Certain things come easy to every author, and other things come hard. Pace comes easy to me. When a paragraph or chapter drags along, I somehow sense it when editing and revising. Most writers do, especially when you read your own work as a “reader”.

Pace is the amount of time you spend on each part of the story. The Goldilocks Principle applies to pace – it should be neither too fast nor too slow, but just right. There isn’t any tidy little rule you can memorise to define what the perfect pace is for a story. A general rule is to vary the pace to suit the tension in the scene. So most often, you’ll want to zip through the boring parts of the story and take more time on the exciting parts. That seems very strange, right? If you’re showing a high-speed car chase, surely you’d want to make it read fast, wouldn’t you? Which means using fewer words, right?

Yes and no.

Yes, you want it to read fast. But no, you don’t want to spend fewer words on it, you want more. There’s really no paradox here. Think of a football game in which one of the players makes a huge play, dodging first one defender, then another, all the way down the field, finally dancing into the end zone for a score. What happens next? You can bet your manuscript that the networks are going to show the whole thing again, this time in slow motion, dragging out every twist, turn, footwork a la Kylian Mbappé, and all the way down the field. Showing it in slow motion takes a lot longer, but it doesn’t cut the pace. It increases the pace.

Because when the play ran at normal speed, you missed most of the action. You saw a fellow running with the ball and you saw others missing to stop him. It all went by in a blur so fast that you couldn’t take it all in. When they ran it in super slow motion, you saw every little move, every tensing muscle, the bunching and flapping of the shirts and shorts, facial expressions and the movements of various muscles. You saw the defence response fooled and beaten, their boots sending turfs of earth and grass flying. All the way to the final kick, ball sailing through the air, the goalkeeper’s twists and turns to stop the score, and finally the ball hitting that particular part of the net, perhaps (and more exciting) hitting whatever part of the posts first before sailing into the net. You saw the last desperate flying ball just an inch from the goalkeeper’s fingers or a breath above his head to land the score. 

And then the normal pace resumed.

It took ten times as long to see it in slow motion, but this time, you saw it all. You saw every action, every reaction, in beautiful, sharply cut detail. That’s what you came to see or turned on your TV to watch. 

In your novel, the moral equivalent of super-slow-motion involves spending far more words than you normally would, but using much shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs. If your sentences are normally ten words apiece, they might fall to five. Or three. Or one. Or, in dialogue, by certain omissions.

You can’t keep that up very long, of course. It would be crazy to watch an entire football game in slow motion, right? You want to ramp up the pace only for the high-tension scenes, where the stakes are in Pluto. Slowing down the pace works the opposite way. Longer sentences. Longer paragraphs. Fewer actions and reactions. More interior monologue, longer dialogue.

The reader reads fiction hoping to have a Powerful Emotional Experience. Inside a scene, you provide this by showing actions and reactions between your point-of-view character and the other characters. Every time you show your POV character reacting to the other characters, you have a chance to provide an emotional hit point to your reader.

Naturally, it only makes sense to speed up the pace when the tension is high. If you try this when the tension is low, the story is going to drag. (Imagine showing the team’s pep-talk huddle in slow motion!) There are an infinite variety of paces you can use as you work through each scene. You speed it up and slow it down, possibly several times in the scene.

How do you know when you’ve got it right?

That’s easy. You’ve got it right when it feels right. Fiction is about creating a Powerful Emotional Experience in your reader. Tweak the pace until you’re doing that, and your reader will feel like Goldilocks.

Glorious pacing, fellow writers!

Blurb: Golden Shana: The Chase (Book 1)







Excerpt from Golden Shana: The Chase (Book 1)







And brains to go with it.


Svadishana’s arms and knickers and… heart?

What obsession, Roman. Get back to real.

No chance. Real was Svadishana.

Blurb: Golden Shana: The Capture (Book 2)







Excerpt from Golden Shana: The Capture (Book 2)




“Bed.” Her voice vibrated against my neck.


“Overriding my sensible decision?”

“Yes. Bed.” Tremulous once, tremulous twice.







“Protecting my golden goddess.”


Blurb: Golden Shana: The Untouchable (Book 3)







 Excerpt from Golden Shana: The Untouchable (Book 3)








“You’re lucky I’m—”


He said nothing.




“Oh, I don’t just think it.”



“You can’t intimidate me, Castell.”



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Giveaway: Golden Shana: The Chase (book 1)