THE TRIFECTA OF PACING
Pacing. How to write to heart, and you will activate your page, emotionally and physically move your reader into the landscape of your storytelling and engage them fully.
Plot. How write to mind and move the story arc and scenes of story.
Prosody. How write to ear and freshen your approach, style, tone, diction, syntax, mood, and pauses until it pings your reader’s ear?
TOOLS TO IMPROVE YOUR PACING
Pace & Creativity. Use this tool in unexpected ways to achieve extraordinary results.
Play plays an important role in pacing your plot. Half the battle starts with coaching yourself to let go and get in touch with your playful side to fully engage readers.
Performance. Shift your pacing to a performance feel by becoming more in tune with the actions, reactions, interactions, how you shift from scene-to-scene, and transport readers.
Personality infuses story. What is yours? What’s your mood, tone, attitude, world view, belief systems, tastes, naivety, voice? What’s the personality of voice, dialogue, story?
Humor, in art and in words, elevates story. Hone pauses, add comedic timing, think like acomedian to improve story.
Pause, breath, and “what is left unsaid” create weight in the reading and writing process, and you should give equal weight to what you write into your story as you do to what you leave out.
Poetry & Poetic Devices support the best aspects of great writing: internal rhyme, enjambment, mocking the scene, building reader engagement—and so much more. These enhance your prose. Rhyme and the beauty of poetry should be an integral part of your writing process. It’s what brings you to the page to excite your readers.
Repetition adds rhythmic beats and creates patterns that thrill your readers by highlighting what’s important, pivotal, and surprisingly fresh in your story.
Rhythm in your writing is not a bonus item. It’s essential. It adds beats, energy, sounds, and merges meaning into song.
Punctuation. See that strong pacing means watching your road signs. All your punctuation marks—!?.,:!—should serve story, support theme, and improve plot pacing.
Questions make a flat line beat again—and pull readers through a narrative, adding interiority and so much more.
Contrast focuses on the negative space of good writing to use flips, word play, opposition, misdirection, and more.
Objects do more than you imagine in defining setting and personality and plot simultaneously. They represent obstacles, connection, and concerns.
Threes—as in, groups of—please the reader’s ear and have remained a golden part of storytelling in plot, words, verbs, lists, adjectives, adverbs, and more.
Lists lure readers in. A list can be just a list, a refreshing pause, a pacing shift to build tension and suspense, or a way to create an interactive game.
White space & Negative Space of Good Writing evokes emotions and paces with immediacy, forcing the reader to entertain expressions, feelings, and emotional journey. You explore how thinking about ‘the flip side,’ or opposing views, will help you enhance each moment of your story.
Art & Graphics amplify, marry words of story, and follow or build on the intensity of a scene, daring to carry story at times. How will you meet reader demand in today’s market from larger words, breaking up a page, considering form, you can enhance story through graphic play?
Interactives build the dynamic worlds video gamers demand—and lift the stakes (tension, suspense, surprise) to new levels.
Dummying or a Novel Check is a step not to be skipped because you pace your plot by layering, punching up, pulsing in the many techniques mentioned here.
Passion. You bring passion and magic to your storytelling. Your words compile into the Not, the Now & the Zing! Remember that every technique in pacing your plot matters. You want to pace your plot as strong and engaging as possible.
jodellsadler
2026-09-25 21:59:03
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A focus
jodellsadler
2026-09-25 21:59:03
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A focusINTRODUCTION
You hold a book right now that will revolutionize the way you write.
It will improve your writing, help you engage your reader, and improve both plot and pacing. I want to share with you the many craft elements will help a light bulb go off in your own writing and illustrating process, further your craft, and help you publish. Right now, you are holding the best advice about the art of plot pacing. And, it is my hope this study of craft will bring joy to your writing process. This book can be used as a great on-the-go or by-the-tool writer’s workshop. You may read it in order, out of order–or even backwards. No matter what, your writing will improve through this study of plot pacing.
