How to know if the story is going too fast?
I have a question, part subjective, part common sense I think... The conjunction of experience of some writers can be helpful for me.
How you know if the story is balanced? ...I mean,how you know it's not too fast how the problems or obstacles hit the protagonist?
I'm writing a story about a teenager that is problem child, so my collaborator said its ok that every day of a week happens something bad to him because it's a problem child after all...
But I still thinking that is too fast, then the story calms down and the things continue happened after few days or even weeks. An abrupt change.
For one side, I'm not aiming to an 100% realistic novel, it's YA fiction and my first draft. But I don't want that the people just stop reading because it's complete unbelievable.
I'm between "They will not even notice that" and "They will laught and think what would happened next? An alien abduction before the dinner?"
If someone knows material about rhythm or pacing in writing I can read I'll be so happy.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/36046. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
The principles you must rely on are plausibility and connectedness.
For example, in the space of 30 minutes I can have ten bad things happen to somebody, if they are connected to each other. A warning light comes on in the cabin of their airplane. An engine explodes. It damages the aircraft, they are too high and don't have enough oxygen. The pilot passes out. The engine catches on fire. They crash. The pilot is dead. The person breaks their leg. Their mother is badly injured and dies. The radio is broken. It is raining like hell!
That can all be made plausible as due to one thing, a cracked part in an airplane engine. That one piece of bad luck is the mother of all the other bits of bad luck, and ONE bit of good or bad luck is pretty much always plausible; after all, every few months somebody wins the lottery, almost every week somebody in the USA gets killed by lightning.
But the bad luck becomes implausible if the odds of these bad things do not have a driving cause. That can be your protagonist making dumb decisions, but you have to convince us these seem like good decisions to the protagonist. That is a little easier with YA, but it isn't completely free. Your protagonist cannot just keep doing things and not caring at all for the bad things that happen to him.
If you think something every day feels excessive, it probably is. You need a connecting thread, an underlying cause, for that to happen.
If it is just "getting in trouble" every day, that is mild enough to be plausible. If it is being injured, breaking something, causing somebody else harm every day: That is too much to be plausible without some underlying factor MAKING this happen.
A simple solution is to drag it out. Have a cycle:
- 1) Try to get something for nothing.
- 2) Fail and get hurt.
- 3) Get over (2).
- 4) Go to (1).
That could be plausible, the "troubled kid" is unhappy and trying to escape their life and that is the underlying cause of all these troubles.
In general, very early in a book, a few things can happen for no good reason. You find a magic amulet (for no reason) that leads to the whole story. Or, your protagonist is one of the one-in-ten-thousand people that survive the plague. Or,Jonathan and Martha Kent happen to be driving down a farm road and find an alien toddler in a spaceship and adopt him and name him Clark.
But you only get one or two of these highly improbable freebies in a story, after that, your events (and outcomes) need good explanations, or need to be seen as routinely believable and not unusual things to happen. Being a troubled child is not a good excuse for being the unluckiest kid in the world.
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