Pacing is a frequently overlooked aspect of
writing. The speed at which your story moves can determine a lot of things,
including its success and appeal. Your audience can drastically change
depending on your pacing.
Now, a great example of this is a visual format
is the Disney Pixar movie Up. This cartoon is widely debated as either the most
boring or the most exceptional of the Pixar cartoons. Why does it cause such
deliberation? Because of its pacing. It is a very slow paced movie, and even
has many scenes without dialogue of any sort. This is a huge difference when
compared to the typical flash and bang of most modern cartoons and movies, but
this choice was made deliberately by Pixar. Why? Because they wanted to focus
more on plot than action.
In your writing, you need to be aware of your
pacing. Action scenes should be faster paced; dramatic, tense scenes slower
paced. Pacing is determined by a lot of factors: your word use, your sentence
structure, your sentence length, your paragraph length, and even your
punctuation. If you do not know what the pace is, try reading it out loud. Do
you speed up or slow down when reading? Do you feel tense and anxious or
relaxed and contemplative?
Pacing can determine how well you story is
received by your audience and even what type of audience you appeal to. A
slower paced book will appeal to an older crowd, while a fast paced one will
appeal to a younger one (in general). The opposite is true of children’s books.
Younger children need slow books, while older ones enjoy stories with lots of
action and adventure.
The best thing for writers to do is learn to
vary the pace of their writing with the action happening in the plot of their
story. If you can master the art of pacing then you can create suspense,
engender emotion, and even surprise your readers.
Pacing is not just for writers of fiction
either. Poets use punctuation and formatting to set the pace of their poems,
and even rhyme and meter can affect how the poem is read and what impact it has
on the reader. Non-fiction writers need to keep their work fast paced to avoid
dullness, or slower paced to emphasize important elements.
Regardless of what you write, pace is an
important element to keep in mind. Pace determines how your readers will absorb
your writing, and with that how much appeal your writing has.
Guest post by Debra Johnson, blogger and editor of nanny payroll. She welcomes your comments at her email: jdebra84 @ gmail.com
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