Pacing Your Story: How to Keep Readers Engaged from Start to Finish

How’s your story moving along? Are you happy with the way your narrative flows? Have you established a rhythm that feels right for the story you need to tell and its characters? Do your chapters and sections transition seamlessly from one scene to the next? Or do you feel that your story is limping along? Does it feel as though some of your narrative threads are caught in a snag? Both scenarios involve story pacing, and it’s an element in your writing that deserves every bit of your attention. 

What Is Pacing? 

In fiction, pacing, or story pacing, is the speed at which a story unfolds. It involves narrative rhythm and flow, the rise and fall of action, plot development, and story arcs. This article focuses on story pacing, but note that pacing isn’t limited to fiction, or any other particular genre, for that matter. In nonfiction, pacing is the speed at which subject matter is explored—through expositions, arguments, anecdotes, and illustrative text, among others. Regardless of genre, all great books benefit from pacing that serves their respective topics and subject matters, their themes, and their purpose.

The Impact of Story Pacing

Read any book review—or a movie or play review—and you’ll find no shortage of descriptions like “fast-paced,” “slow-paced,” “slow burn,” “sluggish,” “page-turner,” and “unputdownable.” These adjectives apply to all kinds of stories, not just stories that rely on traditional action scenes to keep the readers engaged. 

Indeed, pacing factors heavily in how readers experience your story. That’s why it requires care, understanding of literary elements and devices, and a healthy amount of natural writer’s and/or editor’s instinct. Speeding up and slowing down has to correspond with your specific narrative goals. Pacing influences your readers’ level of engagement and affects how much impact your story will have on them. 

How to Effectively Pace Your Story

Getting your pacing right involves, among other writerly tasks, experimenting with sequences of action and chronology, fine-tuning your treatment of the literary elements employed in your story, and cutting parts you love in the service of coherence, thematic clarity, emotional impact/resonance, etc.

In particular, let’s look at nine ways that you can effectively pace your narrative:

1. Establish your narrative structure.

First, you need to have figured out your narrative structure. Your story’s structure is the order in which plot events take place. It doesn’t need to be final, but it should be something you can work with. Having a clear picture of how your story unfolds makes it easier to determine pacing as you write, not just in terms of speed but also in terms of writing effective, seamless transitions.

Generally, Western story structures can easily accommodate experimentation, but they all share these common elements: 

Exposition 

The reader is introduced to the protagonist's normal life, personality, and desires. This part typically ends with an inciting incident.

Rising action

The protagonist pursues the goal resulting from the inciting incident (e.g., go on a quest, go on the run to escape danger, embark on a journey to the past, etc.) and is tested along the way.

Climax 

The protagonist achieves their goal, finds safety, defeats their enemy (or not?).

Falling action

The protagonist must now must deal with the consequences of having achieved their goal.

Resolution 

The story concludes: The plot, character arcs, and themes dovetail to create a distinct impact—emotional, intellectual, psychological, or a combination of two or three. All the narrative threads are tied together, or in the case of ambiguous endings and cliffhangers, the right narrative thread/s are effectively left out.

2. Create balance between fast and slow, hectic and quiet.

Balance is key to effective pacing. Without it, your narrative could end up feeling tilted, and readers could lose interest in the parts that drag. That’s something you don’t want, especially since these parts will likely contain crucial information regarding the plot, the characters, or the place/s or circumstances in which your story takes place. 

Create spaces for breathing and reflection—not just for readers but also for your characters. Yes, this goes even for edge-of-your-seat page-turners. After all, action is driven by other elements, like character motivations and psychology, character evolution, environment (both natural and man-made), and the presence of and interaction with other characters. These elements may not always involve expansive action; rather, establishing them or commenting on them often involves introspective passages, character speech (monologue or a drawn-out conversation between or among characters) and internal dialogue or character musing. These invite the readers to explore your story on a deeper level. When this happens, the dramatic and action scenes will have a stronger impact.

3. Explore nontraditional, non-action-based shifts in pace.

Heads up: Changing your narrative pace doesn’t always require a traditional action scene. In fact, relying solely on traditional action to execute a shift in pacing can rob your narrative of the kinds of shifts that make your story more interesting. Also, action scenes may not be what certain stories require. Some books are intentionally contemplative, and traditional action–oriented shifts can be jarring. Your better options in this scenario would either of these:

Subplot

Introduce a subplot, which you can break up and interweave into your main narrative. Your subplot should connect to your main story—either through one of your characters, through one of your themes, or perhaps as one more answer to your central question.

Voice 

A simple switch from passive to active voice can hint at a change in how the narrative flows. Notice the subtle difference between these two examples: 

Ada came out to the porch and found the cardboard box sitting on the swing. She was about to pick it up, but then stopped. Don’t trust anyone, or anything, she heard Henry telling her just yesterday at the debriefing. She stood there and considered her options.

Or,

When Ada came out to the porch, she was surprised by what she found sitting on the swing. A cardboard box. She was about to pick it up, but she was stopped by Henry’s words in her head: Don’t trust anyone, or anything. He said that just yesterday at the debriefing. She stood there, considering her options.

