Show Notes

• How to Pace Your Story





• The Shattering Peace 





• Podcast: The Five Types of Narration 





• Kaiju Preservation Society 





• The Empire of Silence 





• A Deadly Education 





• Shield of Sparrows 





• Fourth Wing 





• The Abbess Rebellion 

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Alright, I’ve heard we need to pick up the pace on this podcast. So, what we’ll do is record normally and then just speed up the recording during audio editing and publish that.

Oren: That sounds fantastic. I don’t know what could possibly go wrong.

Chris: Yeah, it’ll be fine. Everybody will like listening to that.

Honestly, I have been told many times that I speak too fast. Supposedly being a good speaker just means talking like you would talk to your friends, but I don’t think that works for me.

Oren: Yeah, I don’t know. I just try to do what I would normally sound like.

Chris: Right. And you sound great. [laughs] But sometimes if I get excited, I start talking really fast and skipping words, and slurring words, and nobody can understand what I’m saying. I hope I’ve gotten better, at least when I’m paying attention. Or maybe I talk slower now because I’m getting old.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: [laughs] This is about pacing in word craft. It’s kind of frustrating that pacing means two different things. But I didn’t choose this. Not my term.

Oren: I didn’t choose the pacing life. The pacing life chose me.

Chris: So, most of the time when we talk about pace—cause we talk about plot so much at Mythcreants—usually when we’re talking about pacing, we mean plot pacing. Which I think is best defined as the level of tension as the story progresses. So that pattern of which scenes are tense relative to which other scenes. And how that goes.

But now we’re talking about wordcraft pace, which is a measure of how verbose you are for the content you’re covering. It’s a little more analogous to plot movement than plot pacing. Cause plot movement is basically, does it feel like you’re making progress on the story? So, wordcraft pacing is like, how quickly are you actually getting the story content in there in proportion to how many words you are using.

Oren: Yeah. It’s the difference between if we’re having a scene that is at an ice cream shop and we’re just hanging out there for many pages. That’s just a slow story choice. As opposed to I am describing an action scene, which could be fast or slow, depending on how I describe it.

Chris: We could go to the ice cream shop, but describe that so concisely that the word craft pacing is fast, but the plot pacing is slow.

Oren: That’s true.

Chris: If you do have pacing that is much too fast in your wordcraft, it’s also possible that the story will feel slow because you’ve basically killed all the motion, right? And so, people will get bored and won’t know why. So that happens.

But your wordcraft pace can be too slow or too fast, and people naturally fall in different places on the spectrum. There are people who are naturally very verbose and people who are naturally very concise. So if you have a problem here that are habits that you have to change, it’s not like you are uniquely bad at this. People come at it from multiple directions.

Oren: Yeah. I have an example actually, that I wanna talk about.

I recently read The Shattering Piece, which is the most recent book in the Old Man’s War series from John Scalzi. And I noticed Scalzi’s writing tends to go through phases.

And right now, he is in what I call the scientists-explaining-things-to-each-other phase. Where that’s a fairly large percentage of the book [with] scientists explaining things. And to be sure any amount of exposition is gonna slow the pacing down a little bit. Cause you need to explain things, but I just noticed that the explanations were so long for things that we absolutely did not need to know.

And it seemed like when he starts saying, you don’t have the math for that, it’s like, okay, I get it. That’s a line from the first book. I know. But you’re gonna explain it anyway. Could you just skip the part where you say you can’t explain it? Cause I know you’re about to.

Chris: And this is in dialogue?

Oren: Yeah. This is in dialogue.

Chris: Yeah. So not very long ago, we had a podcast on the five different types of narration. And one of the reasons that’s useful to keep those in mind is if you have a big chunk of the same type of narration, it’s more likely to be your big pause—that is too slow in the narration.

There is reason to have lots of dialogue. Sometimes there’s a situation where one character needs to recount something that’s genuinely interesting and very relevant to another character, and maybe that is worth several paragraphs.

But usually, it’s unusual to have one character talking for that long, especially without interruption. And so that could often be a lecture that is boring and shouldn’t be in there. Sometimes writers want to fit in more in their story than they can reasonably fit. And so instead of making the story about the subject matter, they just have a character do a lecture about all the things they care about that they wish could fit into the story, but don’t have time for.

Oren: Well, what makes this book interesting—And this is something that I think Scalzi picked up from his previous two books—which is that it’s not just one character doing this. There are several scientists who are all talking to each other. God, help me if you tried to figure out which one was which. I don’t know. They’re all the same, but they’re technically different characters.

Chris: Yeah. I remember that issue in Kaiju Preservation Society.

Oren: Yes. That’s where I first noticed it, and I liked that book anyway, but it has gotten worse.

As an example, mild spoilers, they go out to a system where an asteroid colony has gone missing, and the information that is actually being communicated to you is that there’s nothing there and we can’t detect anything on any of our sensors. This takes pages to explain.

Chris: Did he study science and now he really wants to share the science he studied? Is that what happened?

Oren: I don’t think so, cause it isn’t very technical. It’s not quite techno babble, exactly. It’s a little more consistent than that. But I wouldn’t call it hard science either.

And the main character’s not involved in any of this—which is a different problem, that the main character has a very odd skillset for this story. So she is kind of watching a lot of this play out—but we could have communicated that there was nothing there, that nothing showed up on their sensors in way less information than it took to do this.

That’s one of the reasons why I got to the end of the book and realized very little actually happened. It’s maybe a novelette’s worth of story stretched out over a novel.

Chris: Yeah. It reminds me: you read Empire of Silence and I didn’t. It’s not out yet, but maybe it will be out by the time this episode comes out. A critique of the beginning.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: And that o