What’s exciting when it comes to pacing your writing?
There’s one simple truth: Pacing used with intention and skill moves your story’s plot, enhances your character’s emotional journey, and supports your project’s theme. A well-paced story invites a reader in and keeps them immersed in your plot long after its cover closes.
Yes, pacing is that powerful a writing tool.
This study presents in 3 parts:
The Trifecta of Pacing
Pace Your Plot
Tools to Improve Your Pacing
Pace Your Plot introduces the Trifecta of Plot Pacing, and how to move beyond pacing to merge plot with emotional story arc. When
you start to see this trifecta, mixed with prosody, there’s no limit to what you can achieve. It’s a dream changer.
This is not a book about using short and long sentences to pace.
This is not a book that coaches you on simply punching up endings and chapter breaks.
For this is that book that will elevate your writing beyond your wildest dreams, to embrace writing to mind, heart, and ear—the best of plot pacing—and improve your story, touch readers, and, perhaps
garner an agent’s or editor’s attention.
I’m excited for you. Let’s get started.
PART
THE TRIFECTA OF PLOT PACING
Writing to Mind, Heart, & Ear
Before you even begin, please know this book is an invitation to allow yourself the freedom to explore words and sounds and meaning–all of the beauty of writing.
1
ACTIVE PACING
Active Pacing. Action builds story. Active pacing lifts your writing and merges the movement of story with the pauses and moments you wish to highlight in order to create rich and memorable events and characters for your reader. Pacing is imperative to a writer’s success. Pacing unfolds the plot at a rhythmic clip and helps you delve deeper into the emotional resonance of your story. You speed up and slow down—you leave off the page, you flip to the contrary—in a story when you want your reader to notice something important. What’s nice is that there are many tools and techniques to do just that.
All the techniques found in Pace Your Plot may be seen in the many award-winning books. The lens of pace allows you to write inside the playground of your mind. You will discover ways to make your text stand out and rise up enough to be celebrated. You will create more interplay between art and words and form, spanning picture books to middle grades to graphic novels, illustrated, and beyond.
First steps invite you to infuse every manuscript with the Trifecta of Great Pacing: Pacing, Plot and Prosody.
ACTION, MOVEMENT
Pacing includes the action, movement, energy that aligns the stars in your writing. You will pay attention to how you pause, speed up, slow down, and halt story as you unfold your plot in order to enhance the emotional arc.
You might use pause and your ability to cradle your reader in a clause at times to create emphasis. You might use diction, tone, and prosody in order to “go far enough” to entice readers into the next
moments of your story. You might move beyond the ordinary conversation of long- and short-sentence use to consider syllables, syntax, sentence structure—the musicality of language—and all the poetic devices you can employ at any given time within your narrative.
You might challenge word choice based on sound, rhythm, or impact. Activate and emote verbs (challenging those “to be” verbs that shift to summary and telling). You might oust adverbs and infuse your story with the specificity it needs to trek readers towards your rising action and climax.
The best part of pacing is your ability to both control reader
interaction and fully understand the “why” behind your writing. When
you connect awesome pacing your plot, you will emote more meaning into your work, add more depth to your story, scenes, and characters. You will see and feel and celebrate every moment of your unfolding. You will be able to craft “authenticity” while remaining true to the world of your narrative. You will be able to focus or zoom in on the interiority of your characters, knowing the key ingredients and baking time for each technique and become the master chef of your storytelling.
CONTROL & CONNECT
The whole idea behind pacing and slowing, controlling, and moving is to harness the power of comedic pause, breath, white space, and texture—and a whole lot of voice, because diction matters. Pacing allows you to share a joke or a conversation in an opening that flips and gets recast at the end of a story in a way the reader needs no insight in order to appreciate it fully—all because now they know, know your characters well and they have become like family.
