that I talk
+about, integration, to see your story as a whole piece, not as individual scenes, as I've stated,
+in the past, that's a problem with much modern storytelling, we tend to see it as modular,
+you see it as modular, and you have a tale that is a bunch of pieces, if you're lucky,
+it's like a puzzle, you put it together and it'll fit, but a lot of times you'll end up with
+pieces missing and you'll have holes, you don't want that, pacing is one of these pieces,
+this is not a thing that you can just take for granted, and if you chop up your story or you write
+a modular tale that's got a bunch of scenes that can be swapped around, you will have a challenge
+getting your pacing right, because you didn't see this entire story as a whole piece,
+I know this flies in the face of a lot of modern advice that's out there, but trust me,
+your pacing is not something that's going to come from a modular sense,
+if it is, if your pacing comes from that, where you move this scene to there and that scene to
+there, because it wasn't working, but now they're working, you're lucky, you're lucky you pulled
+that off, it didn't work out because you planned it, this part of the thing ought to be planned,
+you're not just picking up pieces and seeing where they fit, that absolutely is hit or miss,
+and you don't want hit or miss, you want to hit more than you miss, and the way that happens is
+by structuring your story from the start, by taking your tale, the idea, the concept of your story,
+whether it's in your head, whether it's on an outline on paper, whatever, taking that structure
+of your tale and deciding what sort of story you're trying to tell, by knowing the kind of story
+you're trying to tell right at the beginning, you can set your pacing, you can decide how your
+scenes fit together with each other, how they're structured on their own, sometimes the way to fix
+deadly pacing is by chopping things out, that is true, that is true, sometimes you can fix your
+pacing by moving scenes around, all of these things are true, and there are some well-established
+storytellers that do it that way, however I think all of them would agree that if you get it
+right the first time that's probably the best way to go, and it's not by chance that it happens
+the first time, if they see it that way then they don't really know what they're doing, they're just
+hoping that they can pull something together from a mess, then it's your editing that's doing it,
+now yes, okay editing, drafting, second drafts, I did say that that's where all of this comes together,
+you're still writing in your second draft, that's not the same as chop and swap, that's not what
+that's all about, your story will come together either on your outline or in your head, if you know
+where you're headed, and you keep that in mind every single time you sit down to write, the pacing
+of your tale will come out as you get excited with what you're writing about, as your scenes start
+to come together and as you start to see the story as a whole come together, hard work is where
+you're going to consistently get stories that have the right pacing that have, scenes that work
+on their own, pacing of the scene, and scenes that work together to create the pacing that you're
+after for your tale, maybe you want a romance, a classic romance, now very often those things start
+with your characters who meet, they don't like each other for whatever reason, and they
+bicker and argue and you see of course that there's romantic sparks there and that they will end
+up together, we know this, we understand it, it's part of your pacing, not just part of your plot,
+part of your pacing, you've got to hit those moments, you've got to get those beats or you haven't
+created the tale you're after, I'm not going to place a judgment value on that sort of storytelling,
+you can say again the technique, we don't need any more of those, who likes that sort of thing,
+well actually a lot of people like that sort of thing, and they like it because it's emotionally
+satisfying, it's giving them characters they want, it's giving them scenarios they want,
+situations they want, and it's got the pacing that doesn't slow it all down, your story,
+that story is not getting lost, it's not driving so slowly that people get bored or racing
+along so quickly that no one can follow what's happening, I've been talking around the subject
+of pacing, it's a difficult one to describe, how do you get the pacing, how do you tell,
+as I say it's largely an emotional determination, does it feel slow, does it feel fast,
+is this bit exciting, if it's exciting why, you ask yourself these questions, is it exciting
+because this thing really rockets along, it really moves, we're hitting our action moments,
+an action again doesn't necessarily mean a high-speed chase on the road, it could very well mean
+an emotional moment between a bunch of characters that are talking, having a conversation about
+their wives and how they feel, is your action moving things along, or is it too fast, or is it too
+slower, doesn't it seem like action at all, all of these can be associated with pacing, it's important,
+I believe, I believe, it's important to understand the type of tale you're trying to tell,
+and how you're going to get there, you do that, you think about that and you will have your pacing
+down, anyway this was some very choppy rambly talk about a very difficult subject, one that many
+established riders never quite grasp, I struggle with it myself, if you have any opinions about
+this episode or any other, please leave them in the comments on Hacker Public Radio, or better yet
+please, please consider creating your own episode of Hacker Public Radio, it's not hard and you
+have interests, you have opinions and we want to hear about them, this has been Lost in Bronx,
+thank you for listening, take care.
+You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org, we are a community
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