The pacing or rhythm of a story is one of the aspects of writing I took the longest to really understand. Unlike story structure or character development, it doesn’t exist on its own. It emerges organically from the words you choose and the story you’re trying to tell.
Yet, for readers, rhythm is crucial. It can determine whether they stay hooked. Too fast, and a story can feel rushed or shallow. Too slow, and it may drag, losing readers along the way.
Particularly slow-paced stories might be hard to sell these days, as high speed seems to have become commonplace in fiction during the last decades. The good news is that while pacing may start as an unconscious side effect, it’s something you can take control of in later drafts.
Different genres, different rhythms
To do this successfully, it is important to become aware of how different genres generally utilize different rhythms, or are told in different gears, if you will. Thrillers, adventure novels, and horror often move fast, while literary or introspective fiction usually unfolds more slowly.
Understanding which genre your writing fits into gives you a better sense of what readers expect. This doesn’t mean you can’t play with these conventions, but if you want to do that, you first need to know what those conventions are.
One of the best ways to get a feel for pacing is to read both inside and outside your genre with attention to speed: Does the story feel fast or slow? Why? Then go deeper: mark passages that feel quick or sluggish. How do action, dialogue, and description contribute to this sensation?
Over time, you’ll start to notice patterns in both content and storytelling style that influence rhythm. You’ll also discover that stories rarely stay in one gear. They shift, allowing the reader to breathe, building suspense and engagement. Timing these shifts thoughtfully is key to keeping readers invested.
Developing a sense for the rhythm of the stories you read, and for what is common within various genres, is one thing. Controlling the pacing in your own writing is another. The perceived speed of a story or of a specific passage may differ from reader to reader, just as our preferences for pace differ.
Still, there are some useful rules of thumb for how most readers experience pacing. Knowing these can help you gain more control over the rhythm of your own work.
The gas and the brake
The overall rule to keep in mind is that action and dialogue are your gas pedal while description and introspection are the brake. Scenes focused on what characters are doing, or what is happening to them, generally feel faster.
Descriptions of settings, appearances, or internal thoughts slow things down. Dialogue and direct speech tend to speed up the story, while inner monologue and reflection slow it down.
The two speculative stories ‘Impatient Griselda’ and ‘Freeforall’ from Margaret Atwood’s Old Babes in the Wood (2025) illustrate these mechanisms nicely.
I often read these stories aloud to my creative writing students. Without exception, they experience the first story as fast and the second as slow.
When we examine the stories more closely, it becomes clear why. The first story consists largely of descriptions of small actions and implied interactions between several characters. It also relies almost entirely on direct speech and implied dialogue.
The second story, by contrast, focuses primarily on the internal musings and memories of a single character. It contains very little action and hardly any direct speech.
If you don’t know where to start to learn more about pacing and how to control it, I advise you to begin by reading these two stories.
Accelerating and slowing down
Atwood’s story ‘Impatient Griselda’ moreover shows us another technique that helps to pick up speed: leaving out information. The story, after all, captures a dialogue but only represents the speech of the main character; the questions and answers of the other characters are merely implied.
As a result, the way in which the conversation between the characters is presented in the story takes up less reading time than it would take to listen to the conversation in real life.
This leads to what, in narratology (the study of storytelling) is called a difference between story time-“the fictional time taken up by an action episode, or, more globally, by the whole action”-and discourse time-“the time it takes an average reader to read a passage, or, more globally, the whole text” (Jahn, 2025, p. 65).
If the fictional time narrated in the story is longer than the reading time the story takes up, this tends to lead to a higher pacing. Of course, the reverse is also true. If I stretch a moment that lasts only a second in real life across several pages, this results in a considerable slowing down of the pace and also signals to the reader that this is an important moment.
Keeping this “law” in mind when writing can thus be very useful not only to control the rhythm of a story, but also the weight you give to certain elements within it.
Fine-tuning speed
Beyond playing with the different speeds of action (fast), dialogue (fast), description (slow), introspection (slow), and the ratio of told time versus reading time, there are additional tools you can use to fine-tune the speed of a passage. Two of the most important are verb choice and sentence length.