I’ve taken these key ingredients of awesome storytelling and
condensed the many tools of plot pacing so you may do more to control the moments and movements within your story—like using a list as a pacing tool and fully understanding why it works, or why parenthetical asides add to its effectiveness.
Action is pacing. Pacing begs for action. It reaches forward and inward, adding interiority and worldview to the spirit of your main character. It’s about imaginings and creativity and play—that sense of letting go. Pacing invites writers to get out of their own way and do more—daring more—and performing better. It’s about moving readers and story on a word and line level, adding rhythm and bringing more joy to your writing process.
Pacing beckons magic and remains the best part of writing—the icing on our proverbial publication pie. It’s truly delicious.
So, I’ve organized these ideas into a kind of unfolding Pace Your Plot workout in three steps: The Trifecta fo Pacing, Pace Your Plot Techniques, and Tools to Improve Your Pacing.
Delve in even further to rethink your process and how you interact and engage and enervate these many nuances of plot pacing.
2
PACING MARKER
Details create word strings that might share rhythmic, memorable information connecting the theme, plot and may act as a pacing marker. A pacing marker line will help you ‘mark’ or report changes in the emotional trajectory of your main character. A line a reader has read once will get attention when repeated. A line, if it uses literary, poetic devise will garner even more attention as its aural energy help
you connect to your reader in a playful way. Pay attention to details and specificity within your story.
As this writing shows, you need to let go and really share your landscape, the feel of the page beneath your feet, the trouble brewing in the heart of you character—all of it. Trust your writing voice and create a symphony of magic for your readers that flows from the heart.
Think beyond words. Think about your project as a whole and embrace all the opportunities that each tool allows. Work to engage readers.
FOCUS & REVEAL
Let’s further explore the Newbery Award-winning novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Kelly Barnhill announces a ritual: Day of Sacrifice, and she spends enough time explaining this practice, and because she
does, the reader may pick up on its importance, sense the tension in its annual practice and its ugliness: A single and youngest child gets sacrificed to a witch. This important detail launches the story.
One skillfully rendered detail transports readers into the story, theme, and character—and details here definitely serves double duty.
Check That You are Writing to the Trifecta of Great Pacing:
Plot (Mind)
Pace (Heart)
Prosody (Ear)
There are just so many ways to check and recheck and keep honing and polishing your work. As you do, you will continue to see more and more ways to enervate your project beyond what you, perhaps, even felt was possible. Get on the page. Feel your way through story from your very first line to very last word.
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15
STORY SCENES, SUMMARIES & STRUCTURES
Once you have a solid draft mapped out, challenge your plot pacing. How did you come in-to the story, and is it the best way? How are you moving your reader from scenes and into key moments and are you falling into poetry or moving between points of view? Are you using a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter, or perhaps ending chapters and key moments with a question? How readers experience your story will matter, so challenge, consider and explore how your readers will travel through story, through scene—and how will you alert them to the really important moments.
Once you have a solid draft, this is your opportunity to hone your pacing even more. Think about the structure of story can also impact plot pacing. How you can take the concepts you’ve explored in this guide and now apply them?
And if there’s one thing you shift in a big way, consider brainstorming ideas on how to further structure your story.
DO A CHAPTER CHECK
Are you starting your novel too soon, a chapter too soon, or shares sharing too much of your own pre-work or notes instead of starting in that “just right” spot? Challenge your opening. Make sure your first chapter is your first chapter and those first lines hone down to the bones of good writing. See what the best way into your story there is and do that. And don’t just change it up once and think you are done. Prove it. Test it. Pace it out for yourself. Try three or four new ways to start your story and open up your writing playground. Allow yourself to start your story in different ways and decide which one works better and why.
SHIFT UP YOUR PACING
Do not be afraid to take advantage of the whole gamut of pacing: all its tools and techniques. FMove, stop, pause, halt your story as needed to bring your scenes to life visually and emotionally to alert your reader—hello, this is important—and do this in such a dynamic and exciting way that even the video-gamers among your readers celebrate the level of interactivity you bring. Thrill yourself to thrill them. Hit the play button.
