Speeding Up Your Story Flow

This is an excerpt from my post on Focus on Fiction

If you’re worried that your story is dragging a bit or you’ve filled your chapters with so much detail or backstory that the focus is hard to figure out, author Chet Meisner has go-to strategies to get your story out of its rut and back on track!

(Read all his tips and get his downloadable pdf at my full post—see the link above!)

What are some of the major causes of story slowdown?

Here are a few of the most common ones:
The premise of the story isn’t strong enough to keep the reader wanting more. A premise like A baseball player must learn to cope with his wife’s death and avoid committing suicide will get and keep the reader engaged a lot more than Bob reminisces about his days as a minor league pitcher.
The writer is holding back information from the reader so he or she can “surprise” the reader later. The reader will only wait so long and then you’ll get the I just couldn’t stick with it long enough to get to the end reaction. Give the reader enough “anchors” early so they’ll stay with you for the rest.
The writer has created chapters that just “set thing up,” “introduce characters,” or “establish place,” but don’t move the story along or create tension. This will elicit the I kept waiting for something to happen reaction from the reader. Treat every chapter as a complete short story, with its own beginning, middle, end, rising and falling action. Make something compelling and interesting happen in every chapter.
The chapters are too long. Shorter chapters with good page turners will keep the reader moving through the story faster and wanting more.

Are there times when writers should balance the pacing—speeding it up in some cases and slowing it down in others?

Yes. If the writer paces the whole story at ninety miles per hour the reader will eventually get exhausted, and everything will run together. I think of my stories as a piece of music. In fact, I get many of my pacing ideas by listening to music and translating the emotional impact of the various movements to important points in a story. I call this “orchestrating my story.”

Can backstory cause the story to get bogged down?

Absolutely. This is a common problem with a number of story submissions I have critiqued or judged. Sometimes writers confuse “backstory” with the research they did when creating the character. The reader doesn’t need to know everything the writer knows about the characters’ histories, but just enough to understand why the characters act the way they do.

How can writers determine if the backstory is necessary or if it is just “filler”?

My rule of thumb is that I try hard not to use pure backstory unless I absolutely cannot find a way to explain a character’s behavior through dialogue, action, interaction, or reaction. And even then, I keep it as short and concise as possible. At some point the writer has to trust the reader to fill in the necessary blanks if the writer drops enough breadcrumbs.