1070. Fiction editor Joshua Essoe explains the hidden techniques behind pacing in storytelling. Learn how good pacing shapes reader engagement, why well-placed story beats and emotional shifts matter, and how popular films like Memento and Fight Club use pacing to captivate audiences. Joshua also looks at managing flashbacks, using white space strategically, and avoiding common pacing pitfalls in fiction writing.
1070. Fiction editor Joshua Essoe explains the hidden techniques behind pacing in storytelling. Learn how good pacing shapes reader engagement, why well-placed story beats and emotional shifts matter, and how popular films like Memento and Fight Club use pacing to captivate audiences. Joshua also looks at managing flashbacks, using white space strategically, and avoiding common pacing pitfalls in fiction writing.
Joshua's "Pacing and Cutting" Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshuaessoe/guides-to-writing-pacing-and-cutting
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Joshua Essoe, a long-established, wonderful fiction editor. I had him on a couple years ago to talk about his book Mood and Atmosphere, which you may remember. Today he has a new book about pacing, and so we're going to talk all about that. And if you're not a fiction writer, you're still going to love it because we're going to talk about all your favorite books and movies and how they do this well, and maybe sometimes not so well. Joshua, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
JOSHUA: Thank you. Thank you for having me back. Yeah.
MIGNON: Yeah, I'm always excited to talk with you.
JOSHUA: Yeah, same here.
MIGNON: Wonderful. So pacing is this whole additional thing that can make a book work or a movie work or not work. What are some of the movies or books that you've seen that do pacing just especially well?
JOSHUA: I think there are a lot, but one that I was specifically thinking about just yesterday was a movie called Memento.
MIGNON: Oh yeah.
JOSHUA: Have you seen it?
MIGNON: Yes. I loved that.
JOSHUA: It's an amazing movie. It is a masterclass in storytelling, and what that particular movie does is it starts at the end, and then each scene works backward in time, and it sounds really wonky. I understand that. But the way that it was put together tells such a compelling story. It somehow manages to create the momentum in the storytelling moving backwards. And it keeps you hooked. It keeps you trying to guess what's going to happen. And instead of wondering actually what's going to happen, you wonder how did that happen?
How did the events that I'm looking at right now come to be? And you keep watching to see the origination of all of those things.
MIGNON: Yeah, that movie was an absolute trip, and you can imagine when you hear the concept, it could have been a complete disaster.
JOSHUA: Yeah, absolutely. If I'd have heard that, if an author had pitched that to me, I'd have been like, “Maybe let's talk about other ways to tell this story that you want to tell.”
MIGNON: So what tools of pacing do you think they used to make that movie so great?
JOSHUA: They used a number of things, and I think the first things that pop into my head is they used a lot of withholding, and withholding is an interesting technique. Withholding is bizarro foreshadowing. Okay, so foreshadowing is a device where an author creates hints or clues for future plot events.
In Memento, they were withholding a lot of information from us because we hadn't gotten to those parts of the story yet, and the main character is a guy who has short-term memory loss. So, he can't remember anything that just happens, and each scene ends with that kind of reset for him.
So, withholding is a strategy whereby the author holds information back from the readers. It delays details, so readers will keep searching for the clues. In one you give, in foreshadowing, you give, and in withholding, you don't. How foreshadowing can also be called planting is because you're sowing the seeds of information that will bear fruit later on in the story.
MIGNON: I've heard that fiction writers sometimes write their story and then they'll go back and plant those little clues. Is that common?
JOSHUA: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I recommend that. It's really difficult to come up with the most subtle ways of introducing information and setup points for your story. And I think most of the time when I'm editing a novel, I find that there could be more done in that arena. And so, I will suggest, “You know what, this part right here, this would be an excellent point at which you could just slip in a tiny little bit of a hint towards your next big climactic event that happens on your way towards the climax of the central conflict.” Yeah, I think that going back through, doing a pass—an editing pass strictly for introducing more hints and clues, more foreshadowing—is a great way to go about your editing process. Yeah.
