The hidden techniques behind well-paced fiction, with Joshua Essoe
25:35 Share

Introducing Instagram teen accounts.

A new way to keep your teen safer as they grow. Like making sure they always have their seatbelt on. All right, sweetie pie, buckle up. Good job. Or ring the bell on their bike. Okay, kid, give it a try. Nice. Or remember their elbow pads. Knees too, okay? Yep. There you go. New Instagram teen accounts. Automatic protections for who can contact your teen and the content they can see.

Grammar Girl.

Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. And today I am here with Joshua Esso, long established, wonderful fiction editor. I had him on a couple of years ago to talk about his book, Mood and Atmosphere, which you may remember. Well, today he has a new book about pacing and

And so we're going to talk all about that. And if you're not a fiction writer, you're still going to love it because we're going to talk about all your favorite books and movies and how they do this well and maybe sometimes not so well. Joshua, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Hi, thank you for having me back. Yeah, I'm always excited to talk with you. Yeah, same here. Wonderful. So pacing is this whole additional thing that can make a book work or a movie work or not work. What are some of the movies or books that you've seen that do pacing just especially well?

I think there are a lot, but one that I was specifically thinking about just yesterday was a movie called Memento. Oh, yeah. Have you seen it? Yes, I loved that. It's an amazing movie. It is a masterclass in storytelling. And what that particular movie does is it starts at the end, and then each scene works backwards in time. And that sounds...

It sounds really wonky. I understand that. But the way that it was put together tells such a compelling story. It somehow manages to create the momentum in the storytelling moving backwards, and it keeps you hooked. It keeps you trying to guess what's going to happen. And instead of

wondering actually what's going to happen. You wonder, how did that happen? How did the events that I'm looking at right now come to be? And you keep watching to see the origination of all of those things. Yeah, that movie was an absolute trip. And you can imagine, when you hear the concept, it could have been a complete disaster. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If I'd heard that, if an author had pitched that to me, I'd have been like...

Uh, maybe. Let's talk about other ways to tell this story that you want to tell. Right. So what tools of pacing do you think they used to make that movie so great? They used a number of things. And I think the first things that pop into my head is they used a lot of withholding. And withholding is an interesting technique. Withholding is like

It's bizarro foreshadowing. So foreshadowing is a device where an author creates hints or clues for future plot events.

In Memento, they were withholding a lot of information from us because we hadn't gotten to those parts of the story yet. And the main character is a guy who has short-term memory loss, so he can't remember anything that just happened. And each scene ends with that kind of reset for him. So withholding is a strategy whereby the author holds information back from the readers and

It delays details so readers will keep searching for the clues. So in one you give, in foreshadowing you give, and in withholding you don't.

Foreshadowing can also be called planting because it's like you're sowing the seeds of information that will bear fruit later on in the story. And I've heard that fiction writers sometimes write their story and then they'll go back and plant those little clues. Is that common? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And I recommend that. It's really difficult to come up with the most subtle ways of introducing information and setup points for your story and foreshadowing.

I think most of the time when I'm editing a novel, I find that there could be more done in that arena. And so I will suggest like, you know what, this part right here, this would be an excellent point at which you could just slip in a tiny little bit of a hint towards your next big climactic event that happens on your way towards the climax of the central conflict. Yeah, I think that going back through doing a

pass an editing pass strictly for introducing more hints and clues, more foreshadowing is a great way to go about your editing process. Yeah. And so with withholding, what's a movie that isn't maybe as trippy as Memento that does a good job of withholding? A movie or a book?

Fight Club, for sure. Both the book and the movie. We're going to talk about that in the bonus segment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a teaser for that is one of the strongest techniques that's used in Fight Club is withholding the fact that Jack, the narrator, is two separate people. And because there are so many little things that...

that hint at that, and so many little things that make you question and start to create guesses as to what's going on. We try to predict what's going to happen or what all these little clues mean. That is creating such a strong momentum, a wave of momentum that's just sort of pushing us through the story, making us need to see the ending of it.

Great. And then you talked about flashbacks too. You know, I both love and hate flashbacks. I don't know. Sometimes they bug me, but then when they're done well, they're great. So why am I loving some flashbacks and hating others? I think it's because in a flashback, you're stopping forward momentum. When you use a flashback, you literally, you stop the story dead in its forward progression and you rewind it.

So it's always a technique that you're going to have to use with care.

