Best Tips for Mastering the Pacing of Your Novel

Join Drake and Marie as they discuss how to pace your story!
 
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Transcript

Marie: But if it's a slow thing, you know, she caressed my jaw line, the velvet, the velvet cloth of her silk covered gloves lingering on my beard, rasping through the hair like there is more intensity in the description. And that slows the reader down because they're consuming the scene in more detail.

Marie: Whereas an action scene where you rapid firing those descriptions of sensory details, it feels to the reader like they're getting smacked with quick jerky scenes.

Drake: Releasing your inner dragon.

Drake: Alright Marie. So our producer wants to talk about pacing. What is pacing? What does that mean to you? What? How do you use pacing? I mean, all of these we're going to talk about throughout the whole thing, But start us off like, what is your thoughts on pacing in a novel, in a scene?

Marie: So pacing is pretty much one of the most critical parts of any given story. Pacing is how you get the reader to keep going. Basically, it is how fast or slow the story unfolds. It is the rhythm of the story unfolding, and if your pacing is off, your reader disinvest from the story that put the book down and you're done.

Drake: Yeah, that's that is pretty much how I see it now. We differ on a few different ways. Like one of the in a lot of this has to do with writing style, you know, my writing style. One of the things that I learned about myself when I was writing the Krasnaya novel for Hard World, the thing that I just finished is coming out this month.

Drake: My writing style does not lend itself well to large action scenes because I'm such a limited head writer that I'm in this one perspective and I tend to just like when I'm in an actual fight, I tunnel vision and I, I do the same thing in my writing and I never really noticed it because the way I plot my stories out there plotted on a very individual basis.

Drake: And I think it's one of the things that really attracts my readers to my writing is that no matter what's going on in the story, you in one person are dealing with this thing and you might be in a different head, you know, in the next chapter. But it's always this. It's this kind of almost tunnel vision and you're dealing with this whatever we're dealing with.

Drake: And so carnage of kuras deals with a fall of a city. And even though I only have one P.O.V. during it, the others are important and they're also in the fight. And so I don't want to just forget about them. I don't want the reader just to like, no, there's no one else fighting shoulder to shoulder with me.

Drake: You know, I've made all these friends and, you know, everybody. And and I found it very, very difficult personally to remember to not get to tunnel vision during the fight, to kind of like, there's a guy here and there's a guy here now and we're fighting in a hallway. You know, it's a bunch of dwarves fighting a bunch of orcs in the orchestra and beating this underground Dwarven city.

Drake: So where that comes with pacing is it again, it's it's all through planning. And so I had to spend a lot of time thinking about when I was going to ratchet things up, because obviously that heavy, heavy fight, you know, heavy combat oriented story, those are much faster versus the downtime in between the moving to the next section, tending to the wounded and all of that.

Drake: And so I don't know, it just made pacing really interesting for me. And I had to think about it in a different way because of the fact that I couldn't allow myself to just be in this one person's head, which I'm so good at.

Marie: So it's interesting that you bring up battle because I I've actually I'm busy reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Massive and Kingdoms Saga Shadows Shadow of the app and he's got a lot of battle and I mean like big big wars you know sieges of sit these wars in multiple locations. He, he goes big on the movement of armies. And what I found very so he has a very different style from either of us.

Marie: He is quite happy to dive into somebody's head for like one scene to show you a thing in the battle. He doesn't care crisis like like, you know I now need to show you a night attack. So for the purpose of this night attack, you're going to be in the head of this character that you've never been in before.

Marie: And it doesn't matter. I am taking you there on this night.

Drake: Attack now and you'll never be in the head again.

Marie: And you'll have been that hit again because you're not there for the character. You're there for the plot.

Drake: Yeah.

Marie: Which I mean, it's fair. It's a different style. And at first it was a little jarring. At first it was a little jarring for me, but now I just I just flow with it. I'm like, okay, there's the poor characters whose hate I'll always be returning to. And then there’s little one, one of characters for the battles that he just uses to show you how the battle's going.

Marie: And it so it makes it like this battle scene, this one siege see consumed. I think like saving chapter seven or eight chapters in the book. And we're not talking small chapters, you know, they're chunky chapters and and they're all these, like different dark night attacks. And then there's a quieter period while you waiting for the attacks to come.

Marie: Then there's the wave of attacks coming. Then there's this ship, you know, and it's it's like movement, movement, movement. And it keeps the battle very engaged. So I think like I didn't think I would say this, but I think there is a case to be made for battle scenes having point of view characters who age. You're not going to be in a game if you want.

Marie: If your story is to show the full scope of the battle, that the entire scope you were never going to write a story with that many growth characters. Yeah, that's not what you're going to do.

Drake: Well, and that's that's what I say all the time. It's these are things that we preach, but I never go, You must do it this way because I can't. I can think of ways that you might need to break them. I mean, one of the guys in the writers room last night, he's writing from the head of basically an immortal deity type thing.

Drake: And that brings with it some very unique things to think about. You know, how do we connect? How do we connect my humanity, my moral understanding of moral values in my 55 years of life to a being that has lived for thousands of years? Like, how do I connect to his moral compass? You know, if we're going to do this limited POV and that becomes very, very complicated.

Drake: So yeah, it's that, but, but it's also how you think about it. Again, that's why I was trying to bring this to how I plan. So like with that, let's say I am writing a bigger battle scene where I have to, where I know I'm going to have different aspects. I need to, to track what's going on at sea and toward, you know, coming in and trying to take over the port area.

Drake: And I've got a land thing and I've got something underground, all that. When I'm planning that story out, I'm going to be going, okay, well, if I got to tell this, that means I need a P.O.V. character, which means now that P.O.V. character needs an entire story arc, start, finish, middle, you know, start middle, end. They need motivation, they need a goal.

Drake: They need something that yes, they're going to let's say they have to, you know, get the sword from the city, whatever. Okay, great. But that's not that's a secondary kind of motivation to most of the characters. Maybe one of the characters, like his whole life hinges on it, but everyone else is like, okay, yeah, I need to get the sword, but only because of this other thing that I need, or only because this other thing I need to happen, or only because of this other person.

Drake: I need to to save or do or or this other thing. So everybody has to have their own unique motivations. So I could still accomplish the same thing, you know, depending. And again, this is a fictitious situation, so who knows? But I would just during the planning stage, just start going, okay, well then, now I need to I'm going to do a character that ends up at this battle in the from the land side and then another character from here again.

Drake: Could it get too big? Could I need, you know, could I need ten, 12 different aspects? And then it's like, no, I'm not going to make ten or 12 different characters to accomplish that. I mean, in my little thing, I'm like, I'll give you three, maybe four.

Marie: And that's that I think is the thing is like he really he really went bananas with, with these like the level to which he shows you the battle.

Drake: Right.

Marie: And like, I understand why he did like I understand why he brought in all of those little POVs

Marie: and that it's interesting because you so invested in the overall plot events of the city, like everybody's plot events that you want to know how the night attack Wait. So even though you're in this Mantis Kingdom's head only for this period, but only for this attack, you still want to know how it went.

Marie: And it is still more interesting to see it on the page than just to get a report.

Drake: 100%.

Marie: But that being said, that book is an epic fantasy sized book, which is to say it is 200,000 words. Good. You have to shorten that pace by making those night attacks reports 100%. You could have you could have increased the pace of the attack.

Drake: Yeah, yeah.

Marie: And that is actually one of the techniques of increasing pacing is instead of having a scene where you show it like a POV character demonstrating it, you have either a telling of what has happened or a report or some kind of summary of the events that took place that basically just moves the reader past the event.

Drake: Yeah, and you know, another omniscient P.O.V.. You could have a narrator that's telling about this stuff and then they tell about what? So I don't ever drop into the head of one of the night's during the night attack, you know, during the night battle or whatever. But I tell about what happened to them and and you know how it is.

