Pacing in Your Work of Fiction

1. Introduction: Have you ever been reading a book and you just hit a wall? For some reason, it's a struggle just to get through the next few pages. Maybe you didn't get enough sleep the night before or maybe the people you live with are making too much noise while you're trying to read. Or maybe, just maybe it's a problem with the story itself in that it's not well-paced. Hi, I'm Len Vlahos, and welcome to pacing in your work of fiction. I'm the author of five traditionally published novels for young adults and the creator of the Skillshare course, 20 Tips for New Writers. With that course was aimed at the beginner, this course is designed more for the writer who has already finished or as well on their way to finishing a long-form narrative fiction project. Why pacing and why me? Well, these are some of the reviews I've had in response to my work, even negative reviews and I'm thankful there haven't been many, often highlight the successive hadn't pacing. This isn't by accident. I pay close attention to pacing in each draft of each book I write, I simply cannot stand the thought of a reader getting bored at any point in one of my stories. In this course, we will define and identify pacing, review the three-act structure and the Hero's journey, discuss the importance of the first act, explore the danger of expository writing, make a case for brevity and hopefully have some fun along the way. You'll leave this course with an understanding of what pacing is and how to approach it in your writing. Of course, I hope this session will be well-paced, but you'll be the judge of that. Please feel free to post comments and questions to the class discussion board. You can find the link below. I checked for discussion updates and student projects every day and would love to hear from you. Stay right where you are for a short video on our class project and then it's on to lesson Number 1. 2. Class Project: Creating a class project to practice pacing in a work of long-form narrative fiction isn't really possible. Long-form narrative fiction can be anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 words or more. Instead, our project will focus on identifying pacing both good and bad in existing works of fiction. You'll be asked to find a novel you love, analyze its pacing, and share a brief written report with the class. Details on the project will come at the end of lesson number nine. Now, sit tight for lesson number one, where we'll find out what pacing really is. 3. Understanding Pacing: What is pacing anyway? Pacing is the speed at which a story is told. That's very different than the speed at which a story takes place. A 1,000-page novel could take place over 24 hours and a 200-page novel could take place over millennia. Either it can be fast-paced or slow-paced, but both, if handled correctly, can be well-paced. What do I mean by the speed at which a story is told? Is there some measure of storytelling speed, some words per minute clock against which you can measure your story? Sadly, no. Pacing is a largely subjective measure. Not everyone agrees on what is well-paced, but there are some truths we can identify about pacing. Let's start by asking a few questions first. One, is anything happening in the story? Are we seeing plot points develop? Is the protagonist being challenged? In other words, is there conflict? Two, are there overly rich descriptive passages that seem to go on for days? Is the author so wrapped up in describing the universe of their book they're ignoring the story? Three, are the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters excessively long? Four, has it been three chapters since the main character interacted with any other characters in the form of dialogue? There are some stories where the main character's isolated; maybe they're stranded on a desert island, and those have special pacing challenges. But otherwise, we should be seeing dialogue. Five, is the writing telling you more than showing you? Four of these points are related directly to the strength of the story being told. If there is a weak plot and character arc, if there's more telling than showing, the story is going to flow like molasses in January. One of my all-time favorite books is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It's the tail of a near-future United States that's fallen on hard times. Teenage Wade Watts embarks on the greatest treasure hunt in history, taking place entirely in a virtual world called the Oasis, to save himself from poverty and obscurity and to save the world. Pretty good setup. Can't help but be well-paced. The first time I picked up Ready Player One, I was eager to get to the next chapter. I couldn't put it down. There are also, though, some places where the pacing slows. I'll use Ready Player One throughout this course to identify where pacing works and where it doesn't. Be warned. There will be Ready Player One spoilers. Now that we've seen how to identify good pacing, let's move on to lesson two, where we talk about what makes a good story. 