If flashes are appropriate, then you can do some really cool things with them. Anytime you have a flashback or a flashforward, it should do at least one of these things. I always recommend any element of your storytelling do more than one thing, but if you're using a flashback or flashforward, it should do at least one thing. You should create character development by providing insight into the character's past or their future experiences, flashback, flashforward. You should show...

other pertinent narrative information, perhaps for other characters, for settings, for the conflicts, for the events going on. You should foreshadow, which is flashback, or backshadow, which backshadow is what flashforward is, a building conflict or a plot point. You should clarify details in the plot or explain the current conflict. If you're not doing that with your flashback or flashforward, then

I really question whether or not it should be included. And the last thing is you should build to the story's resolution with some sort of critical detail that you couldn't get into the story in any other way. Yeah, so your book is called Pacing and Cutting. Let's actually back up a little bit and talk about pacing. What is the difference between pacing and timing or pacing and momentum? Okay, well, let's start with defining what pacing is. Okay. Okay, so...

This is actually a deeper question than you think. Okay. So Merriam-Webster defines pacing as the rate of performance or delivery of something. And it's true. It is that. But it's so much more than just that. Pacing is the speed at which you tell your story. It has nothing to do with the length of your story. You can have a long, very fast-paced book, or you can have a very short,

It plays an essential role in maintaining your reader's interest, in building tension, and achieving that...

emotional impact that you want to achieve with your story. Your pacing is what dictates your reader's perception of time. Okay. So pacing isn't about how quickly events happen in the story. Pacing is about how your readers experience the story unfolding. It could be 10 words describing a decade, or it could be 10,000 words describing just a single day.

Obviously, one of those choices is going to feel faster than the other, but that doesn't make either one of them right or wrong. It really depends on your specific story. So...

Pacing as a noun is the momentum, timing, and time of your story. In other words, it's how much time your story encompasses, it's how that time is organized, and how many words are devoted to each chunk of those times or scene or where those scenes are placed inside the story.

Now, pacing as a verb is controlling those things in order to direct how the characters and the readers experience the story. Thus, your pacing dictates the order and the placement and the pattern of all of your story beats.

So, like I said, pacing, just defining pacing, I think, is an art all by itself. Yeah. But there's all these tools you can use to control the pacing and you do such a good job of laying them out. And some of them are things that we've talked about before in the Grammar Girl podcast, like active voice versus passive voice. How does that play a role in pacing in writing?

Active voice and passive voice. Yeah, those are definitely things that are very strong controls of your pacing. In passive voice, obviously, you're going to lean into telling over showing in passive voice. That also is not bad. There are definitely times in a story where you're going to want to tell things.

where you're going to want to tell your story, not show the action unfolding, especially if it's more an introspective point in the story. If you're trying to build up your character, you're trying to reveal their characterization and their arc and how they're progressing through that,

a passive stance could be a lot more beneficial than an active one. In an active one, obviously, we're talking action. We're talking quick story beats. We're talking shorter sentences, less syllables, shorter paragraphs, even all the way down, or I guess all the way up, to what size of chapter you use. In the book, I talk about how there are some stories that use

only a single sentence as their entire chapter or even a single word as their entire chapter. Yeah. What were some of those? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really cool. Um, one of the things that, that most sticks out in my mind is, um, Stephanie Meyer's, uh, Twilight. I think it's the second book, um, new moon and between chapters three and four, I believe it is. She has a number of unnumbered chapter headings as Bella is going through severe depression and,

Her love has left her and she can't believe that he could possibly have done something so terrible to her. And she just doesn't quite know how to get past it. And so the chapters or the chapter headings, the unnumbered chapter headings go, I think it's like October and then turn the page November, turn the page, December, turn the page. And then she starts to resume life again. And the story picks up and it's so effective. It's so wonderfully effective. And there's a,

Stephen King has done it. I think it was in Misery. And the whole chapter in Misery is chapter 32. And all he says is, Polly, can you? That's it. New chapter. Polly, of course, is the main character. And then another one which really sticks out to me is Something Wicked This Way Comes. Okay, that's one of Ray Bradbury's hallmark stories. And it goes...

Nothing much else happened all the rest of that night. So we have this action that's getting heavier and this tension that's growing more hardcore. And then there's a resolution to that arc. And the next chapter is just giving the characters and giving readers just a break. Give them a breather. Nothing much else happened all the rest of that night. Yeah.

Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card based on the February 2024 Nelson Report.

I love that. You talk about white space, both literal and metaphorical, and the role black can play in pacing. Yeah, yeah, definitely. White space is so important. I have a section in the book called The Psychology of Pacing. I wanted to at least touch on how writing affects the psychology and in turn how that affects our perception of how fast a story is moving and how engaging it is. So white space is...