MIGNON: Yeah. And so, with withholding, what's a movie that isn't maybe as trippy as Memento that does a good job of withholding? A movie or a book?
JOSHUA: Fight Club for sure. Both the book and the movie.
MIGNON: We’re going to talk about that in the bonus segment.
JOSHUA: Okay, yeah. So a teaser for that is one of the strongest techniques that's used in Fight Club is withholding the fact that Jack, the narrator, is two separate people. Because there are so many little things that hint at that and so many little things that make you question and start to create guesses as to what's going on.
We try to predict what's going to happen or what all these little clues mean. That is creating such a strong momentum of a wave of momentum that's just pushing us through the story, making us need to see the ending of it.
MIGNON: Great. And then, you talked about flashbacks too. I both love and hate flashbacks. I don't know, sometimes they bug me, but then when they're done well, they're great. So, why am I loving some flashbacks and hating others?
JOSHUA: I think it's because in a flashback, you're stopping forward momentum. When you use a flashback, you literally, you stop the story dead in its forward progression and you rewind it. So, it's always a technique that you're going to have to use with care. If flashes are appropriate, then you can do some really cool things with them.
Anytime you have a flashback or a flash forward, it should, at least, it should do at least one of these things. I always recommend any element of your storytelling do more than one thing, but it should. If you're using a flashback or flash forward, it should do at least one thing.
You should create character development by providing insight into the character's past or their future experiences. Flash back, flash forward. You should show other pertinent narrative information, perhaps for other characters, for settings, for the conflicts, for the events going on.
You should foreshadow, which is flashback or back shadow, which back shadow is what flash forward is—a building conflict or a plot point. Two more. You should clarify details in the plot or explain the current conflict. If you're not doing that with your flashback or flash forward, then I really question whether or not it should be included.
And the last thing is, you should build to the story's resolution with some sort of critical detail that you couldn't get into the story in any other way.
MIGNON: Yeah. So, your book is called Pacing and Cutting. Let's actually back up a little bit and talk about pacing. What is the difference between pacing and timing, or pacing and momentum?
JOSHUA: Let's start with defining what pacing is. Okay, so it’s actually a deeper question than you think. So, Merriam-Webster defines "pacing" as the rate of performance or delivery of something. Okay. And it's true. It is that, but it's so much more than just that. Pacing is the speed at which you tell your story.
It has nothing to do with the length of your story. You can have a long, very fast-paced book, or you can have a very short, slow-paced book. It plays an essential role in maintaining your reader's interest, in building tension, and achieving that emotional impact that you want to achieve with your story.
Your pacing is what dictates your reader's perception of time. Okay, pacing isn't about how quickly events happen in the story. Pacing is about how your readers experience the story unfolding. It could be 10 words describing a decade, or it could be 10,000 words describing just a single day. Obviously, one of those choices is going to feel faster than the other, but that doesn't make either one of them right or wrong.
It really depends on your specific story. "Pacing," as a noun, is the momentum, timing, and time of your story. In other words, it's how much time your story encompasses. It's how that time is organized and how many words are devoted to each chunk of those times or scenes, or where those scenes are placed inside the story.
Now, "pacing," as a verb, is controlling those things in order to direct how the characters and the readers experience the story. Thus, your pacing dictates the order and the placement and the pattern of all of your story beats. Like I said, defining pacing, I think, is an art all by itself.
MIGNON: Yeah. And there's all these tools you can use to control the pacing, and you do such a good job of laying them out. And some of them are things that we've talked about before in the Grammar Girl podcast, like active voice versus passive voice. How does that play a role in pacing in fiction?
JOSHUA: Active voice and passive voice. Yeah, those are definitely things that are very strong controls of your pacing. In passive voice you're obviously, you're going to lean into telling over showing in passive voice, and that also is not bad. There are definitely times in a story where you're going to want to tell things, where you're going to want to tell your story, not show the action unfolding, especially if it's more of an introspective point in the story.
