Last week I had the privilege of joining ProWritingAid’s Novel Summer Camp for a live workshop on pacing — one of the most fundamental and most misunderstood tools in a fiction writer’s kit.
The session is recorded, and you can watch it below. But I also want to give you the core ideas in writing, because some things land better on the page.
The concept: story time vs. text time
Every piece of fiction has two clocks running at once.
The first is story time — how long an event actually takes in the world of your story. A conversation might take five minutes. A battle might take three hours. A year might pass between chapters.
The second is text time — how much page space you give that event. You can cover a year in one sentence, or you can spend three pages on a single moment.
The ratio between those two things is your pace. And controlling that ratio intentionally is one of the most powerful things you can do as a writer.
The spectrum
At one end you have gap — a chapter break, a line break, a scene transition. Story time passes; text time is nearly zero. You skip over what doesn’t matter.
Next is summary — a sentence or paragraph that covers a stretch of time. Weeks compressed into a line. The drive across town covered in half a sentence.
Then scene — where story time and text time roughly match. This is where readers connect with characters. This is where the story feels real.
And at the far end, dilation and pause — where text time expands beyond story time. A moment that takes seconds in the story takes a page on the page. Something important is happening, and the writer slows everything down so the reader can feel it.
Most writers I work with default to summary without realizing it. They’re moving fast, covering ground, keeping things going — and their readers are connecting with almost none of it, because there’s nothing to hold onto.
The fix
The first step isn’t to write slower. It’s to notice.
Notice when you’re in summary. Notice when your sentences are covering minutes or hours in a single breath. Notice when you’ve jumped out of a scene before it had a chance to land.
Then ask: what’s worth slowing down for? What moment in this chapter deserves real time on the page?
That’s where your reader is going to live. Not in the summary, not in the transitions — in the moment where you stayed long enough to let them see something.
What the session covered
In the workshop, we went through examples — including student writing shared live — and looked at how these concepts show up on the page in real time. We also looked at a passage from Raymond Carver’s “Put Yourself in My Shoes” as a model of how a skilled writer moves between summary and scene without losing the reader.
If you want to go deeper on this, my Show Don’t Tell course on Udemy covers this material and more in a structured, assignment-based format. You can find it here: https://writewithseth.com/