Drake: But again, omniscient always ends up being more telly than showing. So you're saying there's a lot of options. And I don't think there is a right or wrong way to do it. As long as you go with the rule that I always say, the writer doesn't get to decide if they have succeeded in their story or not. So you go, you know what?

Drake: The best way to do it is going to be to jump around through all these heads, and then you let a bunch of people read it and they're all like, No, this sucks. Well, then you failed. It doesn't matter if you liked it. Or like in this case, it sounds like cause I read that series, but it sounds like you're digging it.

Drake: And so, like, you're.

Marie: Going and I mean, he's he's, he's got a whole bunch of reviews and he's got a whole bunch of awards. And I think he had a bestseller list somewhere. So he's clearly doing it right enough. Yeah.

Drake: And that is that is we know that the book was a success. Yeah. How our readers relating to it.

Marie: Yeah it it is a different style. I will I will say that. But I mean he has done very well in making the world and the core characters very interesting.

Drake: Yeah. So yeah. But that only loosely kind of grazes the topic of pacing. Yeah. So. All right. So there's really two levels that we should probably talk about, about pacing, maybe even three levels. There's scene pacing, there's novel pacing, and then there's saga pacing. If you're doing, you know, if you're doing standalone books like a Dresden Files, where yeah, it's all Dresden in every book, but each book is it has a beginning, a set up, a, you know, rise to the climax, the climax at the end and the book is over.

Drake: You literally could just read it and be done with it. I don't think that that you have to worry so much about pacing because each book is almost kind of like a standalone. Really. The pacing would be when you think.

Marie: It gets more to to a, it's more like a series towards the later books.

Drake: Right? Exactly. Because then each book starts carrying over to the next. Yeah, but I'm really referring to the beginning ones, which are the only ones I read. I just know that they do start kind of piling into each other.

Marie: Yeah. I don't think you could read changes if you didn't know what's come before. Like, for.

Drake: Example, right? That's what I've heard. So I guess those are the three things scene, pacing, novel pacing, and then a saga. Pacing. Yeah. So what are your thoughts on I guess I started the granular level. Start with scenes.

Marie: So I think with scenes some of the one of the most under valued and things that that people need to look at is sentence structure and sentence length in the pacing of your see if your center and length are all the same, your sentence structures are all the same, It becomes a very singsong read. So when you're pacing out, you see like and I know that the sound super freaking technical and you know, you want to talk about the pacing of events and how you unfold things in a scene and so on it, sure.

Marie: But on a purely technical level, on a purely craft level, look at your actual sentence structure. Do you vary your sentence structure or is everything the same structure? Is it, for example, I have a terrible tendency to have like a simple sentence with a gerund attached like, and I have to work to vary that structure in my in my scenes so that I don't hit a singsong pace.

Drake: Yeah, well, and that's fine, because not that I think you're wrong, it's just that I would consider that structural pace pacing versus story pacing. But like one of the weird things that I did when I started learning this stuff, you know, 28, 25 years ago, I also started realizing that there are types of information that you give to a reader throughout a book and a lot of times throughout a scene.

Drake: So I started breaking it down. Okay, so there's narration where I'm just describing stuff. There's inner narration where I'm describing more of the what the character's feeling, what they're thinking, what their motivations are, and everything like that. There's a dialog, there is action, and then there's like worldbuilding info, dumping, whatever. And so I started training myself to literally write different sentence structures depending on the mode of writing that I'm in.

Drake: So like when I'm in scene building, I tend to write a lot more longer sentences, either compound sentences, compound complex sentences, whatever, because, you know, it's, you know, Drake walked into the kitchen, picked up a pot, filled it with water and put it on the stove to heat. You know, it's all this big long sentence, but it's longer sentences are going to slow down the pacing.

Drake: And so when I'm when I'm world building, when I'm setting the scene, when I'm making sure you know where you're at and grounded, I actually kind of want you to to slow down a little bit and kind of pay attention to the details that I'm building out. But then I get into an action scene and you will notice that I use way more.

Drake: I'm still using all the sentence structures. I'm still using a simple sentence. When I'm describing a room, it's just less of them and more of compound complex sentences. Then you get into an action scene where you'll get a lot of either simple sentences or simple sentences with a with a gerund attached to it front or back and almost no complex or compound sentences and then no complex sentences.

Drake: I just it's just too long of a sentence to add to it. So. So I just kind of trained myself and now I don't think about it, you know, when I just move into action, my sentence structure just changes in the sentences. SHORTEN Which makes it read faster and feel faster.

Marie: And I think that we cannot overemphasize this point because I still on critique circle, even with some experience, partners encounter action scenes with complex sentences. If you are writing a fight scene, the way to increase the pacing is to write short, sharp sentences with strong verbs. That is how you write an action scene.

Drake: I'm going to say something very controversial here.

Marie: Okay.

Drake: Stop hating on ing words like I get it. I get that it's this stupid academic. we can never have any ing words. But there is a difference to the human brain when they read, you know, running through the kitchen versus ran or, you know, run looking for a word. Obviously it wouldn't be run, but there is a difference between those.

Drake: And ing's a lot of times feel more active than the ed version of it. So a lot of times I will look at like when I when I had a gerund. So running into the kitchen, comma, Drake slipped on the banana peel. The reason why I like that sentence structure is because running into the kitchen as opposed to Drake ran into the kitchen, comma, slipping on the banana peel.

Marie: 100%.

Drake: It the ing verbs literally convey more motion to me. They can convey more to me.

Marie: I agree with you. I think the the thing that people that that people hate on about the English verbs is it is often attached. Was I was running, I was, I were running.

Drake: It was no I was running. Your show was really great. Drake was running into the kitchen and that.

Marie: That you need to avoid. Right. Was is a weak.

Drake: verb but that's where we go to was is are always red flags. Yeah I'm going to cut every was I did your manuscript you'll if you do you'll write stupid sentences but every was should be looked at so you know Drake was terrified okay well that's a crappy tell because you're using was as a linking verb. Drake was running into the kitchen now stronger to right.

Drake: Drake ran into the kitchen, so. Yeah, we definitely want to avoid that. But when you have a especially with your gerunds and since I use so many gerunds because my my writing is so action based and every time when I run into an editor or beta reader or whatever who is more English grammar based, that is the number one thing.

Drake: For 30 years I have been fighting and and I don't think they understand why. They were just told, grammatically in academic grammar, don't write the inverse. Great. But we're not writing grammar. We're writing you to bring us something funny.

Marie: There is actually no grammatical rule against splitting your infinitive.

Drake: Right? Okay.

Marie: It is a it is a rule. Like, you know what a split infinitive is. It's where you have two and then a word and then the other word.

Drake: Yeah, but.

Marie: You could absolutely have split infinitives. And it's grammatically correct. It's not grammatically correct in lack, but we don't speak English.

Drake: Right. So it's even my goal is just.

Marie: To agree with you on the academic point like that. They have this crap hold over from from nonsense.

Drake: Right. Well, another thing, this is a little off the subject, but another thing I get popped for is I like a good cliche. I like there's a reason why they became cliche. They say they convey a ton of information and in a very short amount of time. And so like in the Harn world story that I just wrote, this guy is picking on somebody else because they're large and kind of clumsy or whatever.

Drake: And the cliche that came to my mind is like a bull in a china shop. Now, they don't have technically they have bulls, but they obviously don't have china shops like that world. And so the line that I used was, yeah, he's like a haru and a pottery shop. Now if you're not a hardware person, you're not going to know that a Haru is basically a large boar like creature.

Drake: But you know what a pottery shop is? And you've also heard a phrase close enough to he's like a haru in a pottery shop to know the image, to paint. And yet when I turn it in, one of the guys at Hama was like, this is cliche, you should cut it. And they actually wanted me to cut it down.

