Pacing, Part 4: The Building Blocks of Pacing

I’m working on a series on pacing.  You can see other posts in the series here.

I’ll get to pacing for engineers in a bit.  First the different building blocks of pacing:

  • Word length.
  • Length of phrases (as marked by breaths or punctuation).
  • Sentence length.
  • Paragraph length.
  • Beat length (the length of each individual sub-conflict within a scene).
  • Scene length.
  • Section length (as marked by a white space).
  • Chapter length.
  • “Part” length.
  • Story length.

Each “level” of pacing has its own implications and use.  It’s often the pattern of how the different lengths are mixed that’s important–long long long gives a different “feel” to the work than long medium short short, for example.  (Sorry, engineer types, I’ll get to that for you in a bit.)

The content of what you put into each level is important, too, because pacing is how we link form and content.

And there are other things that I’m not mentioning here that are also levels of pacing, because pacing knows no limit to the complexity with which you can slice it, as far as I’ve been able to tell.  But we’re not going to talk about that now.

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