Control Your Pacing with Stimuli + Response

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In a new post, Janice Hardy offers advice on using your characters’ emotional responses to control pacing and lead your readers into your story.

When your character is exposed to a stimulus, you have a lot of options for describing their response. During an action scene, your hero might respond to the sound of a scream with little internal monologue. During a slower period, your hero will have more time to reflect to events, information, or conversation. “How much internalization and what the point of view character is thinking about determines how fast the scene will read,” Hardy says. “That emotional response is also a fantastic way to keep readers in the head of the point of view character so the action scenes don’t feel dry with a lot of external description of the action.”

Internalization also can help keep your reader engaged. During an action scene, you might be tempted to jump from action to action to action without checking in on your protagonist. Showing what your hero is thinking is a good way to keep your reader in the scene and add immediacy to your writing. However, you should be careful, as too much interior monologue will slow down your scene. If that’s your intention, that’s great. However, if you’re writing a scene where your hero is in danger, a faster pace is probably the right choice.

“The trick is to find the right balance between the pace you want, and the emotions you want the reader to feel,” Hardy says. She offers three considerations:

  1. No one reacts to nothing. Sometimes, you’ll find a character reacting to something that hasn’t happened yet, as though the writer wants to surprise the reader. If your hero walks to his front door before the bell rings, consider rewriting that sentence to describe the doorbell first.
  2. Reactions trigger thoughts. “We think about the stuff that’s happening to us, even if it’s just a flash thought,” Hardy writes. “Internalization helps maintain a personal connection between reader and character, and that keeps the tension tight and the reader reading. Don’t forget to keep the descriptions in the character’s voice.”
  3. Emotional responses help set the pace. In a fast-paced scene, your character will have little time to think. Use short, quick internal responses. Save your long, thoughtful responses for a slower scene or a post-action respite.