From the moment your fingers hit the keys, you begin a journeying from summary into scene and back to summary, linking the important events of your story. When in summary, you will want to control
your flow and build these moments using active language as much as possible. You use these short summaries to move time, move the pacing in huge leaps or small steps, but, nonetheless, you will use this to make a leap over what’s unnecessary to get to that next plot scene your will slow in and bring to life. This part of pacing is yours to control. If you have a longer summary, you will want to infuse it with prosody and bathe it in other poetic devices to improve the pace.
Read well-crafted books that seamlessly shift from summary to scene and, lucky for you, you can review the books that Candy Fleming and Eric Rohmann create. Explore STRONGHEART, Wonder Dog of the
Silver Screen. Read the nonfiction, Family Romanovs and see it’s kinship to fiction. Candy Fleming, the master of this technique, hosts courses and webinars on this material online at KidLitCollege.org and at conferences and events.
USE YOUR PACING MARKERS
If you have information that needs to be shared but it feels heavy, then shift the pacing my inserting the many poetic devices to create a swifter pacing. Now you have so, so many options and ways to shift your plot’s pace. You only need to determine how you want your scenes to im-pact and interact with your reader, and edit them stronger, swifter, while remaining sincere and au-thentic to character, plot and story experience. Weave in tension, suspense, and surprise when and where you will, keep it pacing and presenting throughout your story.
17
FLASHBACK, FLASH-FORWARD & CLIFFHANGERS
Not too long ago, changing and controlling pacing happened trhough the use of the short or long sentence, flashbacks and flash-forward moves as well as cliffhangers, but now, you can see plot pacing moves beyond this short list as well as the hops, skips, and jumps that will improve the plot pacing of your story.
FLASHBACKS
Flashbacks improve and enhance interiority and build awareness
of the complexity of your character’s situation. It will slow the forward momentum of your story, so you need to bathe these in prosody so you can maintain a healthy pacingpace. One of the toughest decisions for you will be when to use a flashback and how soon. So often, authors use them too soon within a story, before the main forward momentum gets moving along. That can be quite jarring. When you find yourself needing that glimpse back… before launching into your story, and perhaps it’s imperative that your reader this informational scene and the details it carries, then that’s a good sign you maybe could use a prologue to start your story. Test it. Try it.
Then explore books that use a prologue like the Cirque du Freak series by Darren Shan or The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater or even Into The Water by Paula Hawkins, which begins with the open of the story of a dead sister had written.
FLUIDITY & PACING BREAKS
Remember to shift up your pacing and surprise your reader, breathe breathing freshness into your work, even when you are going for awesome pacing throughout your work. Thinking Think back
to Leonardo The Terrible Monster by Mo Willems and what you learned from that awesome shift from pages and pages of white space to a full out rant that fills the page with words. Or you can look at The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen or Keeper by Kathi Appelt and see those great shifts in pacing throughout the chapters and over a series of chapters—and really notice that these authors incorporate a drop into a poem, poetic picture book lan-guage, incorporate the line breaks in poetry and some much more. When you think about these moves, you know you can do more to change things up within your own work.
Remember the chapter pause in the middle of Piecing Me Together by Renée Watson. Challenge yourself to see the emotional rise in story and mark it in some way. Mark it with a pause. Consider a short, punchy chapter that falls after a longer one. This remains a good move when it
comes to pacing. Do know how much pacing and layers of pacing you can put out there:
You can pace with in a scene.
You can pace within the words of scene, within sentences.
You can pace your work with structures and pauses.
You can pace with a single word. Pause.
Punch up your work.
Do this as you review your work, identify those hot spots and push extreme pacing right there or pull back to slim to nothing and incorporate a word pause.
Think about how in Keeper by Kathi Appelt, Keeper gets l