Drake: Their original idea was to cut it down was, you know, I actually I wrote he's like a drunken Haru in a pottery shop. That's what it was. And they were like, You should just cut it down. He's like a drunken hermit. I'm like, They were like, But it's cliche. I'm like, That's literally the point. It's the point is that it's a cliche.

Drake: The point is, is that without one statement meant I can introduce a fantasy monster and also 100% never lose a single reader ever.

Marie: The the worst part me about people who go like it's cliche is sometimes it's like this that you've just brought up. It's not actually even a cliche. It's an idiom.

Drake: Right?

Marie: It's an actual idiom like, Come now, that is not cliche. It's a phrase that people use.

Drake: Yeah, Yeah. And so it's just those things and it just remind me and like I said, from the words, because of the fact that every time it happens to all, even to this day, it happens to me where not any readers, no readers notice it. Because again, when I'm using an ing word, it's because it's the right verb to use.

Drake: It conveys the image that I want to convey, like running into the kitchen. You actually see someone physically running into the kitchen. If it's if the line is Drake ran into the kitchen, then your mind is going to paint Drake standing in a kitchen. You're not going to paint him actually going into the kitchen. He's already there. And so it's just a different thing.

Drake: So one of the people in the and the chat had said we were talking about sentence length and all of that. They had said, it's like how people talk when they're telling a story. They're slow when they're in their setup, but as they get to the exciting part, they get excited and they start talking faster and and getting louder and all of that stuff.

Drake: And yeah, it's the same it's the same concept to me because I'm telling a story in your mind. And so I'm not there. So I need you to do that part for me. I need you to get excited and you'll get louder and you tend to read it in a different way. So 100%.

Marie: No. So I think like we've spoken about the different kinds of information in a scene as like a pacing element of the scene. And we've spoken about the sentence length and the sentence structure in a scene and how to vary that. And that I think, is how you kind of pace the scene a bit. Another technique you can use in the scene specifically is in is you can start in media res.

Drake: Yeah.

Marie: So to start in media res means to start in the action of the scene, so you don't start with scene setting. You start with like, you know, I get hit I get hit in the face with a fist and that's the start of the scene And then like the the you you know then tell about like the wall that I stumble into and do a little bit of scene building the insult.

Marie: And that obviously starts the scene very fast.

Drake: Yeah. The thing you have to worry about with that is and we talked about this all the time about how do we scenes that we try to scenes that not in clumps although you know I am way less concerned about this than you sometimes but I don't mind a paragraph in the first couple of paragraphs. It just kind of do this big broad brush stroke of the room we're in or the alleyway we're in or something like that.

Drake: Just get it. And but it's, it's raw. There's no real great details in it. It's, you know, it was a dark and dingy alleyway that smelled like this. And, you know, this is what the walls were like or whatever. And so it's it's just kind of a tally, whatever. But at least it grounds my readers enough that they're like, okay.

Drake: And then, you know, they might get their face smushed up against the splintering wood of the warehouse wall. And, you know, you start getting these details as the scene builds further and further and further. But either way, it's about, you know, if you are going to start a media res, that is one of the big tricks is you don't then want to have, you know, marie got punched in the face while she was standing in an alleyway that was comprised of 15 boxes on this side of the wall and 17 boxes like that's not starting in media res like, you have to understand that now you're seen setting a line here, a line there.

Drake: But but it's intermixed between everything that's going on. Now. When you reach a spot where you can pull the camera back a second and write two or three lines of this is where we're out on a big scale, great. But can't start a media rez and then do three paragraphs of setting the scene and the political, the political attitude of the people in this area.

Drake: And and because that's not.

Marie: These, please for the love of tiny chickens, do not start the media res have a line or two of like the action and then go. She had approached the alleyway thinking that all would be well I'm I'm a read through your book and punch you in the nose that's what I'm.

Drake: Yeah and it's and it's more common than than you would even think of so many times. I will see a chapter start with a paragraph or two of action and then have a page and a half of stuff.

Marie: How we got here. Right, Dude, I'm interested in the action, Right?

Drake: I'm already there. I don't need to know how we got here. I'm here. But again, that's where it's a lot of that's important to the writer. And so many writers get. You fall into this trap and it really hurts their pacing because they fall into the trap of It's important to me that I give you this information.

Drake: And it's the.

Marie: Worst part about that is you've just killed your basic because you have this heinous thought. And then you said, But wait, wait, I'm going to now take you by the reins when I take you by the hair reader and I'm going to drag you back, post this point in time and deposit you in the past so that you can now plod forward again to the point where I've showed you the action.

Drake: Yeah, but even worse, because it's never it's never. And media is on that. It's, it's it's all a info don't tell to get there. It's not even like you jump back in time and I'm in the head of the character walking you know preparing for this thing and then stuff comes out It's which which would also be bad.

Drake: But it's but it's not even that. It's it's a like you said, when I entered the alleyway, I wasn't thinking I was going to get punched in the face. I was actually thinking about Priscilla and her, you know, beautiful golden blond hair. And I was on my way to her because I had a box of chocolates. And I was going to finally ask you out on it.

Drake: Like, what? No what are you doing.

Marie: Exactly. And that So. So don't do that. Don't don't start in media res. And then give me the back story of how I got there. You've just slaughtered the pacing. You dragged it behind the sauna, you shot it and you buried.

Drake: It along with your little chickens.

Marie: Along with your little chick.

Drake: The best line ever, um Never heard that one yet. It's our tiny chickens, which, for the love of tiny chickens. Yeah, but there's a lot of things to deal with. Pacing within a scene, and a lot of it is. And like I said, we talked about this a little bit last night. It's always crazy how much every single time we do one of these, it's like, well, last night, you really should join the writers room, we talk about a lot of stuff in the writers room.

Drake: But no, last night we were talking about a lot of pacing for me through a scene is feeling like one of the things that was funny about the guys it at Horn World. So they're not story writers, they're more encyclopedia writers. They've created, you know, for 20 years they've been creating this fantasy world and they got an insane amount of detail in it.

Drake: And they know a lot about different things, but they don't know detail like the lives, the living of the life of it, because that's not their job. Their job is to create a world that lets someone else live a life in it, you know, a dream, buy it and run a campaign in it and have characters go through it.

Drake: So I had spent for the 25,000 word story, there's a 20,000 word synopsis that I made. Now it's got more detail than I normally do because I was copying like I was going through their their books and going, this is what this plant that they eat looks like. And like and tastes like. And this is what this I'm pulling.

Drake: It's 20,000 words, but it has a lot of stuff that I pulled, you know, copied and pasted. And then I also did detailed character portfolios on not just the main character, but all of the seven characters that are in this story, the main ones. So it's just longer than what I do. But the funny thing is, is that when I when they then read the story, they're like, You didn't follow your synopsis.

Drake: I'm like, Well, I mean, I kind of did like, no, like, like in this chapter, he has a complete mental breakdown. I'm like, Yeah, because that felt right. Like, you know, because when I'm in the moment, like I had just gone through, you had this kid who'd never seen a fight before, and now he's watching children die horribly and women die horribly, and he's fighting for his life.

Drake: And a couple of his friends have been murdered and slaughtered right next to him and and all of this stuff. And now he's walking through this room with just probably 300 dead people that were alive 2 hours ago. And they're just brutally murdered and slaughtered. And as I'm writing the scene and describing it, it just felt right to me to slow the book down and really wallow in the mental pain and anguish that this character is feeling.

Drake: And that wasn't in the plot. You know, when I was plotting it. It was just they were going to move through the scene. But when I when you get into the moment, I'm living that life now because that's what I'm doing when I'm writing, I'm living these characters lives. I was just like, Yeah, I can't take this anymore.

Drake: I'm literally freaking out. I'm and he literally just breaks down and he has this mental breakdown where he's just like, No, I can't. No, no, I can't do this. No, this is I can't even do this anymore. And so it slows the book down to a crawl. At that moment, of course, that's what the reader needs. That's what the reader wants.

Drake: You know, you want to experience that same thing. You've experienced these horrors with this character, but I can't tell you, like, I definitely didn't plan it. It's not in the synopsis. So it's a lot of my pacing is just me. And as I'm in that scene, when I need to speed up for action because I'm fighting for my life or when I'm whatever, a lot of that is happening for me kind of in the moment as I'm coming through those seats.

Marie: So there's two things I want to say. One is we've had a question from the peanut gallery. For those of you who don't know, we are now recording these sessions with and with the audience in Zoom. So if you're part of the writers room, even the free part, you can join the Zoom call and be our peanut gallery and ask questions.

Marie: So one of the questions from the peanut gallery is.

Drake: Does the links down below. But yeah, just explain what you said you do not have to pay the monthly fee for the writers room. There are a few things that you get in the free section. One of them is you can join us live on when we're recording the podcast.

Marie: So links to the writers room down below. So one of the peanut gallery asks, Does pricing always follow the character arcs? I imagine it doesn't have to, but I don't have examples. So yes, not, not yes, it always follows it. No, it doesn't.

Drake: Right.

Marie: And I'll give you some interesting examples that your character arc could be a character arc that ends before the climax of the book, and your character could be a character that dies before the climax of the book. That's possible. And then the character's arc pacing is very different from like the book pace you could have intense stuff going on around the character.

Marie: Like with these horrors, you know, you could be in the middle of a battle and the character could have a mental breakdown, and that changes the pacing. One of the most interesting, effective and I want to say completely surprising things. I mean, Blue eye Samurai, that animated show that I referred to occasionally is episode five has got the craziest, weird pacing that I've ever seen, and it works.

Marie: They have a battle scene going on in the present, in the now of the story. Yeah. Then in the future of the story, you don't know this at the time, but in the future of the story they have, they have intersperse into the scene a framing device of a puppet theater show where they're telling the story of a ronin and his his quest for vengeance.

Marie: And then they've got interspersed with that, they have flashback episodes to the main characters like past that link back to this Ronin show. And it works so well despite the fact that this is kind of character arc pacing interspersed with intense combat scenes and so on. So your character arc pacing does not have to match your plot pace It does normally, but it doesn't have.

Drake: Well, and a lot of this has to do with the style of writer you are and the story that you're telling. So like when you look at me, we've already talked about how much of a singular point of view. I mean, I am, in my opinion, I'm one of the only people that writes in true third person that everybody else will whatever.

Drake: But I really and it's a limitation. It's it's not a good thing. I mean, it is a good thing for me, but definitely it puts me in positions like like I said, writing carnage operas. It made me realize a big weakness of how focused I am on my writing style. It has plenty of advantages as well, but like with everything, there is no such thing as an advantage.

Drake: There's only trade offs. So if I get an advantage, I'm going to have a detriment as well. So because of how I write and because I'm so ingrained, I bring my characters so deep, my readers so deeply into my characters that, yes, my writing style means that my pacing of my story is 100% linked to the characters. So like the scene that I was just talking about, the city is still under attack.

Drake: The other characters that are around my main character, they're having to deal with something completely. They're like, Dude, you can't have a mental breakdown here. This is not the place. This is not the time. We are all in danger. Like, I'm sorry you're having an existential crisis, but no, you're going to get us killed now. And so they're pacing, even though it's outside of the stories pacing, because of the fact that you're in the P.O.V. characters pacing, I still try to and, you know, let it infect his story where everybody else is in this dude, we're making a mad dash for this thing.

Drake: Like, you can't stop in this room of dead bodies and have a little, you know, pity party. I get that. That slows your story down. But the rest of the world around you is moving at a different pace. And so I do try and make sure that the reader gets to feel that external pressure that's hitting them. But the reality is the story itself that you're reading comes down to a crawl pacing, you know, because I'm now having you're in the head of a character who's literally having a panic attack, so he's thinking about dead girl eyes and, you know, severed grandparent, grandfather hands and all this horrible things that he's thinking about.

Marie: 100%. And his arc has slowed down. Right. But there is the like the by what I mean by overall pacing of the stories, I mean, the story is full thundering to its climax. Right.

Drake: Right. So, I mean, I'm magic handing it because obviously I don't have the orcs attack that room at that moment and then have the friends fight this while he's doing this thing. Because I could. But it would it would actually hurt what I was trying to do in the story part percent.

Marie: But there are absolutely ways in which you can have the orcs attack and be telling that story.

Drake: Right.

Marie: Right. So and that's what I mean like it doesn't have to be you make the choice to attach, but the character arc and this is especially applicable in saga levels arc a character's arc, like their growth arc could climax in different points of the saga from the overall story. I mean, if you think of something, you know, like, like the big epics, you know, but most Bourne or something like that, like Chelsea's arc complete outs before the climax of the.

Drake: Story arc.

Marie: Only like from that perspective, a character's arc, even in a limited POV, a character's arc can finish before the overall story.

Drake: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So yeah. So what are some tricks and tips that you have for speeding up or slowing down actual scene?

Marie: So if you want to slow down a C paragraph like I'm, I'm big on structural structural control. Yeah. Because what you want to do is you want the reader to actually consume the information at a slower pace. But what you don't want, you don't want the reader struggling to consume the information. Okay, So you don't you don't want to put in like five five line long sentences, you know, like massive run on sentences that are difficult to pass.

Marie: That's that's not what I mean by structurally slowing the reader down. Don't make it hard to read, but if you put in paragraph breaks and more you know and write longer sentences that have some more complexity, then you do bring the pace down as the reader consumes the information in a more step by step way. So the other thing is if you linger into your descriptions arc, so in a fast paced scene, you're going to quick fire your sensory details.

Marie: You know, like he punched me in the face, his glove creasing along my along my jaw, something like that.

Marie: But if it's a slow thing, you know, she caressed my jaw line, the velvet, the velvet cloth of her silk covered gloves lingering on my beard, rasping through the hair like there is more intensity in the description. And that slows the reader down because they're consuming the scene in more detail.

Marie: Whereas an action scene where you rapid firing those those descriptions of sensory details, it feels to the reader like they're getting smacked with quick jerky scenes.

Drake: actually have a page that, if you don't mind, I'll read from Genesis. When Clitus uses his magic for the first time in combat. Because one of the things that I do with that magic is it actually stops time. So basically you have this action, action, action. And then I literally stop time for a couple paragraphs and it's exactly, it's exactly what you're talking about, where it has to do with how much details am I putting into it and where am I at.

Drake: So but you caught me reading about a page to illustrate this. All right, so Cletus was walking through town and he basically has a he knows he's being hunted by a group of people called the Blood Priests. And he walks around a corner and there's a couple of them standing there, and he's like, well, crap. And so he turns and goes down a sideline.

Drake: That's where we're going to kind of pick it up. Pushing himself into action, He slipped north into a narrow alleyway. As soon as the buildings blocked the men from his sight, he ran left, right, straight. He let chance and whim to decide his course. Through the squalid back streets, the scent of rotting refuge filled his nostrils and the uneven cobblestones charred his every step.

Drake: He ignored it all. All he cared was keeping to a westerly direction, knowing the safety of his villa was was now his only hope. After more than ten seasons traversing the city, kaleidoscope was navigated by instinct alone. That honed instinct or that honed intuition kicked in as a flange mace materialized from around a corner aimed at his face, He gasps, heart pounding as the weapons iron head glinted in the dim light going out of hand, He pushed off the warehouse next to him, redirecting his momentum.

Drake: The mace whistled through the air, smacking the wall with enough force to splinter its unpainted wooden slats. Pivoting colitis faced his attacker as he moved his sword slip free from its sheath with a whisper of metal on leather, a steel saber forged by the essence. During the war of power, Desroches stood a piece long in addition to an Etch Guard and pummel crafted with artful precision, it held an edge so keen it had never needed sharpening.

