Paragraph Pacing

an analysis of James Patterson

Pacing is a somewhat elusive sounding concept. It took quite a while before I found definite information on what it really meant to “pace” something.

Pacing is really the aspect of a written work which controls the speed at which a story is consumed.

It is essential for depth of writing.

A well-paced novel doesn’t reveal itself so fast that the reader becomes lost in the prose.

The key aspects of pacing are word choice, punctuation choice, sentence length and paragraph length.

In pacing, and in writing, grammar is really an uninteresting sort of subject. It is virtually irrelevant from an English Major perspective.

Punctuation comes in Terminal and Non Terminal varieties. Things like a period, question mark, and exclamation mark are forms of Terminal Punctuation. Except in the case of the last bit of dialog at the comma and close quote, which is treated as a non-operation by the reader.

In such cases ,” and ?” are treated as brief commas always in the reader’s experience and have no grammatical purpose at all.

In general the comma represents a short pause, a semi-colon represents a long pause or a shifting pause, and a full colon (if ever used) is a kind of reveal/brace pause. Consider it the literary equivalent of a “dun dun” sound effect in a movie or TV show.

No one really uses that though. I seem to recall Patterson using one in this book. Possibly two.

There are two factors of word choice that apply to pacing, size and origin.

Larger, more complicated words slow the pace as they require more work to understand, in general. Obscure words, world specific words like ‘sellsword’ or ‘septum’ from Game of Thrones are examples of world specific words.

In both cases they can be reasoned out. Completely alien words generally cannot, and names that are unpronounceable fit into this category. They tend to ruin pacing very much.

The second aspect of word choice that affects pacing has to do with choosing between latin and germanic words. I.e. Their origin. Germanic words feel harder and faster, latin words tend to feel slow, detailed.

The difference between bug or insect, stay or remain etc. This is not always the case, like anger vs rage.

Generally speaking using latinate words requires a bit more knowledge of English. For instance affair can mean something that happened, a sexual interlude, or business. The Thomas Crown Affair uses all three actually. Something happens (the stealing of a painting), there is a sexual interlude (with the investigator), and Thomas Crown is a businessman.

The most important aspects of pacing have to do with sentence length, or in reality, idea length.

Consider this line from the prologue of Kiss the Girls “There was too much to explore, to study, to accomplish, from his hiding place inside the dazzling Mediterranean-revival-style house in Boca”

There are three commas. They could have been periods, but the use of commas has them flow one into another.

Consider “There was too much to explore. To study. To accomplish from his hiding place inside the dazzling Mediterranean-revival-style house in Boca”

Both are good. I prefer the second, but Patterson chose the first. The preceding paragraph had one sentence and one comma, but one was very long. It had a dum-dum-DUM kind of meter to it.

Whereas the Patterson version is more like dum-de-dum-de DUM.

I did an analysis of Patterson’s prologue, climax, and validation in the book Kiss the Girls. I was very surprised at the results.

Terminal punctuation represents any time there is a sentence ending with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Omitting dialog commas and question marks.

We can see that his prologue contains 38 paragraphs, his average number of sentences per paragraph is 2. He goes up to as many as 5 and as low as 1. What you will see is that as his number of sentences go up, his number of non-terminal punctuation goes down.

In general that means the more sentences in a paragraph, the more simple and short they are. As the frequency of non-terminal punctuation usually indicates a more complex sentence.

This is more starkly shown by analysing the climax of the story.

In this case the average of sentences per paragraph goes up to three, and he has some examples of up to 8 sentences in a paragraph. But if we look at the non-terminal punctuation line, we see that the entire paragraph is made up of tiny and simple sentences. Hardly any commas. No complexity.

The largest paragraph, which is the third to last of the 57 paragraph chapter goes as follows: “I stood up on rubbery legs. I noticed that I was glazed with sweat. Icy cold. Unpleasant as hell. I struggled over to Kate, and we held on to each other for a long time. We were both trembling with fear, but also triumph. We had won. We had beaten Casanova.”

Short sentences. And the use of the commas is not really about grammar, but the pacing. In the first use he struggles over then holds Kate, so the pause in gentle, because idea being expressed is gentle.

The he couples fear with triumph, and again uses the comma to pause the reader, but not full stop. He doesn’t want it to end with fear, this is the end of the climax, it has to be an expurgation of fear etc etc.

I doubt he actually thought of it at that level. More likely he wrote it that way because it sounded better to him, he has likely completely internalized these details.

Then we turn to the validation.

He is back to his old style with the prologue, it is very similar, though here he also uses far fewer complex sentences. The pacing is very horizontal, essentially sliding them out of the story. He is also back to his 30 paragraphs per chapter.

It’s not a good idea to over think this sort of thing. It’s one of those do it once and hopefully remember it forever. It’s key to get certain ideas into your creative voice, certain ways of doing things, so that you can do them subconsciously.

What I took away from the analysis was using short paragraphs, 2-3 sentences at most, and being okay with one sentence paragraphs.

Of having longer paragraphs with short and simple sentences, no commas.

And also of looking at chapters as being a sort of size, and the idea that the climax chapter probably should be almost double the size of the regular chapters.

Also, there should be a sort of flat and horizontal rhythm to the validation, easing the reader out of the story.