How to Write Killer Prose (3)

Between the Lines: Pace

Pace in fiction is not about how fast your story plays out. It's about texture. It's about offering the grassy path rather than the ploughed field. It's about the quality of the experience. So it's one of the key elements in holding and keeping your reader.

Pace is like tempo in music. You have to balance comprehensibility with momentum. In other words, you have to make your readers feel and think exactly what you want them to in the moment, while at the same time drawing them onwards to the next feeling, the next thought, the next experience. Your prose should be like a chimpanzee swinging from branch to branch through the forest canopy. Each move, each sentence, creates the impetus for the next.

That doesn't mean to say that scads of physical stuff has to be happening. The great French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) can spend pages describing a momentary impression, or taking you on a rambling associative journey into childhood, but the pace doesn't let up, and neither does your desire to know more.

Think of a con-artist's spiel. The way you're whirled from idea to idea with such dexterity that you can never quite say: stop, hang on...

Imagine you're a race-car designer with Ferrari. The questions you're asking yourself might include: what can I strip away? How can I reduce weight, and so increase speed, while not compromising efficiency. Your variables (to greatly simplify) are weight, engine functionality, and manoeuvrability. In a winning machine, all these are balanced. It's no use having a lighter, faster car if there's a danger of the thing flipping at high speed.

The fiction writer is making similar calculations. Her variables are impact, comprehensibility and forward momentum. She's not concerned with style, because she knows, like our race-car designer, that if she gets the other things right, the style will take care of itself. In fiction, as on the race track, top-spec functionality is beauty.

So, line to line, how does she balance the variables? How does she stop the chimp falling out of the tree? How does she make her reader's journey an addictive, more-ish experience?

Let's get granular.