It's what's left over after your words create the dark space. It's the emptiness of the page that isn't filled. You can make your story feel a lot more stifling or you can make it feel a lot more free and free-flowing by managing that white space on any given page.

Paragraph breaks give readers a huge visual and mental break. David Farland, he used to tell me that that break was like a breath while swimming, which I think is just the perfect analogy. I will use that for the rest of my life. So yeah, don't downplay the impact of how writing actually looks on the page.

Think about it yourself when you're actually reading and you turn the page and all you see is just this block of uninterrupted text, right? What's your reaction to that when you hit a point in the book like that? You feel a little bit tired, a little bit daunted maybe. Right, yeah. It's discouraging to see this huge block of text because what that looks like all of a sudden to readers is great, right? Suddenly their relaxation time has become work time.

You like to turn pages.

You're not in quicksand, right? You're on a slip and slide. Do you think that's more of a thing with modern fiction, that it needs to be faster because we're all so used to scrolling through things so quickly? Yeah, that's a really great question because it's utterly true. In my research for this book, I found that modern readers feel that they need a much faster pacing for their stories than readers.

of previous times, of previous generations and centuries. Look at the work of Dickens, for example. He will have just page upon page of solid black space. And at the time, it worked great. People just ate that up, no problem. That was...

It wasn't influenced by what we have going on today. Everything is drawing our attention today. We have our cell phones. We have these little mobile computer systems in our pocket that we're always on. We're always getting new information. Back then, the flow of information was much more constricted. Now we're competing with technology.

you know, navigating, traveling, for example, if you're flying someplace. I just went to Superstars in Colorado to teach. And I was navigating, you know, making it through the airports, going through TSA, baggage check, waiting, finding my gate, waiting at my gate. And when I was doing all of that, of course, I'm still like on my phone, right? Looking at messages, I'm talking to people, like saying goodbye, saying I'll see you soon, playing Pokemon Go, you know, as one does. So, yeah.

Now our attention spans have been greatly reduced. There was a study done in 2023 that was on the attention span of adults, and they found that our attention spans are greatly reduced from even a quarter century ago. And I attribute it all to these guys. It really is. Yeah. Yeah.

So thinking about pacing again, so like in a work, in a movie or a book, it's

does each one have sort of... Is it like a song where it's, you know, 124 beats per minute and it's that way pretty much through the whole song and you know you can do aerobics to this song and you can't to that one, you know, or is it more modulating in a movie or a book? Yeah, the comparison to noise or to music is a good one. It's something that I make throughout the book. In fact, what I've written in the book is make music, not foghorns. It's really important because...

When you're making that comparison of pacing to music, essentially it goes, one long note sucks. Nobody wants to listen to a single long note of anything. It's the melodies, it's the highs and the lows, and how they all mix together into some sort of pleasing partnership.

that makes music enjoyable to listen to. It's the same with pacing. And some of the things that you can do to control those musical beats are actually story beats. And I make a differentiation between kinds of beats in the book. So there are story beats and there are emotional beats. And the story beat

Those are small, distinct moments in the narrative where something important happens. The plot progresses, the tone changes, the character changes,

undergoes a big change, or maybe they have a realization that drives momentum and keeps your readers engaged. So what's an example of a beat? Of a story beat? Yeah. You can think of a story beat like, let's go back to Fight Club. A great story beat in Fight Club is when Jack's apartment blows up. They're

That is a detail in the plot that progresses the entire story forward. If that thing didn't happen, then the entire story moving forward would have been utterly different. So a story beat is like a thing that happens. That's important. That's important. Yes. Yeah. A very important thing that happens for your plot progression. Now, an emotional beat...

is all about what the reader is feeling. It's less about what's going on in the story and more about how that story is affecting your reader. It's a moment in the story that's meant to create a very specific emotional response, creating a deeper connection between the readers and the characters. You want to really carefully manage your emotional beats in your story because they're really powerful tools for writers to engage readers on a more visceral level. They

They invite readers to feel what the character is feeling, and they help readers feel more invested and more engaged with your story. So you have to be real careful with those emotional beats because it's very easy to tucker your readers out if you're hitting the same emotional beat over and over again. One of the examples I use in the book is a movie called The Raid.

The Raid is a very cool movie, but it's exhausting because essentially The Raid is just one long string of action beats. It's just action after action after action, more fighting, more fighting, more fighting. There is a little bit of conversation, a little bit of dialogue and character development within the movie, but it's greatly minimized. It's

Because it's really all about the dynamic action and the choreography of how the characters are physically interacting with one another. Now, some people are into that. Like, that's really cool. It's fun to watch. But the audience for that kind of thing where you're hitting the same emotional beat over and over and over again is much more limited than if you're varying those emotional beats. So what I would recommend most often is if you're going to have an action beat, focus

Follow it up with something else. Give your readers an emotional break from the higher tension of their dramatic action and give them something that's funny. Give them a beat of mystery instead. Like if your story is about a

a zombie PI, like Kevin Anderson's writing, then you're going to need to have the action where the characters are physically circumnavigating some sort of conflict, but you're also going to need those moments where they're figuring the puzzle out.

