Pacey writing

This week I met a friend for lunch who said she'd loved my book Panthera : Death Spiral.  She said she loved the way the story galloped along, and she just had to turn the page and read another chapter before bed.

It's crucial to get the pace of your writing right.  Creative writing teachers will tell you that the golden rule is to get into a scene as late as possible and leave it as soon as the action is done.  In other words, no lengthy build-ups to the action, please.

I'm just coming up to the end of writing Panthera : Death Song, and I'm deliberately using pace to up the sense of menace in these crucial chapters.  So I have my characters escaping from somewhere they shouldn't be, braving a storm in a very small boat, being chased by a bigger and faster boat, having to run for the shore, and maybe getting their boat wrecked on the rocks.  And I'm changing the viewpoint every eight hundred words or so.

Those short chapters mean that I plunge straight into the action, with the character picking up the story thread from the place where the last character left it.  That gives me far more scope for cliffhangers.  If I design my structure right, nearly every chapter or chase scene can end with a cliffhanger that leaves you wondering if the characters will survive.

Of course, I wouldn't want that breathless pace throughout.  It has to be varied, with slower parts where the reader can catch their breath.  I tend to use Panthera's chapters for that.  Pan is often very reflective, usually because he's trying to work out the differences between himself as an artificial intelligence and the way humans think.  So I have him writing poetry to work out his world.  But this has to be a balancing act too.  Too much navel- gazing and my readers are going to get bored and start asking where the action has gone.

Pace is crucial to the success of the story.  Leave your readers catching their breaths in the right places and you've got a successful book.