The Importance of Pace

Just as a walking pace consists of the speed, the length of stride, and even the rhythm with which one walks, so in fiction pace consists of the speed with which a story moves, the amount of action, and the rhythm with which scene and summary follow one another.

Long paragraphs filled with long sentences eliminate most of the white space on a page and make the story’s pace slow down. Short sentences and short paragraphs create a lot of white space and make the story’s pace quicken.

For the...