Make Character Choices Matter
One of my closest friends recently shared an Instagram short with me from a small-time, self-published author whose solution to pacing problems was, "Make waiting dangerous," which prickled me enough to make me ask why and want to unpack it.
Let's assume for the moment that 1) AJ is sincere in his attempt to help newer writers with pacing and 2) the story told is true: AJ's best friend approached him and admitted that she's been having an affair behind her husband's back the past handful of months. A few weeks later, the woman's husband approaches AJ wanting help with planning the anniversary trip he has been saving up for, mentioning how he's felt disconnected with his wife lately. AJ says nothing about the affair. The husband and wife go on their trip, after which the husband wants to renew their vows. The affair, in the meantime, has continued in the background.
AJ uses this example to illustrate his point about pacing: "Writers think a faster story is a tenser story. It is not. The reader isn't responding to activity. They're responding to consequence. The feeling that waiting is making something worse. Every scene where that decision doesn't get made is a scene where the future gets heavier. The character knows what needs to happen, but the story keeps holding them there while the conditions around them tighten. That is how you deliberately control tense pacing. The distance between knowing and doing. And the cost that that unresolved decision creates. Great pacing is not speed. It is just pressure, and pressure doesn't need to force the decision yet. It just needs to make waiting more dangerous."
Aside from the uncited generalizations about writers and the entire premise of, "make waiting more dangerous," I agree that readers typically aren't responding to activity but to consequence. We get invested in stories where we care about the characters and their struggles, or, as in the case of "Breaking Bad," where we're unable to look away from the sheer unceasing horror of the characters digging deeper and darker holes for themselves. "Breaking Bad" is probably the exemplar of, "Make waiting dangerous," because every choice Walt makes within his decision to wait compounds. However, the waiting matters here because it was a purposeful decision made by Walt, not the screenwriters' intrusive plucking of a thread.
The "wait" and the tension can happen in as small a space as the breath between the "best friend" telling her husband about the affair in AJ's story and the cascade that follows. It can exist in as small a package as a single haiku or in as sprawling an epic as "The Lord of the Rings." If Frodo would have left the Shire with the One Ring when he originally intended instead of years later, there would have been no story, or it would have been a vastly different story. Conversely, had Bilbo waited too long in "The Hobbit," to agree in accompanying the Dwarves as their burglar, the opportunity would have passed him by. Bilbo couldn't wait. In AJ's story, tension doesn't exist simply because the wife and AJ himself chose to keep the affair a secret. That by itself is cliché and boring.
People who read, watch, play, or listen to stories often wonder how character(s) will overcome each situation, and what the consequences will be, positive or negative. A character acts; we gasp as the negative consequence wallops them even harder. The character reacts in some way and bam yet another consequence, but aww, that one was nice, minus the other 99 unresolved issues bubbling in the background. As long as the story is still in development, storytellers should take a lesson from Newton and apply his 3rd law of physics to the story: push back with an equally (or greater!) opposing force each step of the way.
One of the most memorable beats I can recall from reading the web series "Worm" years ago was when Taylor got caught between a rock and a hard place with the supposed superheroes while her school was on lockdown. She was a well-established villain going by the name of Skitter by this point, and in the scene the superheroes revealed her identity to the entire student body while they were in the cafeteria, which is an egregious no-no in this universe. With the school on lockdown and the superheroes right there confronting her in front of all her classmates, that breath, that beat, that brief pause between the two stalemated sides upped the tension to a cataclysmic scale.
Even in slice of life stories, these elements all come into play but on a much smaller scale. There's no imminent life-ending threat looming over the characters' heads most of the time — "Natsume's Book of Friends" notwithstanding, since it seems like a yokai wants to eat him or steal the book every other episode. Yet aside from that, the consequences revolve around the characters' daily decisions, actions, and the evolving relationships in an otherwise mundane world. Natsume choosing to wait to reveal that he can see yokai is only dangerous because of his motivation, the fear of rejection he experienced as a kid for his oddness, but it would be redundant to the story for him to undergo the exact same experiences as a high schooler, and so because the viewers are invested in him as a character, they are simultaneously rooting for him to overcome his inhibitions while wanting to know whether or not he is going to face that same rejection from his growing group of friends and his adopted family whenever the secret does come out. The viewer wants to know how everyone involved is going to then navigate that particular social situation. The web comic "Questionable Content" also sticks out in my mind as another slice-of-life example, though I haven't read it in over a decade.
