Set the Pace!

One of my favorite Disney movies has always been Mulan. Not only is it an epic story with a fantastic cast and beautiful music, but it also came out around the time I was born, so I’ve always kind of saluted it as the movie of my year. Recently though, I rewatched Mulan after having not seen it in a while and I noticed something that had never occurred to me before. Mulan as a movie has extraordinary pacing.

            What is pacing? Pacing is how quickly or slowly the events of a story take place, and it is a notoriously hard element to execute. Pacing is a make-or-break element: if your story is too slow, readers might lose interest and stop moving forward; if it’s too fast, they might plow through the story or not be able to keep up with the chain of events. Pacing is not only an element that’s crucial to written stories but is something I know from experience is a huge consideration in how quickly the action plays out in onstage performances or filmed ones.

            So, what do we need to consider to try to get this Goldilocks “just right” middle ground on story speed?

How Much Time Do We Need?

            One way to aid pacing is to set your characters on a time limit. For example, this is a technique you see a lot in fantasy stories in the form of some sort of prophesied magical timer: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians always has a timeline of a particular solstice from book to book, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast has the well-known “before the last petal falls” from Beast’s enchanted rose, etc. A lot of suspense movies also slap a timer on their pacing as well to maximize the amount of pressure their characters are under- you only have so many hours before a bomb goes off, hostages are hurt, etc.

            In all the scenarios listed above, the characters are aware of their time limits and it’s used as a meter to dial up the stress and make the story not drag on. The only trick of having an explicitly stated timeline is that you, as a writer (or actor or director) have to line out events in order to hit that mark. If you start writing a story and find you’ve given yourself too much time or not enough, you can always adjust your timeline by adding or dropping days. Or adding in an obstacle to eat up time as Rick Riordan did in The Lightning Thief, where Percy, Annabeth, and Grover- who are already on a race against time- get stuck in the Lotus Hotel and realize they’ve lost several days once they finally break free of the trap’s outside-of-time magic.

            Even if you aren’t putting your characters on a strict deadline as mentioned above, you can still follow a rough timeline. When I think about a scenario like this, I think about J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Minus maybe the last book, the vast majority of Harry Potter books take place at Hogwarts and roughly follow the timeline of the school year. A whole school year is a lot of time to cover, but each Harry Potter book tends to have a plot that reveals itself slowly as the characters uncover new clues for the mystery of a particular book, clues that also add up into the larger overarching story of Voldemort’s return.

How Quickly Does the Story Move?

            So, this is really where we get into the core part of pacing, right? How much is going on and how quickly does each new thing propelling the plot forward happen?

            We’ve all read a book or seen a movie where this is in prime focus, right? In some of my college visual media classes, we discussed Disney’s Marvel superhero franchise and how, if you watch the movies, there’s a thing where every few minutes there’s an explosion to up the action and make sure the audience’s attention span isn’t straying. New explosion, new attention-grabbing thing bringing you back in the story to see what happens next. I don’t know if the Marvel movies do that for sure or not, but I think it’s probably a good bet. If it’s an action movie, you’ve got to keep the action going.

            Books, not being as visual a medium as TV might execute this same principle in different ways, but essentially, it’s “one thing after another”, most often stacking the odds against the heroes. Off the top of my head, there’s two books I consistently think of that I plowed through reading because I literally felt like there was no good place to stop where the story just kept raising the stakes chapter after chapter: Amie Kaufman’s The Isles of the Gods and Rick Riordan’s Daughter of the Deep. Ironically, thinking on it now, both are nautical stories, which is kind of funny. Maybe fast-pacing is a large part of that genre.

            As you can see though, raising the stakes at each new movement of the story propels it forward. Something you hear a lot in writing advice is to ask yourself “What is the worst possible thing that could happen at this moment?” and then make that thing happen. It’s solid advice for constantly raising the stakes but remember to give your characters (and your readers) at least a couple of opportunities to catch their breath. Though both The Isles of the Gods and Daughter of the Deep are pretty non-stop, there are a few brief moments where things calm down around the middle of both books: Selly and Leander’s brief romantic moment at the club when they finally get to land and the Nautilus’s crew finding a few chapters of safe harbor on the island. Note though that these moments in the story are actually setting up a false sense of safety and, in both books, the characters are sent fleeing as their enemies finally catch up to them.

