Good pacing is hot, in both sex & fiction

I’ve been writing a lot of sexy fiction (including fanfiction) these last few years, and it’s fascinating to note all the ways it’s different from my usual nonfiction fare, the workaday stuff that pays my bills.

For one thing, I’m a lot faster at nonfiction. I swear I spent 5 hours working on fiction yesterday and cranked out just under 1,000 words. On a nonfiction day, that’d be my output in an hour. Maybe forty minutes, with coffee. I guess this makes sense, given that nonfiction writing has been my bread-and-butter for many years and I have a degree in it, but still – it’s staggering how different the mental processes can be between these two types of writing, and how I can feel like a grizzled old pro at one and a shiny-eyed newbie to the other.

But one specific difference I want to talk about today is pacing.

Pacing is certainly important in nonfiction. (Ask any great documentarian.) It’s often about the speed and intensity at which you dole out information, and the way you lead someone from one argument to the next. Sometimes I pace things quickly, like a newspaper article, tugging the reader briskly down one set path – and other times, I’ll linger at certain scenic stops along the way, to point things out to the reader, or make them think. It all depends on the intended effect, and what I want the reader to take away from the piece.