Using active verbs-verbs that clearly express action and movement-can create an illusion of speed or urgency. Passive constructions, by contrast, tend to slow things down. The same effect applies to sentence length: short sentences generally feel faster, while longer ones invite a more measured pace.
Dazzling velocity
The techniques described above are conventional and widely used tools with which writers have controlled the rhythm of stories.
In her study Narrative Speed in Contemporary Fiction (2005), English professor Kathryn Hume sheds light on three additional techniques that appear in postmodern novels; works that are less traditional in that they resist closure and straightforward meaning.
Examples of such novels mentioned by Hume include Ishmael Reed’s The Terrible Twos (2009[1982]) and Robert Coover’s John’s Wife (1996). The first technique Hume discerns is that of multiplying units. By including a large number of characters and multiple storylines, the authors of these books confuse the reader and create a feeling of chaos.
The second technique, which is often combined with the first, is that of subtraction. A term Hume introduces to describe how such books often lack information readers need to connect the dots: information that would normally help them make sense of the story, identify what is important, or meet expectations that are usually fulfilled by default. As a result, readers begin to feel as if they have missed something while reading.
Another technique often used in such novels, generally in combination with the other two, is the inclusion of phantastic elements (such as sudden, unexpected supernatural or unreal events) that do not make sense in an otherwise realistic story and do not appear to have any meaning at all, not even a symbolic one.
Together, but even when used on their own, these three techniques have a puzzling effect on readers, subjecting them “to a breathless sense that the events are hurtling past too quickly for real understanding” (Hume, 2005, p. 105).
The desired effect?
While such postmodern novels certainly have merit in reflecting the dazzling speed of contemporary culture and often serve as critiques of the false closure and singularity offered by conventional stories, using these techniques full-on in fiction may risk frustrating readers. You may therefore want to use them with moderation, depending on the effect you want your story to have.
I personally have made use of some of these techniques in my first novel as well, including multiple characters and storylines, and a more or less open ending, which helped to create the cinematic, high-paced effect à la Tarantino I was after.
Still, I did not want my readers to feel completely lost or puzzled, as I also wanted to encourage them to reflect on the central themes of the book (the dangers of fake news, and the importance of imagination and creativity).
Therefore, I was careful with subtractions that would leave the reader guessing too much. Before using any of these techniques, it is thus helpful to have a clear idea of how you want your story to affect your readers.
Concluding tips
Although pacing initially emerges organically as you draft a story, it is something you can learn to control once you understand where the gears and brakes are.
- When trying to find the right pace for your story, I find it especially helpful to ask myself first what I want the story to do. How do I want my readers to feel afterwards, and what do I want them to take away from it? The answers to these questions largely determine the rhythm the story needs.
- In addition, it helps to read your story aloud and listen to its rhythm. How does it feel when you hear it? Too fast overall? Slacking in certain places? Or just right?
- It can also be useful to mark up your text using different colours for elements related to speed, such as active versus passive verbs, dialogue versus inner monologue, or action versus exterior description. This can give you a visual sense of how different rhythms are interwoven throughout your story.
- In general, keep in mind that you rarely want a story to remain in a single gear for too long (unless, perhaps, it is very, very short). A constant pace often feels flat and unsurprising. Shifting the rhythm not only keeps readers engaged but often makes the story richer and more textured as well, by introducing elements that were not there before, be it action, reflection, or something in between.
References and further reading
- Atwood, M. (2023). Impatient Griselda. In Old Babes in the Wood: Stories (pp. 95–102). Doubleday.
- Atwood, M. (2023). Freeforall. In Old Babes in the Wood: Stories (pp. 127–136). Doubleday.
- Coover, R. (1996). John’s Wife. Simon & Schuster.
- Hume, K. (2005). Narrative speed in contemporary fiction. Narrative, 13(2), 105–124.
- Jahn, M. (2025). Narratology 3.0: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative. From www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.pdf.
- Reed, I. (2009[1982]). The Terrible Twos. Dalkey Archive Press.