4. Story Structure: As we learned in lesson number 1, the biggest driver of pacing is the strength of your story. Without conflict, without a well-defined character arc, your book will fall flat. In this lesson, we'll review the elements of what makes a good story. Screenwriters often talk about the three-act structure of a screenplay. That same structure holds true for works of narrative fiction. In the 1st act we meet our protagonist and the people around them, see the world in which they live and identify the challenge they'll have to overcome or the goal they're trying to achieve. The first act ends when the hero accepts the challenge and crosses from the relative safety of the known world into the hostile environment of the unknown. In the second act, our hero is faced with a series of obstacles that will have to overcome. There'll be a false victory or false defeat and near the end, it will seem that all is lost. The second act spins into act 3 as the action turns again, propelling our hero in a new direction in pursuit of their goal. In the third act, everything comes together to give our hero the tools and wisdom they need to achieve their objective, they'll succeed and return home changed. This can be boiled down to the first act is setup. The second act is conflict confrontation, and the third act is resolution and reward. You may have seen this in something called the hero's journey or a bitmap. Those concepts are dealt with in detail in Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces and Jessica Brody's, Save the Cat, Writes a Novel. Both are excellent and both are recommended reading for writers of long-form narrative fiction. Take a look at this mash-up of the elements of the hero's journey, the Save the Cat beats and the three-act structure. As you can see, all the elements of the hero's journey or the beats in the 1st act or setting the story up, introducing the characters and the challenge the protagonist will face. The second act is really all about the obstacles and the third act is about resolution and importantly, how your main character has changed from the beginning of the story to the end. If we apply the three-act structure to ready player 1, it looks like this. We meet ordinary teenager Wade Watts, Wade lives in a near future United States. After decades of global warming, corporate consolidation in war, the US is in bad shape. It is a world with little hope. Most Americans have retreated into the oasis, a virtual world where people live, work, go to school, and play. Wade and his friends find hope in James Halliday's Treasure Hunt, in which they're searching for an Easter egg buried in the oasis. The winter will not only get untold wealth, but control of the oasis itself. Wade and his friends are egg hunters or Gunters. Only it's been five years since the hunt began and no one is any closer to finding the treasure. Then Wade stumbles across a clue and suddenly he is a top of the leaderboard and his entire life changes. There are two main storylines in act 2. First, Wade meets the girl of his dreams, Artemis. She too is a gunter and she and Wade start to fall for one another. IOI starts to close in on Wade. They blow up his home, killing his aunt and neighbors and they kill one of his fellow gunters. At the same time, Artemis ends her relationship with Wade, vowing instead to focus on winning the contest. It seems that all hope is lost. In the third act, in a bold and daring move, Wade allows himself to be captured by IOI and brings the company down from the inside. He wins the contest, gets the girl and has in every measurable way changed. The story structure of Ready Player One is really strong. But Len, I thought you said this course was about pacing. It is, but remember, pacing is first and foremost reliant on the strength of your story. If you're reading something and it falls flat, nine times out of 10, it's an issue with a plot or the story structure. Before you can even think about pacing, you need to make sure your story is solid, really solid and that means you'll need an outline. Even if you've already finished the first draft, go back and create an outline. Make sure the plot is compelling. Make sure your main character is facing challenges and has a goal to achieve and make sure that in the end they come back changed. There's an apocryphal story about Alfred Hitchcock. He used to spend so much time on pre-production, on casting, rehearsals, scouting locations, storyboards, all of that, that when it came time to film, he would simply drive his car onto the set, roll down the window, yell action, yell cut, and drive back off. It's probably not true, but you get the point. Put the work in on the front end, make your story as compelling as possible. Write an outline and map it to the hero's journey, the bitmaps, and the three-act structure. If you're missing a bit, add it, if you have too many, pair them down. Don't be afraid to make changes to make your stories strong. Get it where it needs to be and then and only then can you worry about pacing. Let's move on to lesson 3, where we will look at the 1st act in particular as it relates to pacing. 5. Focusing on the First Act: There's another quote I heard about movies, and it had to do with the difference between British and American audiences. If the film opened with scenes of the sky, the British audience would be content to look at clouds for a little while. In the US, if by the third shot there's not an airplane exploding, you've lost them. It's an exaggeration, but it illustrates how important the opening scene is. Do you need a car chase or a shooting or an airplane exploding to open your manuscript? No, of course not. But how you get into the story is incredibly important for establishing the pace of your story. The Scar Boys, the first book I was fortunate enough to have published this was the advice my editor gave me. The biggest issue in the book is the amount of background that comes at the beginning of the story in order to set up the life of Harbinger Robert Francis Jones. If we can take a hard look at the opening chapters of the story and ask tough questions about what is necessary and what unnecessary background information is included. I think we can tighten this section so that it strikes the perfect balance for the novel's success. At this point, there's more information than is completely necessary and teen readers could grow impatient. To see what my editor, Greg was talking about, let's go inside the story. In the original draft of The Scar Boys, after a short prologue, which we kept unedited the manuscript began with several pages of backstory on how my character got the unusual name of Harbinger. This is the text from the original opening. 