Different perspectives

Changing from one character’s perspective to another’s can affect how the story moves. Narrating from the perspective of someone who is depressed and just plodding through their days (think Mort Rainey from Stephen King’s Secret Window, Secret Garden) would slow your pace, while doing so from the perspective of a detective who is working a fresh child abduction case would entail writing an adrenaline-charged prose. 

Two or more narrator

Or you can have two or more narrators—characters with distinct voices and circumstances that determine how they move through the story. Your pressed-for-time detective can be narrating, and so can your depressed character, and both their voices will bring a unique rhythm to the narrative.

Dialogue

Snappy dialogue can help quicken the pace of your narrative. Conversely, a thoughtful character carrying on a conversation with another can slow things down since their lines will be punctuated by pauses and silences as they consider what they hear and what they say.

4. Introduce variety in narration.

Mind your scene narration and dramatic narration—the two standard types of narration in practically all forms of prose. Use scene narration if you want to pick up your narrative pace, by showing your characters performing an action or engaging in conversation. On the other hand, use dramatic narration to report what the characters did while keeping the event “offstage.” This allows you to slow your story down, so you can establish details—that is, visual, verbal, or tonal information—that at first won’t seem particularly significant (except, perhaps, to the highly observant reader). The payoff will come later when the significance of these details are revealed at the right moments in the story. But first, recall tip number 2 about creating balance between fast and slow, and hectic and quiet. 

Indeed, how you employ the two types of narration will make a huge difference in how your story moves. You’ll want to avoid a monotonous pace, so start with this tried-and-tested practice: Show a scene when it’s either necessary and/or interesting. Use a summary, or dramatic narration, to move over the (seemingly) less thrilling or less compelling parts.

5. Experiment with the order of events.

Nothing wrong with using the standard basic structure of beginning, middle, and end. In fact, for certain stories, it’s the best approach. But if your story allows it, you can try beginning your story in the middle or at the end.

Beginning your story in the middle of the action and then adding in the details throughout the course of the narrative is called medias res. Use this method if you need to pull in your reader with “considerable force” and if you prefer to write shorter pieces like short stories and novellas.

A story that opens with the end is called a frame story. The reader is pulled in because they want to find out why and how instead of what happens.

If you are writing something longer, put your story’s dramatic question (i.e., your protagonist’s main conflict) up front. Once the dramatic question is established, you can explore the lines that all lead to the answer that your protagonist is looking for.

6. Balance speech with action/motion.

Just because your characters are engaged in conversation doesn’t mean they can’t be doing something else, or that you shouldn’t mention their action or what’s going on around them in the narrative. As a matter of fact, any accompanying action, internal dialogue, thought, gesture, or mannerism will add to the rhythm of the scene and keep it from becoming monotonous. It will also be useful for characterization, theme exploration, plot development, and so on.

For example, if your character is talking on the phone, what else is she doing, depending on where she is? If she’s in the home office she shares with her husband, is she pacing the floor, noticing things around the room, tidying his desk and finding … what? There’s a promising opportunity for transition and plot development. All this while she’s carrying on a generic catch-up conversation with one of her girlfriends. Or it could be the other way around: the conversation could be a significant piece of your plot, and the character moving around the home office tidying things could be another way to give readers additional insight into the character (i.e., their state of mind and tendencies).  

7. Vary the length of sentences and paragraphs.

The standard length of sentences in books is between fourteen and twenty words. For paragraphs, five well-constructed standard-length sentences usually make a good paragraph. Now the fun part: You can treat a single word or a phrase as a sentence for emphasis, which, in turn, can signal an increase in pace or a slowing down. It can also serve as an emotional cue, whether it’s fear, sadness, anger, etc. 

The same is true with paragraphs. You can have your five-sentence paragraphs and then prevent monotony (in terms of both rhythm and the way the text looks on the page) by writing paragraphs of only two or three sentences. And in the dramatic or crucial scenes in the story, you can have a paragraph with only one sentence, and a short one at that. Or even just one word. Naturally, these variations have to occur at the right moments in order to make an impact.

If you’re writing a long exposition or dramatic narration, break it up with dialogue or a short quote. If you have characters engaged in a drawn-out conversation, you can insert an exposition or a dramatic narration to give the reader a clear sense of time and place.

8. Be selective/strategic in revealing information.

This is crucial in creating a suspenseful atmosphere in your book. When and what kind of information and how much of it you reveal all help determine whether you succeed in telling the story you want to tell and creating the effect you intended. Suspense involves a series of gradual steps—hence the piecemeal information being provided to the readers at the right moments. Until everything culminates in the answer to the dramatic question.

9. Read the text aloud.

Or at least “listen” as you read what you’ve written. Take note of how long it takes you to read through a scene and how the lines and entire passages feel as you read them. You’re assessing rhythm here, and you’ll want to find the spots where the rhythms change. Is it an organic change, or is it because something’s missing or you have an unnecessary element? Mark the natural places for the narrative to slow down for the quiet moments and where to pick up speed and move with urgency through the story.

The Takeaway

Pacing is crucial to every book, fiction or nonfiction. In novels, it should pull the reader in from the first page and keep them engaged until the last. It should help amplify the author’s intended overall effect and the impact of the story’s themes, characters, and the events that unfold.  And remember that balance is crucial to pacing.