If you're trying to build up your character, you're trying to reveal their characterization and their arc and how they're progressing through that, a passive stance could be a lot more beneficial than an active one. And an active one, obviously, we're talking action, we're talking quick story beats, we're talking shorter sentences, less syllables, shorter paragraphs, even all the way down, or I guess all the way up to what size of chapter you use. In the book, I talk about how there are some stories that use only a single sentence as their entire chapter or even a single word as their entire chapter.
MIGNON: Yeah. What were some of those?
JOSHUA: Yeah. Yeah. It's really cool. One of the things that most sticks out in my mind is Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. I think it's the second book, New Moon.
And between chapters three and four, I believe it is, she has a number of unnumbered chapter headings as Bella is going through severe depression. Her love has left her, and she can't believe that he could possibly have done something so terrible to her, and she just doesn't quite know how to get past it.
And so, the chapters or the chapter headings, the unnumbered chapter headings go, I think it's like, October. And then you turn the page, November, turn the page, December, turn the page, and then she starts to resume life again, and the story picks up. And it's so effective. It's so wonderfully effective.
Stephen King has done it. The whole chapter in Misery is chapter 32, and all he says is, “Polly, can you?” That's it. New chapter. Polly, of course, is the main character. And then another one which really sticks out to me is Something Wicked This Way Comes. Okay, that's one of Ray Bradbury's hallmark stories. And it goes, “Nothing much else happened all the rest of that night.”
So, we have this action that's like getting heavier and this tension that's growing hard, more, more hardcore. And then there's a resolution to that arc, and the next chapter is just like giving the characters and giving readers just a break. Give them a breather. “Nothing much else happened all the rest of that night.”
MIGNON: I love that you talk about white space, both literal and metaphorical, and the role that can play in pacing.
JOSHUA: Yeah, definitely. White space is so important. So, I have a book, I have a section in the book called The Psychology of Pacing. I wanted to at least touch on how writing affects the psychology and, in turn, how that affects our perception of how fast a story is moving and how engaging it is.
So, white space is what's left over after your words create the dark space. It's the emptiness of the page that isn't filled. You can make your story feel a lot more stifling, or you can make it feel a lot more free and free-flowing by managing that white space on any given page. Paragraph breaks give readers a huge visual and mental break.
David Farland, he used to tell me that break was like a breath while swimming, which I think is just the perfect analogy. I will use that for the rest of my life.
MIGNON: Yeah.
JOSHUA: So yeah. Yeah. Don't downplay the impact of how writing actually looks on the page. Think about it yourself when you're actually reading it and you come, you turn the page and all is just this block of uninterrupted text.
What's your reaction to that? When you hit a point in the book like that?
MIGNON: You feel a little bit tired, a little bit daunted maybe.
JOSHUA: Right? Yeah. It's discouraging to see this huge block of text because what that looks like all of a sudden to readers is "Great." Suddenly, their relaxation time has become work time.Â
MIGNON: You like to turn pages.
JOSHUA: Yeah. You like to turn pages. It makes you feel like you're progressing. It's not just the actual story. It's not just the characters. It's not just your plot and the conflicts. It's how you feel. You need to physically progress through the book to make it feel like you're making progress rather than you're stuck.
You're not in quicksand, right? You're on a slip and slide.
MIGNON: Do you think that's more of a thing with modern fiction? That it needs to be faster because we're all so used to scrolling through things so quickly?
JOSHUA: Yeah, that's a really great question because it's utterly true. Â
In my research for this book, I found that modern readers feel that they need a much faster pacing for their stories than audiences of previous times, of previous generations and centuries. Look at the work of Dickens, for example. He will have just page upon page of solid black space.
At the time, it worked great. Like people just ate that up. No problem. It wasn't influenced by what we have going on today. Everything is drawing our attention today. We have our cell phones. We have these little mobile computer systems in our pockets that we're always on.
We're always getting new information. Back then, the flow of information was much more constricted. Now we're competing with navigating traveling. For example, if you're flying someplace. I just went to Superstars in Colorado to teach, and I was navigating, making it through the airports, going through TSA, baggage check, waiting, finding my gate, waiting at my gate.