            Not going to lie, one of the most stressful series I think I’ve read is Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s Illuminae series, which is this baffling combo of writing and visual graphics. This series does cover a large amount of time, as the basis is characters recounting a particular chain of events to the reader, but it makes a point to skip any irrelevant time. Each new log entry is dated, so you do have to pay attention a bit to make sure you’re not missing a time jump, but I distinctly remember being halfway through the first book, feeling like things were wrapping up, and then going “Wait, why are there 300 pages left? Things have to get way worse.” They did, in fact, get way worse. Worse than I would have guessed, so you have to keep going.

            Make crap hit the fan whenever you can. That’s my advice for pacing.

The No Good, Terrible, Very Bad Day

            I feel like I probably left out some adjectives in my attempt to be clever with that title reference, but it’s extremely fitting for how pacing really does work in a lot of stories. Writing advice always tells you to start your story at the latest possible moment for the story to make sense and begin quickly, but taking that a step farther, you’re probably also starting on a very bad day for your character (*cough* inciting incident).

            This is what really struck me about Mulan, which I still find baffling that I never noticed it before given how many times I’ve probably watched that movie. Literally the entire first movement of the story takes place in one day. Mulan preparing to meet the matchmaker and the cacophony of dishonor that ensues, all the feels of “Reflection”, her nice pep talk with her dad…Mulan is already having a terrible day before the soldiers show up and demand all the men go to war. The second half of the day is then this existential turmoil of her father going off to war, Mulan insisting that if he goes he’ll almost certainly be killed from his physical state, her crying in the rain until her parents go to bed when she finally decides to take his place, and her preparing and leaving home to go to war or be killed by the discovery of her being a woman.

            I never realized it. All that is one big, awful day. Isn’t that insane how fast the story moves?

            The movie does slow down a bit as she spends time at the training camp, although they’re not there long. Another thing I never realized is the only reason their army leaves training to go to the front is due to Mushu’s meddling, but the army at the actual front was decimated, so Mushu actually got them to the right place at the right time by total accident and his own selfish intentions. (Note: side characters propelling the action forward by their own motivations. Also a good thought.) But once they realize they’re the main troops the army has left, the story is back into full gear as it starts that descent to the climax: the Huns find them, the battle, Mulan gets hurt saving the others, she is discovered and left behind, she sees the Huns survived and are headed for the emperor, she tries to warn the others, the battle to save the emperor and the city. They don’t really say how long she might have been out for her injuries before the army leaves her behind, but it seems like most of what I’ve just laid out happens in the span of a day or two. Other than training, which obviously takes a bit for the characters to learn their skills, and marching to the front, the main action sequences of the movie happen in the span of a couple of days. Wild, right?

            But think about other stories too. Unless there’s a time gap for some purpose, a lot of stories happen within a few days. The latest Percy Jackson book, Wrath of the Triple Goddess, takes place in a week. It’s a little hard to judge since they were jumping between places with different times, but I believe the last series I read (The Silver in the Bone duology by Alexandra Bracken) took place in the span of a couple of weeks- well, the time span for the characters- although a couple months had passed in the mortal world, unbeknownst to them.

            You might not know this until you really dig into writing your story, but how fast the events take place might not be super clear at the beginning. Like I said, if you want to set a deadline for your characters, you have to make sure you give them just the right amount of time to hit said deadline (most likely in the nick of time) and you can always adjust how much time they need as you go. Remember, you don’t want to give them too much time and that deadline needs to pack on the pressure as the time ticks away. Giving a definite timeline isn’t necessary, as I said, as long as the chain of events is propelling the characters forward into higher and higher stakes.

            So, try to keep all that in mind as you set forth working on your own story’s chain of events. What amount of time is just enough to seem plausible to achieve the character’s goal but keep them on a clock? What chain of events can happen to keep propelling the action and characters forward? How much can you put your characters and readers through before they’ll need a break, even if it’s just a short one?

            I hope this helps! If you know any other great examples of books, movies, or shows with great pacing, let us know.

            Now go watch Mulan. You know you want to.

            Thanks for reading! Write on.

            -Kamryn