Drake: He doubted it had it. It had an equal. Three brown skinned men, all dressed in sailor's garb, spread out across the alley. Each held one of their damnable flagship crossbows, a fourth, the burly man wielding the mace who had failed to take his head off, hovered behind a wicked grin, painting his thick lips grim faced. All their eyes left no doubt about their intent as they moved to cover all exits, footsteps betrayed the inept stalker's approach from behind Cletus, informing him that he was surrounded 5 to 1, no less, as a single entity, crossbows began to rise.

Drake: Clyde is open himself to the full onslaught. That was Suyin. And see, here's where I want. I want you to really revel in what it feels like to have this power. So this is where you'll see that I completely change the pacing of the scene. All of that was pretty fast paced and where run in and gun it and all this stuff is happening.

Drake: So Clyde is open himself to the full onslaught. That was Suyin. The raw essence tore through the bonding stone embedded in his palm like a tsunami raging up his arm and filling him to the brim. Time froze as such and ripped him from reality, unshackling him from the physical plane. For a moment, he shivered as the power invaded his body, his skin feeling as if it should burst under the strain.

Drake: Everything around him snapped in a needle like focus, clear as glass. It overwhelmed his senses, the fading coloring, the faded coloring of individual splinters of the cracked and broken wood from the massive strike, the foul stench of riding fish heads, mingling with human waste dumped into the sewers, the softness of his silk shirt pressed against his skin, the beat of sweat cascading down his left temple, the unevenly worn heel of his right boot.

Drake: He always became lost in the details Suzanne brought with it so, like you see two different complete paintings and they happen on a dime from each other. And even before then, he's just walking through town and he's thinking about these problems and he knows someone's follow, but he's never going to figure out who. So he's worried about that.

Drake: But he's also thinking about this quest he's going on and all this stuff. So that pacing is much slower. He turns the corner, blood pressure in front of him and he's like, wow, crack. And then, you know, he saw that he books down an alleyway just trying to escape. So a lot of the pacing, like you said, is controlled off of how much detail.

Drake: And if you notice, I'm even given detail through the more action, you know, the faster scene because I'm constantly dripping detail through my stuff. Some people don't like as much details I put in, and that's fine. I'm not for everybody, but I am a very, very detail oriented writer. I like to paint a very vivid picture in my readers imagination.

Drake: But still, during the running gun scene, it's much faster. And then this is the first time the readers are going to experience this type of magic. And so I want to take a moment to really allow them to kind of take this in and so I put a crap ton of details and they're not even details that matter.

Drake: The sweat cascading on his cheek, the uneven heel of his boot, like these are things that are not going to affect anything. He's never going to think about them again, but it still forces the reader to slow down and take a moment while this is happening. I describe the men, you know, it says with time Frozen, Clyde is good for Motor City, man.

Drake: I describe what they look like and then it ends with the line at the end of the paragraph I'm describing. It says, Nevertheless, all three favorite each other look and build time snapped back into place and Clyde is shot forward in a blur of motion. The three piece, the three priests finished leveling their weapons a fraction of a moment before for crossbow, stringing slap rods in a perfect harmony of death.

Drake: Enhanced by the essence, Clyde is shifted faster than humanly possible, directly the left handed priest. Like now we're just like the pacing of the story is now lightning speed. And so that's that's really how I kind of control my pacing. It depends on it really is focus. What am I focusing on? Am I focusing on the blow by blow by blow?

Drake: Then it's going to feel like we're moving very, very, very, very fast. Am I focusing on a more esoteric moment where we're going to step back, think about something bigger? I'm going to use bigger sentences. I'm going to, you know, slow the reader down and I'm constantly changing speed, pacing throughout a scene.

Marie: I think it's it's also underrated how much you can control the pacing through the movement of your characters. Like if you have your characters move from one place to another, touch something, be distracted by something, you automatically slow down the pace like Clyde is getting distracted by. He's warned you, but he'll etc., etc.. You know, if you have a character who's in an airport and they, you know, they're looking at a at a fast food joint and then they hear an announcement and then like all of these things slow down.

Drake: Or on the other side of it, you know, they're late to catch that flight. And so they're running past blurred face after blurred face. Like now you're.

Marie: Like in here is the announcement.

Drake: Right? Can they hear a buzzing in their ear as some annoying person gets on? You know, you let the least amount of you know, when you tone down those details, it makes it feel more frantic, more rushed in. And, you know, then you could throw look for things like, you know his stomach grumble as he as the the as the odor of hamburgers and fries assailed his nostrils but he didn't slow down like yeah.

Drake: So we get that little detail but it's still this frantic running and gunning. Yeah. So pacing is just it literally is that it's all about what are we focusing on during that time?

Marie: You know, we talk about like we you need to stop to smell the roses and it's exactly like that with your character when you need to speed up the pacing. They don't smell the roses. They're running past the roses. The roses are barely brushing against them. Yeah, but when you want to slow down the pacing, they smell the roses, they absorb the roses.

Marie: The roses speak to them. They little petals open in the inside of the roses. This perfect image that tells you of the philosophy of the cosmos. And the moment when it all opened like a flower.

Drake: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that for me, is pacing on a granular level. Yeah. And a lot of it is, is just it's twofold, I guess. One is what I want the readers to focus on. So like in that scene that I just read, obviously I want you to take a moment and feel what it feels like to kind of be unshackled from time for a second.

Drake: And then I want you to feel like because when Suzanne feels that there's a character there only ripped from time for just I mean, for the rest the world, it doesn't even look like they were ripped from time. But for them, they get and wanted to do. That's actually the plot device that I came up with because it allows me to do exactly what I do there.

Drake: In that next paragraph, I got to right before fight, describe what four guys look like in detail. You know, one has a burnt face and he's missing an ear and this guy looks like that. And it's like so it allows me this ability to set the scene in a very slow way, but it doesn't break the action because, you know, I've just set up timers frozen and then I want you to feel what happens when we snap back in.

Drake: And now it's just all fine. But the cool thing about that is what that gives me in these fights is now like if you notice the line that I read, you know, he headed straight toward the left handed priest Well, how can I use that as a descriptor? Because when I was slowed down, you know, I was like, this priest is holding the crossbow in his left hand.

Drake: You know, that priest has a really tiny head. And this priest, you know, is missing an ear. And so I set everything up. So now that I want to hit the action, when I say left handed priest or tiny head or, you know, whatever, you know where they are already, you know where they are in to the character.

Drake: So I can fly through that.

Marie: I just want to say one other thing about pacing, and this isn't just about scene pacing, it's overall. But we were talking about slowing down a scene and writing slow, reflective scenes. I feel like a lot of the problems in a lot of modern storytelling in especially in the TV genre, is writers do not slow down. They do not give stories.

Marie: The space, the time to breathe. They don't give characters the space and the time to absorb the impact of what's going on and what has happened to them. It's just like you, you know, the plot. And that creates poor storytelling. Like not everything has to run at a million miles an hour. You can take the time to slow the story down, to give the reader the opportunity to absorb not just the plot, but also the impact that it is had on the characters and how the character feels.

Drake: And setting up the stakes. Like obviously writing this, fighting these blood priests. The stakes in that moment are they could kill him. Okay, great. But what does his death mean? Like how how does that affect me as the reader? And so until I have the scene where you get to spend time with him, with his ailing son, and see how much love is between them, and then the scene, you know, him and his wife spend the last night together in intimate embraces.

Drake: You know, he's about to go off on this very dangerous quest. That's when you start going, yeah, no, this matters. You know, this this guy matters. His life matters. It's not just the the the stakes of losing your life. It's the stakes of if he was to die in that alleyway, his son dies. His son does not get better.

