Pacing is either something you get and do, or something you struggle with. And how to smooth over transitional scenes or any time skips is a goddamned art. Personally, I struggle with both; pacing is an unconscious mess, something that either happens to mess up or happens well in my writing, but any time I have to put in any kind of time transition, I agonize.
Is it too obvious? Is it too little time, or too much time? Is it realistic? Will readers be offput by it? As someone who has had to plot down to specific days in several projects (why do I keep doing this to myself? NEVER AGAIN, I swear yet again), having to gloss over multiple days in a row can be frustrating, scary, and/or jarring.
From my struggles, reap the fruit. Here are a few things to keep in mind that I’ve found help:
-Every story has a period in which you have to get used to it. Does this mean a rougher first (or more) chapter? It could! You have to figure out what the story wants, how it wants to be written. Don’t immediately stress if it hasn’t clicked yet.
-Don’t worry overmuch about showing and not telling, especially when it comes to pacing. Once in awhile, you gotta tell. It also does you no good to worry over something like that. Write it down how you want, first, and you can always revise it later, even if it sounds like a summary or a timeline.
-But what makes it sound like a summary vs a story to you as the writer? Is everything happening too much or too quickly? Is the dialogue not happening? Do you know what points A and B are but not what kind of line connects them? Try to figure out exactly what sounds off to you about it, if you can.
-That said, sometimes… writing drags. Sometimes, it’s useable and good anyway. Sometimes, it needs to be edited, and sometimes, it needs to be chopped. The point to this bullet point is that the authors can and often will be biased when it comes to their own writing; in an annoying number of cases, parts I have loathed writing or thought were rather weakly done are apparently engaging or entertaining or favorite parts of readers. Don’t automatically condemn something just because you don’t initially like it.
A lot of my advice is going to boil down to “commit and push through”. Just keep going. Maybe it’ll align itself into something you like, a pace that works, a tone that works. Maybe it won’t for another 2 chapters, maybe it won’t ever and you choose another project to work on.
You just gotta commit. If you rewrite and revise and edit and redo and agonize over the same part(s) of your story over and over, you’re not going to get much progress, much less get the story actually done. You can’t fix it until it exists.
Unless you’ve figured out a magic that I haven’t yet (entirely possible!), you’re not going to suddenly go “oh!” one day and figure out exactly how to pace and describe that one thing and only then can you progress.
You just have to do it in the meantime.