1967 wasn't the summer of Love it was the summer of indigestion. It was like 1966, had eaten a bad taco and just couldn't keep it down. If some dirty old hippy tries to tell you otherwise, don't believe him. I've researched it I know. There were riots, wars, and revolutions. The entire planet was going to ****, the entire planet except for Brooklyn, New York, that is. Greg felt that if we didn't grab readers right away, it would hurt the book's chances for success. While the backstory was interesting, it wasn't really compelling. In other words, as written here, I was establishing a slower than desired pace. I took Greg's advice to heart and dropped the entire opening, saving parts of it for later in the book. Instead, I began with a scene in which Harbinger is the victim of a bullying incident. Who the **** are you? An older and much larger boy stood over me blotting out the sun. You weren't ******* here when we chose up the ******* sides. He was trying on curse words the way a little girl tries on her mother's shoes. The boy wasn't just big, he was cartoon big. He also wasn't alone. He was one of seven snot-nose tweens surrounding me like I was in the middle of a football huddle. Remember, the function of the first act is to set up the story, the character, and the universe. Greg's advice made The Scar Boys a much stronger book. It hooked readers in from the beginning and improve the flow of the pace. We'll talk more about expository writing in the next lesson. But for now, be careful not to start your story with a lot of explanation. Give readers a compelling reason to turn the page. Start with action. In Ready Player One, Cline introduces us to the treasure hunt in the very first paragraph. Again, we're hooked. Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest, I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons when the news bulletin broke in my video feed announcing that James Halliday had died during the night. From this, we know that there's a contest that our protagonist has a hideout and watches cartoons. The way he talks about his video feed, it's probably set in the future and that someone important named James Halliday has died. It's a lot of information to get from just one paragraph, and it's so well executed because also puts the hook in our mouth. How you get into the story establishes the pace for everything that will follow. It won't engage gesture readers it will engage your writing as you will find a natural desire and tendency to keep up with the pace you establish from the word go. On to Lesson 4, where we will discuss the dangers of exposition. 6. Danger of Exposition: Nothing stops a story in its tracks like too much exposition. Let's start by defining the word. Exposition is writing or speech primarily intended to convey information or to explain. In short, exposition is telling rather than showing. Too much expository writing is perhaps the biggest difference between a poorly paced story and one that flows easily. So why do writers do it, and how do we avoid it? Let's start by looking at an example. "Len was a pack rat. He never threw anything out, hoarding boxes of memorabilia from different periods of his life. Finding anything among his varied possessions would be like finding a needle in a hay stack." These are simple expository sentences, and in the abstract, there's nothing terribly wrong with them. But if you have 30 such passages strung together, telling us everything about your character, it will slow the reader down. Here's an alternative. "Len absent-mindedly pawed through yet another box full of his life's memories. Scattered about him on the floor were old journals, magazines, and photos of people long since forgotten. He looked at the mess around him and shook his head." How did he let it get like this? We're communicating the same information, but this time we're showing rather than telling. It's the difference between a static image and a dynamic moving image. The reader will be more engaged with what your character is doing, than with what a narrator is telling you your character is doing. It's very easy to write exposition, which is why writers do it. It acts as a crutch, challenge yourself to show rather than tell. But, Len, I'm writing speculative fiction and I'm building a whole new world. I need to tell people about it to give context for how my character will act, what should I do? Good question and a fair point. There may be times where you need to use exposition. You should use exposition only if, one, you can't convey the same information via action. Two, you're not using exposition to deliver a plot point. Three, you don't open your story with exposition, and four, you use it sparingly. The second point here is very important. You should never ever use exposition to describe an important plot point. You need to show that rather than tell it. In the film version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo and Sam leave home together, taking the ring of power out of the Shire and saving their kin from jeopardy. It's an impactful moment at the end of the first act. This is it. This is what? If I take one more step, it'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been. Come on, Sam. It's a very important moment that is showing us how high the stakes