Drake: The only way his son gets better is for fighters to go on this quest to get this thing that his son needs. So you can't do that. Like, I could shove it in there. I could shove in that fight scene, you know? the mace almost took his head off. And so he thought about how the fact that if he had died, his son would then be doomed to a year of misery and death but that's, first of all, crappy info dump.

Drake: And it's not really setting the stakes up. Correct.

Marie: It's not going to absorb the reader what his son means to him.

Drake: Right.

Marie: And that's the thing. Like that is why showing is powerful because showing takes the reader into what that emotion feels like and what those stakes mean at a deep level.

Drake: 100%.

Marie: But showing does take longer. So be aware of that.

Drake: Take. Well, so this month I've got an advanced preview of the rewritten first book of Genesis coming out, and I think the craziest thing about it is it's just the first 15 chapters. It's 70,000 words long. So it is literally the same length as the first Harry Potter book, but it's only the first 15 of 60 chapters. So yeah, when you write showy, when you put in details that you can't put in details without putting in words.

Drake: And so it's going to make the book thicker. It just is. There's no way to get around that. And then that's why pacing is so much more important. Because if I had just written 17,000 words of just info dump tally puking, people would slog way through it.

Marie: So I think it's like, let's take a step up and talk about pacing at the book level.

Drake: Yeah, speaking.

Marie: So obviously in a book you do want to build up to a climax. You do want things to go faster and faster. But what does that mean for your chapters?

Drake: For me, it all comes down to stakes and motivation. So for the climax to build in tension, the reader has to have a deep understanding of what actually at stake for these chapters to mean more and more and more. So like that scene from colitis that I just read, you know, been with him all day, you know, that he was thinking about his son in the morning and he was actually witnessing this thing so he could tell his son because his son couldn't be there.

Drake: And then, you know, you find out that he's actually going on this very dangerous journey to collect a thing that the healers need to heal his son. And then you learn, you know, that the healers actually asking for a payment that he doesn't want to give. But he's like, you know what? Screw it. I don't care. Whatever I've got to do to heal my son, I will make that payment to you guys.

Drake: And so you've him do all this stuff, and then that fight happens. And so, you know, at least that he's actually trying to do something for his family. But I really wanted that fight scene because it is in Act One. It is early on, I wanted that fight scene to be more about him saving his life. And, you concerned that he's going to die because now you like him as a character.

Drake: Then the bigger picture, which is why it isn't until his last chapter that he makes it home and he has this, you know, and I actually read it on one of our podcasts where he's in there with Cyril and and he has that really touching moment with his child. And relays that what he told him he was going to lay and all this stuff.

Drake: And then he has to deal with the fact that that he's lying to his son on different things. So some things have changed out of his control and all this other stuff. And the reason why I do it there is actually to increase the tension and the stakes as he moves out of the city, as he moves into the wilderness, as he goes into danger to try and get this thing for his son.

Drake: And so a lot of my pacing has to do with that. And then the chapters are decided basically on and I still love how you talk about it's do I need to give my readers time debris? So going back to the Icarus story, the reason why I like that that chapter where he has the mental breakdown is because we've had literally two chapters running and running and running and running and running and gunning and death and destruction and fighting and and barely surviving and all this stuff.

Drake: And I'm about to have the climax because it's a novella. It's only 25,000 long. So this is the chapter between the first two chapter, the fight in the last two chapters, the fight. And so I wanted to give the readers a moment to realize how much this is actually impacting him, how difficult this actually is for him. Before you get to the big bad, before you get to that final climax of it.

Drake: And so, yes, it slows the story down, but I would never call it a saggy middle because of the fact that you're because you just live that you are also primed to have a mental breakdown with him, even as like, it's a story and you're like, whatever. And if that chapter wasn't there, you would have never felt it.

Drake: But by putting that chapter in and slowing the story down, I now force you to have a mental breakdown along with him and force you to go, yeah, Wow, this is really bad, this is terrible. And there was a dead girl that we just stepped over. Like it forces you to have to reconcile and again, like you say, to take a moment to breathe.

Drake: So that's how I deal my my pacing. It's all a lot as I'm going through the novel. It's all a lot about how do I build stakes and how do I give the reader time to consume those stakes so they really understand why this is so detrimental? And then let's go to the next thing that's going to try and take those stakes away.

Marie: And I think that that is one of the key things that you need to understand about the escalation. It's not so much that you're like like, yes, of course, in some books you are escalating towards a war. You're escalating towards the climax of a battle you're escalating towards. But you could be escalating towards anything and you could be escalating towards a verbal confrontation.

Marie: You could be escalating towards a magic ritual. You could be escalating towards a choice. It doesn't matter what the climax is. The thing about the climax is it is the last and final taste of the stakes for the character. And what you need is to make the stakes more and more important to the character. It needs to be a higher and higher cost that they're carrying with them.

Marie: If they lose the cost feels immeasurably higher with every confrontation, whether that is they are rolling the dice, they are swinging a sword, they are costing a magic ritual. They are taking.

Drake: Trying to get their love.

Marie: Trying to get they love playing a sports game like it doesn't matter. But the climax can be anything. It's about the escalating stakes. And then when you reach it, you have that lack of stake. You have that stakes that so high.

Drake: I'm going to add one thing to that. There's another way to to really help your pacing, and that is also sacrifice. If your characters never sacrifice anything along the way, then the stakes, in my opinion, start to feel hollow. So I like to I like to give my character things that the reader knows. this is it.

Drake: I can't lose this or I'm over. And then when I build up the stakes above that, now technically for the story, I can sacrifice this thing that yesterday you thought was the be all end all. I mean, think about any teenager, you know, teenager like, my goodness, if I don't get an A on this test, my life is over.

Drake: And then us adults are like, I don't remember what tests I took. I don't even care. Like, those stakes are so low that I don't know what class I was taking that year. Like, who cares? It doesn't affect your life, you know? You're not going to you got these people that are like, I'm going to kill myself if I don't get it, at least in a.

Drake: And it's like, yeah, that's not. And so I think about that and that's a good way to help understand the pacing of it, because we can set up something that is that, I got to get in on the test and it is the most important thing and the reader buys into it. But then the story moves on.

Drake: It's like, wait a minute, a werewolf is going to kill my mom, like, so I can sacrifice studying for the test and lose that. And I do have to suffer for it. I mean, it still was important to me, so it's not like I can go, well, that's not important anymore. I'm going to do this. That's not what I'm talking about.

Drake: We sacrifice knowing that we're sacrifice facing, because now the stakes have gotten higher. And so that raises also we can run our pacing through that.

Marie: I also want to just stop a moment here and talk about the importance of character death at this point, not the POV character's death necessarily. Secondary and tertiary characters that are important to the POV who have died previous to the climax increase the stakes because if they have died so that the we can achieve victory their death serves as an increase of the stakes.

Marie: Because if you then don't succeed, the death doesn't have meaning right? Well, that's how the POV feels about it, and that thus increases the stakes. So you can look at each sacrifice. If you do the sacrifices correctly, you can at each sacrifice as like a thing that you add to your stake meter, to push your stakes higher and higher, to make your climax count and to increase your pace.

Drake: And death doesn't necessarily mean death. I think one of the most brutal So Carnage Guras is a story. You know, for those that aren't in harn world, it's a pivotal moment in this world history because this dwarven city is sacked and everyone dies like 20 survive this attack. And so that's the story I'm writing. So obviously it's not.

Drake: And a happy ending story. So I created this group of young friends that get caught up in this and have to deal with it. And all of that is told from one character's perspective. Obviously there's a lot of death in it, but I think one of the most gut wrenching deaths is a character who doesn't die at all.

Drake: But he does die. He just basically gives up trying to say without without giving too many spoilers away here, it is such a sad moment and it is such an impactful moment that I think it's probably more impactful than when you when you get to learn, you know, when you fall in love with this friend of mine and then watch that friend die versus what happens.

