narrative flow: a brief writerly lesson

Oct 05, 2023

I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.

Everyone wants to someday write a novel. We all believe we have it in us. And probably you do.

Why not!

But people often wonder: How do I begin? What do I do when I get stuck?

And so on endlessly, for the questions never stop, the complications never end. My general and very real advice is taken from the great sage Nike:

Just do it.

But for something more practical, I’ll say this:

Imagine a narrative having a dial from 1-10. You can call this tension or pacing but I think of it more like level of interest.

You rarely want the dial lower than 3 or higher than 8. What you want is to keep the narrative moving with a nice rhythm between 4 and 7 and then you bring it low, like down to a 2, before cranking it to a 10. And then you slow it down and toggle in the middle for a while before pushing it to 8 for a bit.

You want to play with tension, with the reader’s attention.

You can’t keep it at a sustained 8, because then that 8 gradually, for the reader, becomes a baseline. If you’re sprinting at 80% of your max speed for a mile, gearing up to 100% isn’t really that different.

But if you’re running a leisurely mile before breaking into an all out sprint for the last 100 meters, you notice. And so does everyone else.

The crowd might even lose their dang minds.

So play with the dial, find the rhythm that works for your novel or story.

There are reasons why you may want to slow things down to a 1, to let the reader just settle in with your characters and hangout. Let them come to learn about the people in your novel. Come to know them. Come to feel at home beside them.

Then spike it up to a 6 or 8 or give them a gradual but steady rise all the way to a 10 before ramping back down.

In general, I think every 20-50 pages, you want some kind of Moment. It doesn’t need to be an action or dramatic setpiece or the death of a character or whatever else. But you need something. Maybe a new reveal or toss in a new character or open up the door to a new narrative possibility or unleash some of that carefully constructed worldbuilding you have lying in wait.

I’m going to use Emrys the Fool, the novel I’m serializing here every Wednesday, as an example.

I began the novel with our eponymous character in a position of high stress and kept him there for two chapters. Then I relaxed the pace for a few chapters, letting him hangout with his cousin, who’s also his best friend.

They then encounter a stranger who plunges them into a haunted forest for several chapters. They face great peril and though Emrys survives, he is also changed by what happens there.

Again, I slowed things back down, mixing moments of stress with more relaxed situations. And then, for Chapter Twenty (newly available to everyone this week), I created a 9,000 word chapter at a festival, which results in another story-shaping moment that I really would love for you all to experience.

In short: keep your reader slightly off balance by shifting gears on them. Allow them to relax and settle into your narrative, your world, but then puncture that with moments of high stress or tension or interest.

Sustain that for 150-1,500 pages and you’ve got what you need.

My novels:

Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers