Complicated Webs

Big, fat, complex, multiple-viewpoint novels have been popular for quite a while, and they have a whole set of problems all their own. Once of those problems is pacing.

The temptation is always to take advantage of a slow moment in the main plot to advance a subplot, and it’s frequently a good idea in many respects, but it can lead to a too-even pace as the intense high points of one subplot cancel out the lows of another. So what does one do?
Well, the first thing is to look for places where you can do two things at once. You have a super-fast fight scene that relates to the main plotline; maybe you can drop some background information about a secondary character’s skills that will be relevant to his subplot later on. You have a planning scene that works as a pause in your tense political subplot; maybe you can work in some character development that will be relevant to a couple of other things that are going on.

Everything in a story affects everything else, even (or especially) when there are multiple viewpoints. Even if your secondary viewpoint character is two hundred miles away from your main character, or you have an ensemble cast scattered across multiple star systems, they’re all in the same book for a reason. A character who’s hundreds of miles from the main plot focus can run across a piece of information that’s irrelevant to him, but that the reader can see is going to up the stakes for those other characters. This serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, it ties things together across plotlines; on the other hand, the inclusion of more information makes the subplot scene more dense, which slows the scene down a little. The fact that the additional information isn’t directly relevant to the subplot slows it down even more.

If pacing in a complex novel is a really serious problem, you may have to resort to charting out your scenes, so that you can see what the problem is. There are a bunch of different ways to do this; the simplest is to use letters for the various plotlines and upper and lower case for fast or slower paced scenes. So if you have scenes that go A – B – A – C – b – A, you probably have a too-fast pacing problem (and if A isn’t your central plot, you may have an emphasis problem). An A – a – B – b – C – c  pattern moves like a rocking chair; it’s not bad, but maybe a little more variation would help. If you’re doing two-fers, an Ab – B – aC – Ac has some nice variation in terms of which subplots each scene is looking at, but the low spots and the high spots may be smoothing each other out too much.

If you want a more visual representation, you can go with Post-It Notes – one color for each plotline, bright shades for fast-paced scenes and pale shades for slower ones. Or you can list your scenes in an Excel spreadsheet and assign each one a value for each subplot and then use the graphing function…the possibilities for cat-vacuuming are endless. Nevertheless, you can’t fix a problem until you know what and where the problem is, and charts and graphs of various sorts are a good way of doing that.

Once you have some idea where your pacing problems are, you can look at ways of correcting them. If you have too many intense scenes in a row, but they’re all from different plotlines (A – B – C – D), you may be able to move some slower scenes from later on to provide some breaks: A – Bc – d – Cb – a – D. If you can’t move slower scenes from later in the story, you may be able to write something new to insert to provide a breathing space. Similarly, if you have a string of slow scenes from different subplots, you can move higher-intensity scenes from later to intersperse with the slower ones, or write some new high-intensity scenes to break up the slow section, or speed up one or more of the slow bits.

And if none of that seems appropriate, you can use various tricks and techniques to “slow down” and de-intensify one of your fast scenes, so that you still have some pacing variation. As I said in the last post, each of the aspects of storytelling has more intense, faster-reading forms and less intense, slower-reading forms. For instance: Shorter sentences read fast. Short fragments, faster. Longer sentences tend to slow thing down, even if there’s a lot of activity happening; complex sentences that have multiple clauses tend to slow thing down even more. The same is true for viewpoint: a close-in camera tends to read faster than a more distant view, even if less of the overall scene is visible close up. Dialog and dramatization tend to read faster than narrative summary. Short, simple word choices read faster than polysyllabic ones. Cramming lots of important information into a single paragraph or line tends to make it dense and therefore slower reading. By adding a few longer, more complex sentences and moving the viewpoint camera a little farther out, you can slow down a too-fast action scene without actually changing much of what happens. And of course, it works the same in the other direction.

You also have to keep an eye on the rhythm of the subplots. You may have a perfectly acceptable overall pace that comes out as A – b – C – b – A – a – b – C, but your subplot B is composed of nothing but slow scenes. Sometimes, that’s all right; sometimes, it means some of the subplot scenes need to be intensified; sometimes, it means the subplot really needs to be given less emphasis and combined with other scenes because it doesn’t have the oomph to stand on its own; and sometimes, it means the subplot needs to be cut.

And as with the original “Big Three,” you can advance more than one subplot in a single scene, which tends to make it more intense and important even if both of the subplots are at a low-intensity point in their rhythm.