Carl Hiaasen, On Pacing the Action in Crime Novels

00:08 [Carl Hiaasen] I think that pacing depends to a large degree on what's happening in your story at the time. Obviously if there's a pursuit going on, or obviously if there's action taking place, you're going to want it to move crisply and quickly because your readers are dying for that to happen. They don't want to—if you're in a car chase, don't spend five paragraphs telling me

00:30 about the cigarette butts in the car ashtray. Nobody gives a rat's ass about that. Get to the chase, as they say. I think that, on the other hand, when you're getting to know a character, and the character himself becomes a mystery, and you have to step back from the story, step out of the story for a few minutes and talk about that character, then it's not wasted time and there's nothing wrong with slowing the pace because the readers are wondering the same thing.  Who is this guy, where did he come from? Who's this new person I'm seeing, or

01:00 who is she? Who is this person? Then you have a way of—then the slowing down of the pace becomes, in a way, suspenseful. And then you're, bingo, you're back in the story again later. You mentioned alternating the lengths of sentences. That's very important, alternating—there's nothing worse than having the same cadence of a sentence hit your eye, any more than you would be listening to a speech and every sentence was the same. You'd nod off and go to sleep. It's the same way when the eye is picking it

01:30 off the page. The speed at which it's being read should reflect the pace of the story at the time. You don't want someone agonizing, just staring at a paragraph trying to figure out what it meant. You've screwed up as a writer if someone needs a slide rule to figure out what you were just trying to say in that sentence. You haven't done your job. And I don't mean write for the lowest common denominator. I don't mean simplify and be simplistic. There are great writers who

02:00 write in very simple language, who tell stories in fantastic ways, without condescending, patronizing readers at all. One of the things about dialogue is it's so easy, I've found in reading popular fiction, where people—they don't know how to get around the problems in their story, so what they do is they all of a sudden have a character give a two or three page dissertation, just a monologue on explaining,

02:30 well, how did the CIA get involved? And then you have some guy sitting in a diner in Washington, D.C., with a trench coat on saying, okay, I'll tell you how. And you let this schmo tell the—that's lazy writing. You just—how do we get around this? I know, we'll bring this character in and he'll tell the whole story about the CIA involvement. I mean, that's just plain out lazy writing, and people don't talk that way. People don't talk that way. If you open a book and you see a solid two or three pages of dialogue—

03:00 not even politicians talk that way. And again, you've failed at your job as a writer because now you're not the story. Now you've got basically a schmuck that you've brought in to tell your story because you couldn't do it yourself. Show as much as you can show, bring in as much detail as you can possibly gather out of your notebook, or in this case, in fiction writing, out of your head. I mean, that's all it is, is a notebook. But we have the advantage in a newsroom of, we come in from a story assignment,

03:30 you flip open the notebook, and there's all the stuff that goes into the story. You've written it down. In fiction, the stuff is in your head and you're really just sort of opening this invisible notebook in your head, and you're hoping everything's in there that you need. And it is, but you just have to work hard at it and get it out. But it can be just as vivid and just as dramatic and just as moving as the most sensational piece of journalism you've ever seen.

04:00 And sensational in the good sense of the word. I think that's the duty, is to bring all the senses of the reader, everything that you put in the writing of that piece, should be there for him or her when he's reading.