First, understand that there are all kinds of readers. Some love non-stop action and adventure, a fast-paced rollicking story that carries them from start to finish on a rollercoaster ride of suspense and excitement. Others love the slower-paced character development as they seek to make connections with your characters, to relate to them and then to live vicariously through them. Some love the emotional component or conflict that exists between characters, wanting their heartstrings tugged and even manipulated. With that being said, you can have aspects of all those elements in your story, but it is impossible to write for all readers. Not everyone will like your book.

Still, there are basic pacing concepts that are important to follow. These concepts should be kept in mind when writing. There are always exceptions, but there better be a good reason or you may lose readers.

Everything You Write Must Accomplish One of Two Things

Everything, and I mean everything, must work to either further the plot or develop your characters. If you write something that does not do these things, edit it out and throw it away. Authors can become attached to their writing and have scenes that accomplish nothing. For the reader, these scenes are distractions. They want the story, not to be bogged down in mundane writing that doesn’t push the story along.

Ask yourself, does what you write develop the character in important ways to the story? Does the scene develop the plot and the overall story you want to tell? If you can’t answer yes to either, then don’t write it.

Don’t Get Carried Away with Detail

You need detail to connect the reader to the story, but too much detail slows the book down to the point where your readers will start skipping what you wrote to get to the good stuff—or they’ll stop reading altogether.

When describing something, you only need to give the basics. Readers will fill in the details from their own imaginations. Unless a detail is essential to your story, you don’t need to go into great explanation of the crack in the windowsill, the spiderweb in the southeast corner of the room, the chipped paint, the faded carpet, the water stains on the walls—all you probably need to say is that the house was rundown and dilapidated. A few details here and there as your characters explore the house is just fine—it helps set the tone and atmosphere—but don’t spend three entire paragraphs describing the house to the reader at one time. The reader will imagine a rundown house without your help. Get to the story!

Don’t Spend Time Describing Natural or Normal Actions

If a person is dismounting a horse, you don’t need to go into detail about the process. You only need to state that she dismounted. If someone needs to get something from the overhead bin of an airplane, you don’t need to spend 500 words describing him getting out of his seat, clambering over people, standing in the narrow aisle, opening the bin, finding his luggage, opening it, finding what he needs, closing the luggage, closing the bin, clambering back over the other passengers to his window seat—whew, that’s exhausting! Just say he excused himself to retrieve something from the overhead bin. The reader knows what these actions look like, so you don’t need to describe them in any detail. The reader can imagine them just fine without your long-winded detailed-filled prose.

Someone once explained it this way: don’t write about someone retrieving something to eat from a refrigerator—unless there is a dangerous cat in the fridge. If there is, write about that! Minor details are okay, but there is no need to belabor everything a character eats or drinks. Write about the unusual, the exciting, or the mystifying.

You don’t need to describe normal actions that everyone already understands. Give enough detail to let the reader’s imagination take over and then move on with the story! Get to the good stuff, please!

Have Good Transitions from Scene to Scene

Time lapses are common in novels. When a character is sleeping, there is nothing to write about—unless there is a significant dream or something happens while she is sleeping. So there are times you need to skip the unimportant, the times that don’t push your story forward. But have good transitions when you do.

I’ve read many authors who jar their readers when they skip time but don’t inform the reader of that fact. Transitions can be funny, witty, or straightforward. Here are a few examples:

1. A week later, everything fell apart.
2. I woke up the next day with a pounding head.
3. By the third inning, we were nine runs behind.
4. I shot upright, looking around and blinking. Uh-oh, I’d blacked out again. I glanced at my watch. 4:30 AM. But what of which day? Uh-oh.
5. It took him three hours to make it home, and by the time he did, he was frantic.
6. She slept through the entire ten-hour plane ride. When she finally managed to reach the farm out in the middle of no-where, she needed a shower desperately and she owed the tax-driver more than she wanted to pay.
7. Time passed.
8. Nothing happened for the first two days. On the third, she

Regardless of how you do it, provide good transitions to keep the reader engaged and on track. The pacing should be quick enough to stay in the meat of your story without compromising the integrity of your story either.

Where’s the Beef?

Again, it is the meat of your story that matters. How you get there will be different from author to author, but you need to keep a decent pace that provides enough detail to engage the reader’s imagination without tossing the reader into a bog of detail and irrelevant scenes. If you follow these principles, your readers will love you!

Happy writing!