Drake: I think it's the most brutal of the deaths and he doesn't die. Now, you assume that he's going to die, but you don't get to see that. But it is a very, very brutal because it's more of a decision as opposed to whatever. But it's a pivotal moment for the character to understand, because, again, everything is for the character.

Drake: And that means that everything is for the reader because the character is the reader. So I agree with you hundred percent those deaths around here. But it also is just it's not just death. It really just sacrifices sacrificing what. They love and sacrificing what they believe in, sacrificing what they what they gain, what they thought they had, what they thought was important.

Drake: Any of those things makes it to where now if they don't succeed, the stakes are so much higher because then all of that other stuff was worthless. All of that other stuff became meaningless for this journey.

Marie: But it's interesting because it gives you a different perspective on like Martin killing everybody because the first few deaths up the stake. But after that, it does feel meaningless.

Drake: Yes.

Marie: Because it's too much sacrifice.

Drake: Yes. Well, and also, a lot of times they're not even sacrificed. They're just snuffed. So like I had this argument with Game of Thrones fans where Ned Stark's death was worthless. It meant nothing for the story.

Marie: So I. I disagree with you, but I have a different reason from it, from the people to.

Drake: And we've already we've already.

Marie: Discussed we've discussed that. Yeah.

Drake: But yeah, that's people that got, you know, invested in the TV show. They started going yeah I don't I don't care about any character and I'm never going to allow myself to care. And then again that's that it's that beaten dog syndrome. You beat a dog long enough and they stop doing whatever it is you don't want them to do.

Drake: And so that's exactly has happened with Game of Thrones.

Marie: And the problem with that is you didn't have no sex, right?

Drake: I agree.

Marie: And then you can't really up the tension. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Drake: I think it was a huge mistake. And I get that. I'm I'm saying that from the position of I've never sold anywhere near that many copies books, and I'm telling him he's made this huge mistake. I get the irony in that statement. Yeah, but I do, I do think it was a huge mistake. Just because the funny thing is, is that I probably got that idea when I was 14 or 15 that I was going to write a book.

Drake: I was just going to introduce characters and make them make the reader love them and then just kill them for no reason, and then just introduce and kill and introduce and kill and introduce and kill. And it made me giddy. I was, you know, as a writer, I was like, this is gonna be a great thing. And then Game of Thrones came out and I was like, no, it actually sucks.

Drake: It's not a good thing to do.

Marie: So Yeah, so I do I do want to just talk about a saga level pricing before we close off because this podcast is getting long in the tooth. So one of the very interesting things in reading Adrian Czajkowski shut out of the app is that it is a massive series, it is a ten book monstrosity of a series and they're were like, like Jordan's books.

Marie: They are, you know, doorstops and I noticed in the reviews because I do like to check reviews, you know, of books and so on and see what's coming and so on. I noticed that there was a big dip in like people's opinion on the post book four books, a book signing it book five, and I'm now on book six and I can see what the problem is.

Marie: And it's this book four builds up to a climax that ends a war and the war actually ends then Book five obviously dips. Now the saga continues because they saw escalating stakes in the saga. But the the the war, this big war that you've been building to for four books has come to an end. And the problem is that the readers expectations are up here because it's all part of the same saga.

Marie: But now you're in the post war dealing with a post war events phase, and it is very hard to go from here to there like we do it in real life all the time, obviously. But it's it's hard to do in a story to get that big a drop.

Drake: Yeah yeah. And you mentioned before the show probably the best or one of the best ways to think about fixing that would have been to reset the reader expectations by starting it as book one of the next series.

Marie: Of the next year.

Drake: And even more about that. Yeah, nothing. Just call it book one and readers go, okay, I'm starting at the bottom because everybody knows we're starting at the bottom and we're moving up now. And they probably didn't even need to change the title, didn't need to change single word of any of the chapter one or any chapter in it.

Drake: He just tells them it's book one. And it's weird how expectations how much like, well, so like when Eragon came out as a movie, my wife went and saw it and we were like, This is going be terrible. It's going to be horrible. It's to be the worst movie ever. Yeah. And we walked out of there going, you know, it wasn't as bad as we thought it was.

Drake: You know, it was entertaining as opposed to other movies that were way better, movies better written, better, acted better. You know, the whole nine yards that we went into going, it's going to be the best movie. And We walked out going, Wasn't that good? It wasn't that good. And yet it was still like it. But it was just the expectations that we had going into it.

Marie: And that's I mean, that's 100% true. And that I mean, that is actually the reason why I decided to split my saga of sang wheel into multiple series because the peaks are too high and from a and you have to offer so you've built up to this massive peak of a war now you need to you need to bring the pace right back down to the post construction phase.

Marie: You know, like the picking up the pieces phase. And you cannot go pace, pace, pace up to Mount Everest and then say to the reader, okay, now follow me, you know, down, back down to sea level.

Drake: Yeah, yeah. And as dumb as that sounds, it really a lot of what we do and I talk about this a lot in the writers room, a lot of what we do is psychology. Yeah, it really is that simple. So it's not about the telling of the story, it's about the telling of a story in a way that's going to impact the psyche of the reader.

Drake: And as dumb as it sounds, if they had finished book four and like, that's it, that's the end of this saga, join me for the next one, which takes place tomorrow on that saga. But it's book one new saga. No, just that little expectation may have fixed. Everybody is opinions of it.

Marie: Yeah. Because because like the reviews were, you know, the pacing feels slow. Yes, the pacing feels slow. We've just come out of a war.

Drake: Right? Exactly. So somebody posted something in the chat about the movie Halloween, and it's it's exactly what we were talking about. So at the beginning, some of the teenagers get killed, but really they're considered the adults, you know, whatever. And then at the end, the main character is actually trying to protect the little children. And that raises the stakes so much because, you know, death is on the table.

Drake: Yes. This is a perfectly acceptable. But you could use that exact same thing for Jurassic Park. You know, some of the adults get eaten by dinosaurs, but then there's these two little children we have to save.

Marie: Children always raise the stakes, always like you. It takes a very weird reason, reader, to go like, yes, the death of a child is the same as the death of an adult. Like it's not. It hits different.

Drake: I mean, there's a reason why in the carnage guras, I literally take a moment to step over a dead little girl.

Marie: Yeah.

Drake: Like I want to show you know, there's a couple of times babies are mentioned and stuff like that. Not not dead, but. But you know they're going to die. I'm just not going to do that on screen. But you know there is for Western sensibilities, we value children.

Marie: I know all sensibility it it takes like we have we have proof that Neanderthals saved their injuries. no, no.

Drake: I'm not saying.

Marie: Like it goes like this is a human thing. Yeah.

Drake: Mostly. I mean, there are cultures that do not value children at the same level as other cultures. So it just you're right, it is a very human thing. We protect our offspring. That is the way it is. But there are cultures that protect them more than other cultures. That's all I'm saying. But we wait for the West. That's what we're writing for.

Drake: We're writing for a Western audience.

Marie: So we've got a comment here from the Peanut gallery with a concept of splitting a series. Is it okay to keep the same POV characters with new arcs, or would it be a new set of characters? So it depends. In in Tchaikovsky's case, if you split the series, it would have been the same characters. Predominantly. I am actually doing both.

Marie: So my middle series will be in a different location with different characters, and then my Climax series, my third series will be a mixture of old and new characters, or of the two, the two trilogies, the two series, correct. So. So it depends. You can have the same POV, you can have new ones because you resetting at book one, you actually have an almost blank slate.

Marie: You just have to remember that you do have a blank slate. You could have readers who literally pick up this book, so you have to do your worldbuilding again and you have to do it in a way that doesn't enjoy your old readers as well.

Drake: Like, Yeah, that's the thing.

Marie: My life more complex.