And when I was doing all of that, of course, I'm still like on my phone, looking at messages. I'm talking to people, like saying "Goodbye," saying, “I'll see you soon.” Playing Pokémon Go, as one does. Now our attention spans have been greatly reduced. There was a study done in 2023 that was on the attention span of adults, and they found that our attention spans are greatly reduced from even a quarter-century ago.
And I attribute it all to these guys.
MIGNON: Yeah. Smartphone. Yeah. Yeah.
So, thinking about pacing again, so in a work, a movie or a book, does each one have, is it like a song where it's 124 beats per minute and it's that way pretty much through the whole song, and you can do aerobics to this song, and you can't to that one? Or is it more modulating in a movie or a book?
JOSHUA: Yeah. The comparison to noise or to music is a good one. It's something that I make throughout the book. In fact, what I've written in the book is “Make music, not foghorns.” It's really important because when you're making that comparison of pacing to music, essentially it goes: one long note sucks.
Okay. Nobody wants to listen to a single long note of anything. It's the melodies; it's the highs and the lows and how they all mix together into some sort of pleasing partnership that makes music enjoyable to listen to. This is the same with pacing, and some of the things that you can do to control those musical beats are actually story beats, and I make a differentiation between kinds of beats in the book.
So, there are story beats, and there are emotional beats. The story beat, those are small, distinct moments in the narrative where something important happens. The plot progresses, the tone changes, the character undergoes a big change. Or maybe they have a realization that drives momentum and keeps your readers engaged.
MIGNON: So, what's an example of a beat?
JOSHUA: Of a story beat?
MIGNON: A story beat? Yeah.
JOSHUA: You can think of a story beat; let's go back to Fight Club. A great story beat in Fight Club is when Jack's apartment blows up. Okay? That is a detail in the plot that progresses the entire story forward. If that thing didn't happen, then the entire story moving forward would've been utterly different.
MIGNON: Okay, so a story beat is like a thing that happens that's important.
JOSHUA: Yes. Yeah. A very important thing that happens for your plot progression. Now, an emotional beat is all about what the reader is feeling. It's less about what's going on in the story and more about how that story is affecting your reader. It's a moment in the story that's meant to create a very specific emotional response, creating a deeper connection between the readers and the characters.
You want to really carefully manage your emotional beats in your story because they're really powerful tools for writers to engage readers on a more visceral level. They invite readers to feel what the character’s feeling, and they help readers feel more invested and more engaged with your story.
So, you have to be really careful with those emotional beats because it's very easy to tucker your readers out if you're hitting the same emotional beat over and over again. One of the examples I use in the book is a movie called The Raid. The Raid is a very cool movie, but it's exhausting because essentially The Raid is just one long string of action beats.
It's just action after action after action. More fighting, more fighting, more fighting. There is a little bit of conversation, a little bit of dialogue, and character development within the movie, but it's greatly minimized. It's because it's really all about the dynamic action and the choreography of how the characters are physically interacting with one another.
Now, some people are into that; like, that's really cool. It's fun to watch, but the audience for that kind of thing, where you're hitting the same emotional beat over and over again, is much more limited than if you're varying those emotional beats. So, what I would recommend most often is if you're going to have an action
beat, follow it up with something else. Give your readers an emotional break from the higher tension of their dramatic action and give them something that's funny. Give them a beat of mystery instead. If your story is about a zombie P.I., like Kevin Anderson's writing, then you're going to need to have the action where the characters are physically circumnavigating some sort of conflict, but you're also going to need those moments where they're figuring the puzzle out.
Like, what is going on here? Sherlock Holmes is a great example; the Sherlock Holmes movies are even better examples because we get to see, especially like the one with Robert Downey Jr., where everything slows down and he's analyzing, which is a very cool tool also, it's called focus. So, he's analyzing every little detail that's going on right now and how he can manipulate those details, how he can take advantage of those details.
How can he defeat, like whatever tiny move he sees his opponent making by making a counter move? It's very cool stuff. But we get those really powerful physical moments interspersed with him thinking about stuff, what I call wool gathering.