are for the characters rather than telling us. Ready Player One, Cline uses a fair amount of exposition to describe the world of the United States in 2045, and to describe the OASIS and its history. Parts of the first five chapters are expository in nature. For example, this from Chapter 5. These two sentences are a classic case of exposition. They're part of a longer description on the history of gregarious games, the fictional company that created the OASIS. There's quite a bit of this kind of telling in Ready Player One, and if there's any argument I have with the pacing of the book, it's here, but it's a small argument. Cline uses exposition to build his world and set the story up but does it in a way that doesn't really bog us down. The lesson here is to show as much as you can rather than tell. It's the single most important element of pacing. Stay right where we are for Lesson 5, where we examine why longer isn't always better. 7. Longer Isn't Always Better: Some writers create long flowing sentences full of descriptive words, and then string those sentences together into long paragraphs expounding on a single idea, and then string those paragraphs and sentences together into long chapters. See what I did there. Actually, I have no problem with this. Some of the finest works of fiction follow this paradigm. But be warned, it's immensely difficult to pull off as a writer. It's also a style of writing that appeals more to 19th and 20th century sensibilities. Life in the early 21st century is very different. We communicate in short social media posts. We digest our content in 20-minute podcasts rather than 1,000 page books, and we favor headlines over substance. I could wax philosophical here on why all this is bad. I really could, but I'd be spitting in the wind. These genies are out of their bottles in the world has changed because of it. The bottom line is, human beings have a shorter attention span than they once did. Does this mean I'm suggesting you don't write long beautiful sentences and luxurious thought-provoking paragraphs? No. But just be aware that if you go that route, you really have to pay attention to how it impacts the pacing of your book. I'll be honest, I hate having to include this lesson in this course because it makes it sound like I'm suggesting you appeal to the least sophisticated of your readers. But really I'm not. The world has changed. Remember, this is a course about pacing. If you can convey the same idea using the same beautiful language in two medium length sentences rather than one very long sentence, your work will be better for it. Consider this example. Nestor rolled over, fumbled for his phone and squinting his eyes against the harsh back-light of the screen, managed to tap the snooze icon before dropping the phone on the floor. He let out a sigh of frustration and retreated further under his covers, trying desperately to fall back asleep. Let's break that into three sentences and see how it looks. Nestor rolled over and fumbled for his phone, squinting his eyes against the harsh back-light of the screen, he managed to tap the snooze icon before dropping the phone in the floor. He let out a sigh, frustration, and retreated further under his covers, trying desperately to fall back asleep. I'm not saying the second version is better writing. It really depends on the overall tone and style of your work. I am saying, however, that absent other priorities, this will help the overall pacing of your book. If you find yourself writing many long sentences, think about how you can break them without sacrificing the beauty of the pros. With this in mind, you should also be careful about overusing semi-colons. When using a semicolon, always ask yourself if the idea trying to convey will work better as two sentences rather than one. The same holds true for paragraph length. When a reader turns a page and sees that one paragraph takes up the entire next page, and maybe part of the page that follows, their eyes will glaze over. Here's an example of a really clean paragraph from Ready Player One. Her avatar lost its human form and dissolved into a pulsing, amorphous blob that changed its size and color in sync with the music. I selected the mirror partner option on my dance software and began to do the same. My avatar's limbs and torso began to flow and spin like taffy and circling Artemis, while strange color patterns flowed and shifted across my skin. I looked like plastic man, if you were tripping out of his mind on LSD. Then everyone else on the dance floor also began to shape shift, melting into prismatic blobs of light. Soon, the center of the club looked like some other worldly lava lamp. The descriptions really make you see and feel the virtual nightclub being described. But the client is careful to keep the language crisp and accessible. Is there an ideal length for sentences, paragraphs, and chapters? No. I wouldn't share one with you if I thought there was, as I don't want you writing with those restrictions in mind. Just remember that organizing your ideas into smaller quanta of thought will keep your readers engaged and will keep your story moving. Stay right where you are for lesson number 6 and we discuss the importance of choosing the right words. 