AJ's diatribe misses its mark by focusing on the wrong form of "waiting" as the primary lever for pacing, because waiting can very easily be seen as the author's finger on the pulse of the story, added as unnecessary drama if done incorrectly, or it can be the consequence of a specific decision the characters themselves are making where the underlying motivators give it weight.
You can have an active character who goes out and, "gets shit done," and who doesn't wait to act on the information he receives, thinking about Holden from "The Expanse" series. Maybe they're the type of character who leaps before they look and doesn't wait for anything. If that's the case, making waiting dangerous isn't going to solve anything and will only introduce other problems with story's flow. These are the types of characters that require heavy and catastrophic pushback as their decisions and inability to wait creates problems for others.
The waiting itself isn't about the lack of acting on a decision like AJ insinuates throughout his short; it's not about a character holding a secret purely for the sake of "the story." Wait too long in these scenarios, and the desired effect will oftentimes backfire; readers will start rolling their eyes and saying, "Get on with it already! Enough is enough!"
Dresden book 2, "Fool Moon," comes to mind, where the deliberate lack of communication between Murphy and Dresden throughout the first half of the novel happens purely as cheap drama to foster misunderstanding and suspicion between two otherwise highly intelligent characters. When there's no good underlying reason for the characters to postpone an important conversation, like Murphy did with Dresden, the consequential tension falls flat, it irritates the reader, and the waiting becomes dangerous purely for the sake of being dangerous and nothing more. The purposeful "waiting" in this context harmed the narrative more than it helped.
What "waiting" actually means is delaying and denying the characters a satisfactory resolution, even when the characters themselves are actively working to solve their problems amidst compounding consequences, like in "Breaking Bad." "Waiting" means delaying the instant gratification of a character receiving everything they want within the first five chapters of a forty-chapter story without any further development or consequences tacked onto it. I don't like romance as a genre, but you gotta admit that the best writers out there know how to work the "wait for it," lever to maximize frustration levels.
If a character is simply waiting for something to happen that causes circumstances to change instead of being the enactor of change themselves, they are a boring character. The waiting itself doesn't matter. It's how all of the different characters in AJ's example story, AJ included, navigate the social situation that creates the tension. Any choice the character makes, even the choice to reveal the affair, could prove interesting, but it's still up to the character to be making choices that result in meaningful consequences, and it is up to the writer or the storyteller to make the consequences of those choices interesting. Making those choices matter is one of the ways a storyteller controls pacing, and it can be applied to far more scenarios than the narrowly scoped advice, "Make waiting dangerous."
Summary of Notable Accomplishments (9.16 - 9.29):
Built With Science workouts
Transcribed Sessions 145 & 146 for Skies Over Aefala and had Session 147
Finished reading "Ultralearning"
Been considering what project I want to pursue after I've finished catching up on Cael's journals
Tried listening to "Game Changer" by Rachel Reid and DNF'd it because the writing was just far too simplistic
I may or may not have been referencing this book when I mentioned "instant gratification" above
Some general wawfuls/errands
I started jogging again!!!!
I decided on a whim that, because it was nice out, I would jog for as long as I could.
I did not expect to last an hour
It felt good
I since went on 2-3 more jogs with the same results
Real Talk:
Okay, I'm open to discussion on the whole, "make waiting dangerous," idea because to me it sounds like a subcategory of "make your characters' choices matter." What are your thoughts?
I genuinely enjoy picking apart ideas or advice that's given as "universal truths" and contemplating exceptions, especially exceptions employed by reputable people.
Plus, having teaching experience, the way a concept is presented matters to me, because you don't want to say one thing but mean another. Lack of clarity doesn't help anyone.
This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Salad
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