Drake: And there is, I mean, there is some things to think about. So look at the Dragon. Lance Saga is a series of books as a, as an example. So we get, you know, the Dragons of the Dragon series, the Dragon series itself, the first trilogy.

Marie: Dragons of Dragons of sort of Autumn. Winter and spring.

Drake: Yeah. And when we split off from there, like the next series was the test of the Twins.

Marie: So that was a great series and I love that series.

Drake: And we still have. We have, we have Kinnaman, we have Roslin, we've got Tasso and.

Marie: Yeah, and, and the Priestess.

Drake: Yeah, yeah. She was in there too. Yeah. So we have the same characters. We had some spin offs, but I think there was a huge drop off of readership when the series same world, same series, but it was now their children. I know. That's where my wife bailed. You know, she just she read the first book and she was like, Yeah, she's not the same.

Drake: So that's the risk you run into if you change too much.

Marie: So I agree with you. But I also want to say that I don't think that that was planned partly so. I feel like I feel like the children's books were very much sequel. Like this.

Drake: Is.

Marie: Like they were writing it because they had to write something in the Dragon Lodge world and they were like, Well, let's come up with something for the kids. Yeah, that's what it feels like, you know.

Drake: It does Doesn't.

Marie: Feel like a book. Books that they really like. The time of the Twins feels like books they wanted to write, right? The first three Dragon, it feels like books. They wanted to write the books after that feels like books that they wrote because the money was there.

Drake: I would not argue that point. Yeah, but yeah, it's it is different.

Marie: Yeah.

Drake: somebody else wrote a, another comment too. They were talking about how in the Bosch series main character actually ages so that in the current novels he's in his seventies so obviously he's not doing the same kicking down doors as he was there. And so yeah, they brought in a new protagonist and now Bosch has become more of a co protagonist, and I think that's what they were trying to do with the indie franchise.

Drake: I think they failed miserably, but I think they were trying to pass the baton. Yeah, to the next indie do things.

Marie: Pacing up on the right, this hobbyhorse the fricking movie, right? To stop getting it right again and stop trying to cram in 50 storylines into the space of one epic.

Drake: $500 million budget doesn't mean that that gives you any more time than 2 hours.

Marie: And that's the problem. Like, I don't where this money goes, but it goes stupid places. It goes places that adds no value to the movie like in my opinion. Yeah. So, yeah, I, I with that but I've got to stop trying to cram in so much so fast.

Drake: Yep.

Marie: Slow it down and tell the story properly. Yeah.

Drake: Yeah. You have to give the story time to breathe. You have to. It isn't a roller coaster ride. I mean, some some stories, you know, you take an action fueled nonstop. I mean, what was the.

Marie: Speed? Speed is a good example.

Drake: But no, it really isn't, because there are plenty of scenes where they are just on this bus and they're talking about stuff. And I mean, they slow it down. What I was thinking of is the one that that that won martial arts, the white martial arts dude from England or whatever. And he basically it's sits with this drug that if he if he slows his heart down, he'll die.

Drake: And so it's literally he's just running through town and taking the biggest risks that he can take so that he's constantly in terror, like he's he's jumping off of things and riding motorcycles by standing on them and being shot at and.

Marie: sure. But but then that is your plot device and you're not trying to tell another story at the same time.

Drake: Right.

Marie: And that's kind of what I mean. It's like, you know, if I if I think of Rings of Power, for example, which the problem with rings of power is who needed this fricking grim, dark hobbits? Nobody needed those grim, dark hobbits. They could have left out that storyline and given themselves more time to do the other storylines.

Drake: Justice Yep, that's why I missed the 22 to 24 episode seasons.

Marie: Yes, me too, man. I miss those. Yeah, but I will take way lower special effects for some 22 Episode 22 Scene Episode with some bottle episodes. I'd know if you ever watched Stargate SG one, but there was a bottle episode in Stargate SG one, which is still my favorite, which is the the one where they get caught in a time.

Marie: But the only people who are aware of the time loop is Jack O'Neil and took. Neither of them are super bright, right? They're not the they're not the two scientists. So they have to go through this loop like a bazillion times figuring it out and at one point, just like I'm taking this loop off and it plays gold through the strip and stuff.

Marie: Like, it's awesome. It's a great bottle episode.

Drake: I remember that episode. So two things. One, it some Save Me, it's Jason Statham and the movie was Crank back in 2006. So you also dropped an industry term that I want to at least take a second to define. So a bottle episode is a movie industry or really a TV industry term where we've gone over budget. We need to cut costs.

Drake: So we write an episode and everybody has seen this. You just didn't know you were seeing it. It felt like it was just one of the episodes of the season, but Literally. It was written on purpose to save money. So they write an episode where they use one setting, one scene, so they only have to set up the film crew one time.

Drake: They only use a couple of the actors. They don't even use all of them, so they don't have to pay them because no actors get paid per episode they're in, so they can save costs that way. And it's, you know, like there's a friends episode where half of the cast get stuck on an elevator. That's so and it feels like an episode of Friends.

Drake: It just feels like it. But it's not. It's literally they went, We need to save some money. We've gone over budget. Let's make an episode that's going to cost us basically a third of what a normal episode cost and we get back on track. So that episode because I do I didn't remember to you said the golfing and that was like I do remember him going through there in golf and it just literally going, Nope, I'm taking this one off.

Drake: I don't care. But so you just have the tunnels of SD one, just the base. Yeah. And nothing's going on and they're just doing this loop over and over and over again. And that's you have one camera set up, you have one scene, one setting, one everything you get, you can you send half your crew home because there's not needed you send half the cast home because they're not neat enough to pay any of them.

Drake: This episode, you're not. It's usually on something that already owns you're not paying location fees. So like that was obviously in their studio, in their soundstage, which is where they had the SG one base set up at.

Marie: The other thing is a bottle episode also quite often doesn't deal with the direct plot elements it deals with like the, you know, a character development or whatever. So you do this kind of focusing in on.

Drake: Yeah, that's what appeals to the audience. Like it's a part of the series but actuality it those come out of nowhere. Those are literally a top down decision where, you know, the executive producers will be like, I spent too much money. My final episode is back on track. And so the writers will have to then go, man, what did I miss?

Marie: Episodes. But they were right.

Drake: Yeah, you do not have them anymore. You know, they've had eight episodes.

Marie: So you never have bottle episodes, but but bottle episodes were amazing because they they would let you explore a character, a part of a like and it would really let you connect with that character. Like, I missed 22 episodes.

Drake: Yeah. And just to do one last shameless plug because I am poking at it again. So one of the cartoons that that I've written that I'm trying to get produced, I was going to do all in house and then I got cancer and haven't gotten back to it but I've actually start poking at it again. But the entire show is a bottle episode because I'm going to do it internally.

Drake: So it's it's two guards, It's called guards and it's two guards standing in front of a gate and they're talking and no one shows up to the gate. No one goes through the gate. They never leave the gate. Like literally it's just two guards standing there talking and it's hilarious. But the entire show is a bottle episode so that it can be really, really cheap every single episode.

Drake: Because I need two actors. I need, you know, we're doing it in 3D and I've already got the 3D assets and all of that, but it means that make the assets once and you just move the camera around as you animate these two guys, they're just standing there talking. So yeah, that's come back onto my radar. I don't know if a movie able to do it.

Drake: I know this year, but maybe next year I'll start actually spending a little bit more time on thinking about getting that done. If there's any animators out there that just want to work on a project that's a passion project, that's really what I need. I need some animators. They can just sit down and crank out because I've got the show written, I've got the actors, I've got everything to do on the post-production.

Drake: I just don't have labor for somebody to actually just animate the characters as they're doing their thing. So if there's any 3D animators out there that just want to do a passion project as, you know, slave labor, I'm your guy. Hit me up. All right. Anything else on pacing? No.

Marie: I think that we have reached a good and natural point to say that that is a good place to end this episode by.

Drake: But

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