Mysterious Pacing

 One of the most important factors about mysteries that a reader notices almost immediately is the pacing. Depending upon the type, i.e. sub-genre of mystery determines the pacing of the book. For example: a cozy mystery will have different pacing than a suspense thriller.

The reasoning is, a cozy is a slow as molasses sort of story. It starts slower, moves slower, and so the tension and pacing are not warp speed. The characters can have high-intensity events and the pacing will move well, but chances are good they won’t give you that heart-stopping feeling that a suspense thriller will.  Cozies give the reader the puzzle to solve at a more or less fun level. Suspense thriller are all about the ride and how fast the reader can get to the end.

What are some things that make pacing go faster?

A few items would be sentence structure, word choice, and action versus reaction type situations. In a fast-paced scene or passage, you will find short, snappy sentences. An example would be, “The gun-butt smashed his temple. He fell to the floor. Jesus, what happened?” Or maybe it is the word choice, specifically verbs, which makes the event move quicker, with something like, slammed, plowed, ditched, careened, pivoted, etc. And finally there are also the old action-versus-reaction scenes like “I pivoted on one foot so fast he had to step back to avoid my fist.” This gives that immediacy needed to ratchet up the pacing.

How to make it effective?

It’s fine to write a fast-paced scene, but what if you write something that just doesn’t ring true with readers? It just isn’t quite believable? Then, you have to perform your scene in the real world and test it out. Pacing will never save you if you have the action all wrong.

Here’s an exercise for you.

Try to imagine a fight scene. Write it first from the protagonist’s POV, then on the other side of the paper, write it from the villain’s POV. Compare the two and actually try doing the moves yourself. Are you writing about something impossible to really occur? If you find that you cannot physically do the moves you say the character is doing, chances are good you should rewrite that scene.

A final word about pacing in mystery writing: is to test the waters before settling on the scene. If you think it may be slack in the way it unfolds, ask a friend or fellow writer to read the scene.  Sometimes word choice needs to be tweaked, or maybe the sentence structure is not punchy enough. Another set of eyes should right the problem.