Pace

Pace is not typing faster. It is the rate at which the reader’s questions are answered, and the nerve to withhold an answer for a chapter.

A book that moves at one speed becomes a drone, whether the speed is a sprint or a shuffle. Alternate pressure and release. After a scene in which something is decided, you may give the reader a quieter page — not a pointless page, a page in which the decision is felt. Then tighten again.

Pace lives in sentence length as well as in plot. Short sentences accelerate. A long sentence can linger, or it can rush if the clauses pile up without a rest. Read a page and notice whether your pulse matches the scene. A fist fight written in leisurely subordinate clauses is accidentally comic. A grief written only in fragments can feel like a trick.

The usual cut, when a draft is slow, is the scene that exists to explain. Explanation is the enemy of pace. Replace it with a consequence. The reader will infer the cause if the consequence is sharp enough.

Commercial fiction is less forgiving of the slow patch than literary fiction, but even a meditative novel needs a pulse. If three chapters pass in which nobody wants anything they cannot have, you have written weather. Weather can be beautiful. It is rarely a reason to turn a page.