Pace and the arc of a piece

Pace keeps a reader moving through a piece, while its central question and eventual meaning give that movement direction. Both depend on the writer’s choices about structure and presentation.

The question and the takeaway

Storytellers work with two questions:

1. What happened?
2. What does it mean?

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The first involves both the main question or quest unfolding through the piece and the momentum that keeps readers moving between its parts. ¹ The second concerns what readers learn or take away. ² In storytelling, this is often a theme: a human reality that can make a story accessible even when readers do not share its characters’ experiences. ²

Momentum and comprehension

The momentum of a piece is also called profluence. ¹ Pace can be understood as the reader’s sense of urgency to continue towards something. ³ Clean sentences that do not require readers to work out what refers to what help sustain that urgency. ³ Active verbs, vivid perceptions and effective metaphors can also contribute to a sense of pace. ³

Pace affects both the reading experience and comprehension and is often underestimated. ⁴ Work on it should begin at the level of structure and the connections between sections. ⁴ Writing talent cannot rescue an unclear, complicated or disconnected structure, just as ordinary prose can still hold attention when the story is compelling. ⁵ The structural question is how one main idea or image leads to the next. ⁵

Three aspects of writing can be considered in this order:

1. Connections between paragraphs and whole sections.
2. Sentence length and direction.
3. Verbs.

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An arc emerging from the material

In the emergency-medicine memoir Something for the Pain, Paul Austin struggled to identify the narrative arc, then recognised it in his stories about work with patients: he had changed over the years from a short-tempered, hard-driven physician into a more objective, compassionate and mature person. ^{7, 8, 9, 10}