Pace (narrative)

Methods

Storytellers control pace through tools such as narration, action, description, and dialogue. Description and narration tend to slow the pace, while action and dialogue accelerate it; dialogue is the most effective tool for placing characters and readers in the present moment. Pace can be increased by flipping forward past a scene that exists in the story but never appears in the book, skipping steps in a logical sequence, using short scenes, frequent paragraphing, short sentences, dialogue, action, active voice and aggressive verbs, and flab-cutting—the removal of superfluous words, phrases, and unnecessary adjectives and adverbs.

Editors may rearrange scenes to create suspense or build toward a climax, and they may suggest adding or expanding scenes to inject energy. Pace can be decreased through description, narration, and introspection. Editors also adjust sentence and paragraph length to control rhythm and flow: shorter units create faster pace, longer ones allow for detailed description or introspection.

Surf Draculas

In narrative criticism, "Surf Dracula" is a pejorative term for a pacing issue where a narrative includes a backstory for an unimportant part of its universe or a setup for an unnecessary plot point. The term is most often applied to television serials in the current streaming era, where shorter seasons and longer hiatuses make such setups more frustrating when payoff is delayed. The name originated from a 2021 tweet by user @topherflorence, who contrasted a hypothetical show called "Surf Dracula" that would have shown the title character surfing weekly in older television with a streaming-era version that spends its first season on a long flashback to how he got the surfboard, showing him surf only briefly in the season finale. "Surf Draculas" can also refer to entire narratives composed solely of such setups, as with the first season of the television adaptation of the video game series Resident Evil, which was a setup to the zombie apocalypse that the showrunners planned to depict in later seasons but was cancelled before those seasons could be made.