3 Ways to Ramp Up Your Fiction Pacing and Tension

Strong pacing and tension are critical in a fictional story, but they’re some of the hardest elements to understand and master. That’s because there isn’t one “right” way to pace a story, nor is there one definable factor that creates tension.

One thing readers will attest to, though: if a story’s pacing drags for too long, they’ll stop reading. And if they don’t feel tension, they’ll likely start falling asleep.

What is pacing? It’s the pulse rate of your story. At times you’ll want a slow, thoughtful pace. Other times a racing one. And those elements that create tension impact the pacing of a story. No tension means a sluggish pace.

The Culprits

Backstory and heavy opening-scene information dumps cause a story to screech to a grinding halt. Overwriting as well bogs down the pacing and kills tension. Telling instead of showing detaches readers’ interest.

But there are many other offenders that contribute to poor tension and pacing. Once you are aware of them, you’ll be able to seek and destroy the culprits that are out to drag down your scenes.

No matter what genre you write in, it will serve you well to learn how to improve pacing. This happens on a macro level—in the way you build a plot and develop characters, as well as in the order of scenes and the way those scenes play out. And pacing can be fine-tuned on a sentence level, down in the verbs and the punctuation.

3 Ways to Ramp Up Your Pacing and Tension

1. Don’t chronicle every single action.

The late great writing teacher Gary Provost advised novelists that we don’t have to account for every moment of our character’s life. In terms of tension and pacing, this means only scenes which concern the story goal should be acted out. If nothing (apropos to the story) happens over a character’s weekend, you don’t write a scene that makes readers live through it.

Likewise, in scenes, you don’t need to chronicle every motion. I think you can safely assume “She reached out her hand” if you write “She shook his hand.” The same is true for nodding one’s head (what else do you nod?), putting on one’s hat on one’s head (ditto), or turning to face someone (just write he faced her).

If, in every chapter’s opening, your character hears the alarm clock, puts on fuzzy slippers, and goes downstairs for coffee, you are going to put your reader to sleep. These are the things you can usually safely omit.

So go through your scenes and find those sentences and phrases that show boring, mundane, or trivial actions, thoughts, or speech. Be sure you have all your scenes building to the important plot points with pertinent information that will engage your readers. Just by cutting out those unnecessary bits will ramp up your tension and pacing overall.

2. Pay attention to rhythm.

Rhythm can be hard to define, but at its simplest level, it’s created by sentence length. Short sentences or phrases are flashes of insight, hammering action, stark realization. They feel like a caught breath, or, in rapid succession, a pounding heart.

Look at the rhythm at the end of this description: “They got the net over the rail and dumped it on the deck, silver fish flapping, detritus, and the person—a girl—a woman, young. Alive.”

On the other hand, long, complex sentences can create a feeling that everything is happening at once. They’re helpful to overwhelm or to create a sense of things spinning out of control: “Dark clouds were billowing over a choppy sea, the boat charging up and down the waves, when the words sank in. Through the spray and the looming storm Tyler saw it too—an arm, a flash of shoe.”

Altering your sentence structure helps promote strong pacing and tension. The effect is conflict: the long and the short warring with each other. In a tense scene, that’s exactly the result we want.

Go for sentence wording and punctuation that mirror the flow of the action—staccato or flowing. Effective rhythm can also be created through alliteration, assonance, and other tools from the poet’s bag of tricks.

3. Infuse your pages with conflict and emotional narrative.

Other great ways of keeping strong tension and pacing are through the use of conflict and emotional narrative. Conflict, or a character’s opposition with other characters or circumstances (or both), keeps a story interesting. Emotional narrative invokes readers’ interest by allowing them to get to know a character and care about what happens to him.

If a character’s inner thoughts and motivations aren’t shown, he seems more like a puppet just going through the motions. One of the things that greatly influences whether readers bond with a character is their ability to identify with what the character is experiencing.

Seek and Destroy

If you’re writing scenes that feel as if they’re slogging through molasses when you want them to move quickly, with a lot of tension and emotion, try this: scrap the scene as it stands now. Rewrite it entirely, focusing on the senses, using strong verbs, and playing with rhythm that mirrors the action. You might be amazed at what you can turn out.

Go through your scenes and find those sentences and phrases that show boring, mundane, or trivial actions, thoughts, or speech. Be sure you have all your scenes building to the important plot points with pertinent information that will engage your readers. Just by cutting out those unnecessary bits will ramp up your tension and pacing overall.

Pay attention to your use of conflict and emotional narrative. By working to infuse inner and outer conflict on every page, you’ll find the tension and pacing will ratchet up. And when your characters are experiencing and manifesting strong emotions, that will help evoke emotional responses in your readers.

When readers care about what happens to your characters, they’ll feel that tension, created by the need for comfortable resolution to their problems.

Now go seek and destroy those culprits that sabotage your pacing and tension. Your readers will be glad you did!

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