Like, what is going on here? Sherlock Holmes, great example. The Sherlock Holmes movies, even better examples, because we get to see, especially like the one with Robert Downey Jr., where everything slows down and he's analyzing, which is a very cool tool also. It's called focus. He's analyzing every little detail that's going on right now and how he can manipulate those details, how he can take advantage of those details, how he can...

defeat like whatever tiny move he sees his opponent making by making a counter move. It's very cool stuff, but we get those, those really powerful physical moments interspersed with him thinking about stuff. What I call wool gathering, you know, characters, Gary's got a wool gather. Sometimes they got to just sit there and think so that they can understand and therefore help readers understand.

Why is it called wool gathering? I think that's another thing I got from Dave Farland. Wool gathering is basically a character who's just going, hmm, hmm, hmm. You know? Thinking, thinking. They're gathering wool. Yeah.

Well, to wrap up, before we get to the bonus, what is an example of something where the pacing really just did not work? Like, let's hear about a little bit of a disaster. I love it. Yeah, let's talk about a bit of a disaster. Okay, so when I was a teenager, one of my very favorite series was, what's it called? The Earth Children, Earth's Children series. It's

It's a Gene M. Aul's series that starts with Clan of the Cave Bear. Oh, yeah, yeah. Freaking loved it. So, so good. And then in the fourth book, oh, Earth Children. That's what it's called. The Earth Children series. In the fourth book, in the Plains of Passage. Oh, God, it just killed me. It killed me. Because the first, I don't know, 100 pages, 150 pages is...

We just find the MCs, Ayla and Jondalar, just walking across the plains. The main characters, yeah. The main characters just walking across the plains. They're just walking. And they're walking. And they're walking. And there's some woolly mammoths. That's cool. Oh, hey, some saber-toothed tigers are doing it over there. That's awesome. But let's continue walking through the high grass for another 50 pages. Turn the page. Oh, yay. More high grass. It was interminable. Wow.

I mean, no freaking kidding, right? The Plains of Passage. But because I was a younger person at that time, I was a much younger and stronger man, I was able to finish the book. And I remember thinking that it was really good. Like, I enjoyed it. But, you know, all these decades later after reading it, the only thing I can remember was walking through those high grass plains for 150 pages. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I wonder what happened. You often hear about writers who are incredibly successful and they get edited less and less as they become more successful because the publishers know their books are going to sell no matter what. Yeah. To spend the money to do it. Yeah.

Yeah. And they're so prominent, people don't want to tell them that they messed up or yeah. So book four in a highly successful series kind of fell apart. Yeah. I stopped reading the series after that. Did you? Yeah. I just, I couldn't do it. I couldn't risk my reading time on the gamble that I would be forced to walk through more planes for a hundred pages. Yeah.

That's great. Well, thank Joshua. You know, you always change how I, whenever I talk to you, when I read your books, it changes how I experience books and movies because it gives me so much insight into how they're made and what the elements are that make them great or maybe not so great. I always really appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, this newest book is called Pacing and Cutting by Joshua Esa. Where can people find you and your books?

Well, you can find me. I'm easily findable on Facebook, for example. I think I spend the most time doing any sort of social media there, but also my website, joshuaso.com. And Pacing and Cutting is going to be launching on Kickstarter. So, I mean, that's going to be the next place to find me on April 1st, which is not April Fool's Day. It's Anne McCaffrey's birthday. Oh, great. Yeah. And we will put a link in the show notes.

if it's live when this comes out, it should, I think it will be. It sounds like the timing will work. So, and if not, we'll add it back after the fact. Yeah. Wonderful. So thank you so much for being here. Now, if you are a grammar palooza, and if you support the show, which we appreciate so, so much, you're going to get a bonus episode. I happen to know that Joshua, you may have already picked this up, fight,

Club is one of his favorite books and movies. And we're going to just dive into everything about Fight Club and what it does right in the bonus segment. And then we'll get Joshua's book recommendations. If you want to be a Grammarpalooza supporter, go to quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus to learn about signing up, or you can sign up, write an Apple podcast in the Grammar Girl show page. But Joshua, again, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I always love talking with you, Mignon. Thanks.