TuesdayTips177

Space Is Pace

Welcome all! This week's #TuesdayTip is a brief companion piece to last week's discussion about rhythm and pace TuesdayTip176.

A couple of years ago, I was sitting in the audience at a literary festival, listening to the authors on the panel discussing their writing. One of the authors was Steve Cavanagh, the highly talented author of the Eddie Flynn legal thriller series(*). Something he said really stuck with me.
Like a lot of writers, especially those in the thriller genre,  when editing his prose, he keeps an eye out for pace. The Eddie Flynn thrillers area mixture of high-tension legal action, lower tension (but still exciting) legal skullduggery and heart-stopping action sequences. The pacing is always excellent and very well judged, with the reader in turns bowled along by the excitement of a fiery exchange or violent altercation, or allowed a well-earned breather as Eddie plots his next move.

He said something very simple, but absolutely on-the-nose:

You can judge the pace of a scene by the amount of white space on the page.


Try it. Take a book off the shelf and compare different scenes.
Fast dialogue and exchanges between characters tend to involve short sentences, with rapid switching between speakers. Common convention is to start a new line each time a different character speaks. Furthermore, that first line is typically indented on the left-hand side. That means white space at both the beginning and the end of a line.

Now look at a slower sequence. For example a person delivering an impassioned monologue to the jury. Typically, the paragraphs are longer, and with only one person speaking, there are fewer line breaks. The text is usually justified (the spacing between letters is subtly manipulated so that each line takes up the same width on the page). There is a lot less white space on the page.

The same goes for faster-paced action sequences, compared to slower-paced descriptive scenes. Shorter sentences. More line breaks. More and shorter paragraphs. All of these mean that the pace of a scene impacts the amount of white space.

Of course, a cynic might say that publishers are already clamping down on word count to counteract rising paper costs. How long until they start demanding that books are faster-paced so they use less ink? Unlikely, but never say never …

What are your thoughts on this? Is this an over-simplification? Could one write an algorithm to give a book a 'pace score'? Is this a useful observation for writers or largely meaningless?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until next time, all the best,
Paul.
If you are a writer with a tip to share, or fancy writing a fictional interview between you and one of your characters, please feel free to email me.

(*) You can buy Steve's books here or check out my reviews of Thirteen and Fifty Fifty here.