When people talk about pacing in stories, they usually turn to the lines–how to make a passage or paragraph feel faster or slower.

Recently, I’ve been sharing how pacing happens at three levels:

– Within the Narrative Arc

– Within Scenes

– Within Lines

And it only seems right to finish up the series by visiting pacing within lines. Issues come up when a passage or paragraph feels too slow or too fast, and while line-level pacing can overlap in places with scene-level pacing, it’s a little different. This is more about the way the story is written on the page.

And as I touched on in my prior posts, there is more to pacing than adding or subtracting words, even when we get clear down to the line level.

Because I’ve already talked about line-level pacing on here before, I thought I’d simply review a few things.