8. Choosing the Right Words: This lesson will be short and sweet. Given its title, and after the last lesson, you probably think I'm going to suggest you dumb down your vocabulary. Don't worry, I'm not. But I'm going to tell you to be absolutely certain you're using every word and every phrase correctly. Three of a writer's very best friends are a dictionary, a thesaurus, and Google. I'll give you a personal example where those would have come in handy to me. In addition to writing books, I cover the Colorado avalanche for a website called the hockeywriters.com. My very first article for that site, I wrote this, "Colorado won President's Trophy with a 39, 13, and four regular season record, and opened the playoffs by winning a franchise best six consecutive games. Then the rails came off." Did you spot the problem? The phrase the rails came off isn't correct. Something can go off the rails, but really the rails don't come off of things. Or at least that concept has no meaning. Neither I nor my editor caught the mistake, but a reader did and correctly pointed it out. The same holds true for vocabulary words. Here's a list of some commonly misused words and phrases. Irregardless. This is not a word, or at least not a word you should use. Irrespective is a word that means regardless of. On accident. In some parts of the country like where I live in Colorado, people say on accident when something occurs by happenstance. The correct phrase is by accident. For all intensive purposes. This is one of my favorites because when I was younger, I misused this. The correct phrase is for all intents and purposes. When you see it written down, it's pretty obvious why. Then versus than. When you're trying to compare two things, the word is than. Bob would rather have pancakes than French toast. Then is used to indicate time. Bob ate ate pancakes, then ate the French toast too. Gaff. A gaff with no e is not a mistake, or a faux pas, that's a gaffe with an e. Take the Emily. Take the Rachel. A gaff is an iron hook used in fishing. Which versus witch. If you're misusing these, you might need more help than this course can provide. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. When you read through your manuscript, highlight any word or phrase about what you have any doubt, even the smallest tickle in your brain, and research it. When a reader catches a mistake in your work, it will stop them dead in their tracks, and will destroy any pacing you've worked so hard to create. Be deliberate, be methodical, and be careful in your writing. I told you this was a short one. Let's move on now to Lesson 7, where we'll discuss the importance of dialogue and pacing. 9. Dialogue & Pacing: In a work of fiction, you have characters. These characters need to interact with one another. The most common way for characters to interact is through dialogue. If your readers go through several chapters without your characters talking, it's likely one of several things is happening. Number 1, you're using too much exposition. You need to get to the point and get back to your characters in the here and now. Number 2, you're getting too wrapped up in your own descriptions. Yes, we absolutely are in love with how you describe nature, but we get it. Time to get back to the story. Number 3, your plot needs a review. Are you hitting the plot points you need to hit? Is your protagonist faced with conflict? Readers need to see characters interacting with one another. Even in a story that's largely internal taking place mostly in the protagonist's mind or in which your protagonist is isolated, say they're stranded on a desert island, readers need to see your hero interacting with the world around them. Ideally, you want to have some dialogue in each chapter, but never go to or more chapters with no dialogue. This is a guide and not a rule, but it will really help with your pacing. I'll also add something that I covered in my course, 20 tips for new writers. We covered in our course. Fine. Something we covered in our course. When writing dialogue between two and only two characters, you do not need to attribute each statement to one of the speakers. As you can see in this example, when there are only two people in the conversation, we can usually figure out who's talking if there's attribution every three or four statements. However, when there are three or more speakers, unless it's very clear who's speaking, you need attribution with each statement. Otherwise, readers will be confused, which will pull them out of the story and you guessed it ruined the pacing. One last thing., Anybody who knows the meaning of this shirt? See it here? Post your answer to the discussion board of this course, and I'll pick one person who gets it right at random and send you a copy of my first book, The Scar Boys. He means our first book. On to Lesson 8. Where we're going to review some best practices for streamlining your work during the editing process to make the pace of your workflow. What he said. 10. Revising & Editing: All good writing is rewriting. Rewriting, also known as editing, is where you will really improve the pace of your story. This lesson is actually a brief review of the sections on revising and editing from my Skillshare course, 20 Tips for New Writers. If you've already seen that, feel free to blow through this with 2X speed. It sounds especially funny at 2X speed. If you haven't, take a moment to review these techniques as they will really make your writing home. First stop. Overuse of the word "That" is a common mistake in manuscripts. It slows readers down and hurts the pace of your story. Do a search in your document for every instance of the word "That" and you'll likely find hundreds. Review each one. I recommend reading them out loud and delete those that aren't absolutely necessary. For example, "Maria thought that she should save her money, so she didn't buy the book that she wanted." Neither use of the word that in this sentence is necessary. Delete them both, and read the sentence again. "Maria thought she should save her money, so she didn't buy the book she wanted." It's now clean, clear, and