MIGNON: Ah.
JOSHUA: Characters gotta wool gather sometimes.
Sometimes they gotta just sit there and think so that they can understand and therefore help readers understand.
MIGNON: Why is it called "wool gathering"?
JOSHUA: Why is it called wool gathering? I think that's another thing I got from Dave Farland. Wool gathering is basically a character who's just going, “Hmmm. Hmmm.” They're gathering wool.
MIGNON: Well, to wrap up, before we get to the bonus, what is an example of something where the pacing really just did not work? Let's hear about a little bit of a disaster.
JOSHUA: I love it. Yeah. Let's talk about a bit of a disaster. Okay, so when I was a teenager, one of my very favorite series was—what's it called? The Earth's Children series? It's Jean M. Auel’s series that starts with Clan of the Cave Bear, and I freaking loved it. So good. And then in the fourth book, oh, Earth's Children, that's what it's called.
Or the Earth’s Children series. In the fourth book, in The Plains of Passage, oh God. It just killed me. It killed me. Because the first, I don't know, hundred pages, 150 pages, we just find the MCs, Ayla and Jondalar, just walking across the plains.
MIGNON: The main characters. Yeah.
JOSHUA: Main characters. The main characters just walking across the plains.
They're just walking, and they're walking, and they're walking. And oh, there are some woolly mammoths. That's cool. Oh hey, there’s some saber-tooth tigers are doing it over there. That's awesome. But let's continue walking through the high grass for another 50 pages. Turn the page. Oh, yay. More high grass.
It was interminable. No freaking kidding. The Plains of Passage. But because I was a younger person at that time, I was a much younger and stronger man, I was able to finish the book. And I remember thinking that it was really good. Like I enjoyed it. But all these decades later, after reading it, the only thing I can remember was walking through those high grass plains for 150 pages.
MIGNON: Yeah. I wonder what happened. You often hear about writers who are incredibly successful, and they get edited less and less as they become more successful because the publishers know their books are going to sell no matter what.
JOSHUA: They don't need to spend the money to do it. Yeah.
MIGNON: Or there's, yeah, and they're so prominent people don't want to tell them that they messed up or, yeah. So, book four in a highly successful series fell apart.
JOSHUA: Yeah. I did. I stopped reading the series after that.
Yeah, I just, I couldn't do it. I couldn't risk my reading time on the gamble that I would be forced to walk through more plains for a hundred pages.
MIGNON: That's great. Thanks, Joshua. You always change how I… Whenever I talk to you, when I read your books, it changes how I experience books and movies because it gives me so much insight into how they're made and what the elements are that make them great or maybe not so great.
I always really appreciate it. This newest book is called Pacing and Cutting by Joshua Essoe. Where can people find you and your books?
JOSHUA: I'm easily findable on Facebook, for example. I think I spend the most time doing any sort of social media there, but also my website, JoshuaEssoe.com, and Pacing and Cutting is going to be launching on Kickstarter. That's going to be the next place to find me on April 1st, which is not April Fool's Day.
It's Anne McCaffrey's birthday, so…
MIGNON: Oh, great. Yeah, and we'll put a link in the show notes. If it's live when this comes out, it should, I think it will be, it sounds like the timing will work, and if not, we'll add it after the fact. Yeah. Wonderful. So, thank you so much for being here. Now, if you're a Grammarpaloozian, if you support the show, which we appreciate so, so much, you're going to get a bonus episode. I happen to know that Joshua, you may have already picked this up, Fight Club is one of his favorite books and movies, and we're going to just dive into everything about Fight Club and what it does right in the bonus segment.
And then we'll get Joshua's book recommendations. If you want to be a Grammarpaloozian supporter, go to quickanddirtytips.com/bonus to learn about signing up. Or you can sign up right on Apple Podcasts in the Grammar Girl show page. But, Joshua, again, thank you so much for being here.
JOSHUA: Thanks for having me. I always love talking with you, Mignon.