Winter Hauntings Workshop 3: pace yourself

Like a haunted corpse heart pounding beneath the floorboards, effective pacing establishes the rhythm of your narrative and keeps readers riveted from the first hint of trouble to the final act of mayhem in your tale of terror. When story time is condensed, such as summarizing days or even years in a few sentences, the pacing feels faster, creating a sense of rapid progression as you skip over less critical events. Conversely, when story time is expanded, focusing in detail on a short period, like a single moment described over several pages, the pacing slows down, allowing for deeper exploration of characters, emotions, and atmosphere.

Mastering story time travel techniques equips you to control information flow, the speed of the narrative, and your reader’s emotional anticipation. In our third Winter Hauntings workshop at CCC, we’re going to become skilled story time manipulators, using the following tools of our trade.

Tools for Manipulating Story Time

• Sentence Structure: Vary to affect pacing.
• Paragraph Length: Adjust to quicken or slow down the narrative.
• Dialogue: Can speed up or slow down events.
• Description: Detailed or concise to influence pacing.
• Literary Devices: Use of foreshadowing, flashbacks, etc., to control pace.

Story Time, Text Time, & Speed

While story time refers to the chronological duration of the events within the narrative itself, text time is the amount of time it takes for a reader to read the text, which can vary greatly from the fictional time span of the story. Narratologists Gerard Genette and Seymour Chatman proposed five standard story speeds based on the ratio between story time and text time, which Jane Alison distills in a handy chart in her amazing book on writing craft Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative.

In class, we’ll be looking at examples of story speeds in M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” If you’re interested in playing along, take a look at these two passages and tell me in the comments what kind of story speeds the authors are using, some of the tools they use to speed up and slow down, and how the speed affects the pacing.

Passage from “The Yellow Wallpaper”

There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.

 ***

We have been here two weeks, and I haven’t felt like writing before, since that first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

Passage from “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, my Lad”

On the following day Parkins did, as he had hoped, succeed in getting away from his college, and in arriving at Burnstow. He was made welcome at the Globe Inn, was safely installed in the large double-bedded room of which we have heard, and was able before retiring to rest to arrange his materials for work in apple-pie order upon a commodious table which occupied the outer end of the room, and was surrounded on three sides by windows looking out seaward; that is to say, the central window looked straight out to sea, and those on the left and right commanded prospects along the shore to the north and south respectively. On the south you saw the village of Burnstow. On the north no houses were to be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing it. Immediately in front was a strip—not considerable—of rough grass, dotted with old anchors, capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the beach. Whatever may have been the original distance between the Globe Inn and the sea, not more than sixty yards now separated them.

10 Pacing Questions for a Writers’ Workshop

We’re also going to be workshopping the writers’ ghost stories with an eye on pacing in particular. If you want to assess your own pacing, you might ask questions like:

1. Are there areas where varying sentence length could improve the flow or tension?
2. Can changes in paragraph length be used to enhance key moments in the story?
3. Are there places where dialogue could be tightened or expanded to better control pacing?
4. Are descriptive passages too lengthy or too brief in critical sections?
5. Would a literary device like foreshadowing or flashback enhance the pacing?
6. Does the story maintain a balance between fast-paced and slower, more reflective sections?
7. Are there any noticeable pacing inconsistencies that disrupt the flow of the story?
8. Does the pacing allow sufficient time for character development and reader connection?
9. Are there areas where the story feels stalled or rushed due to pacing?
10. Is there a variety in the pacing throughout the story?

Next week, we’ll finish up with a creative writing game inspired by one of my favorite authors Italo Calvino. See you then!

Links

You can read the full text of “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” here or listen to the story here.

Read the full text of “The Yellow Wallpaper” here or listen here.