tight. Word echoes or words repeated in close proximity to one another and they trip readers up all the time. They will slow down the pace of your story significantly. "Shana spent so much of her energy reviewing budgets, she was mentally spent by the end of the day." Spent is the word echo here. To improve the sentence, change one instance or the other. For example, "Shana spent so much of her energy reviewing budgets, she had nothing left in the tank at the end of the day." If you're writing in the first person, be careful not to overuse the words I, me, my, and mine. Doing so will not only be repetitive, it will make your writing seem amateurish and may inadvertently make your protagonist seem like a narcissist. It will definitely pull readers out of the story and hurt your pacing. For example, "I lifted the lid of the trunk to see what treasures it held. I was disheartened and surprised to find that it was empty. I had spent all this time searching, only to come up empty." This might work better as "I lifted the lid of the trunk to see what treasures it held. Nothing. There was nothing there. My jaw and neck muscles went slack, all the stored up excitement and energy evaporating in an instant." Did you also catch the word echo in the first version? Sneaky. Anyway, paying close attention to your use of first-person pronouns will strengthen your writing and keep the story moving. The larger point is to be careful, deliberate, and methodical during the editing process. This kind of attention to detail is what will fine-tune the pace of your story and keep your readers engaged. Stay right where you are for Lesson 9. We will discuss why it's so important to read your work out loud. 11. Reading Out Loud: This is another topic I covered in 20 tips for new writers and it's well-worth emphasizing here. Reading your work out loud is one of the best techniques for identifying where your story has a problem with pacing. When you finish your first draft and again when you finished your first edit, read the entire work out loud. Use different voices for different characters, add emotion where you intended, act it as much as you read it. There's no better way to identify where your story is falling flat. Not only will you find the words in sentences that trip you up, you'll see where the story gets bogged down, where you have too much exposition or maybe not enough dialogue. Reading out loud acts as a pacing radar. Why does this work? Well our mouths work more slowly than our brains. When we read out loud, we're forced to slow down and hear the story, experiencing it one word at a time. When we read in our minds off of screen or paper, and please always do a paper edit in addition to a screen edit, our brains are filling in gaps as we skip over sentences or individual words or even big ideas, we miss things, a lot of things. If you're not already a consumer of audio books, I strongly urge you to get a hold of one. Your local library likely has thousands of titles available to borrow via digital download. Find a book you know well so you can get a sense of what it's like to hear it read aloud, even better, See if you can get a hold of the audio book for Ready Player One read by Wil Wheaton. It's phenomenal. Anyway, in my humble opinion, there is no better guard against bad pacing than hearing your work read aloud. We reached to the point in the course where it's time for our class project. Now that you know what pacing is and how to identify it, please write a piece of no fewer than 100 and no more than 500 words on a book you've read and discuss why you think the pacing does or does not work. Please copy and paste it into the Projects and Resources section of this class. Onto our final lesson with a word of caution about balancing, pacing, and story. 12. Balancing Pacing & Story: You've paid attention to the three-act structure with special focus on the first act. You've been careful to show rather than tell, boiling as much exposition out of your story as possible. You've taken time to ensure that your sentences and paragraphs aren't so long that they're bogging readers down, and that you're using words and phrases correctly. There's plenty of dialogue and you've taken time during the editing process to really make the writing hum, good for you. Only now, when you read it out loud, you find that you've stripped all the life out of your character and story. It's falling flat. Pacing is very important, but it's not more important than developing your character and story. Be careful not to pair your work down, so much that you rob it of what makes it special. This is the balancing act, where your creativity and imagination as a writer will shine. It's art, not science. The good news is, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can absolutely improve the pace of your story without doing damage to it's beating heart. It just takes time and focus. On to one final video, with a word of thanks. 13. Thank You!: Thanks so much for taking this class. I really appreciate your time and attention and I hope you got something out of it. A list of the books referenced during the course, along with credits for the images, videos, and sounds are used can be found in the projects and resources section below. Please do complete the class project. Feel free to ask questions and post comments to the discussion board, and if you feel so inclined, leave a review. Thanks, and happy writing. Let's go inside the story. The images and videos and sound are. I also add something that I covered in my course, 20 tips for new writers. We covered in our course. Fine. Something we covered in our course. Now, that you know what pacing is and how do I identify it, please.