Pacing is one of the problems webcomickers are concerned with the most. The paradox is, it’s the place where they’re usually the weakest. Eh.

Now, most of us look at it as a characteristic that dictates whether the reader is going to be bored. Actually, I think that at some moments the reader should be bored. It gives him time to think about what he read, perhaps to leave the reading for a while, go to the fridge and grab something to eat, while impressions of the comic settle down in his head. Comics that you read in one sitting usually seem short. But that’s another story.

Pacing is, first and foremost, an element of the story structure. Webcomickers are often not interested in those technical sides of writing, those matters of “craft”. Therein lies the problem. We’ve all seen a lot of poorly structured stories, stories that are exhausting themselves in an introduction, stories without proper culmination, and so many with no end at all... But that’s another story too. Right now I want to talk about poor pacing.

Basically, there are two kinds of poor pacing: too fast, and too slow.

Too fast pacing appears when the writer has an ending in mind. He knows where he’s going and he’s anxious to get there. Therefore he puts all of his efforts into getting there without turning around to notice all the beautiful thinks he passes along the way.

Too slow pacing, quite the opposite, appears when the writer has no particular ending in mind, even more so when he can’t think of a proper ending, so he allows himself to wonder around the unfamiliar landscape, sometimes getting lost, eventually finding a road by chance.

Too fast pacing annoys the reader from the start because he’d like to stop and ogle those things along the way. But sadly he’s in the car with a speeding driver. He’d like to see this or that character more closely but the writer is giving him just as much as is necessary to get to the desired ending.

Too slow pacing starts bothering the reader much later (true, it usually starts only later in the story). At one moment the reader becomes aware that the writer, his guide through that land, doesn’t know where he’s going. And that is bothering him. That may be the place where he quits reading the comic too.

Both of them are results of poor planning; when you’re thinking one page ahead, you’re going to lose the story, just like you lose the chess game when you think only one move ahead.

And that’s it. Everything else is, I believe, allowed. If you decide to tell the story in a very slow tempo, or to do a rapid thriller that never slows down, that’s the domain of the author’s conscious decision. Results may vary but there are really no rules – it’s all up to your skills. And if some readers don’t like the author’s decision – some other will like.

Now lets get back to bad pacing and try to fix it, shall we?

Too fast pacing is not as common as too slow. Too bad, because it’s easier to fix. All you need is to add some elements to the story. The important thing is to have the scheme of the story flow in front of you. I think it eases things to perceive a story visually. It’s easier to add elements to particular places then.

Now, the first problem may be that the basic story is too short. Try to calculate how many scenes it has, how many characters and places. For a chamber drama, two characters in one room are quite enough. But for an epic story or spy-thriller, even five times as many is often not enough.

(One example of this is the movie “First knight” with Richard Gere and Sean Connery. A mythical story about kind Arthur is told with only four important characters, which is the result of poor writing centered around only one subject.)

If the need occurs to make the story more complicated, try to do it equally on all parts of the story and to add new characters and places along with adding new scenes. This means, try to really make story more complicated, not just delay its ending with subplots.

(Another example: “Shrek”. The story ends an hour after the beginning: Shrek saved the princess Fiona, they got to know each other and gradually fell in love. In order to lengthen the film to the proper cinema production time, writers have to delay the resolution – the inevitable part where Shrek finds out that Fiona is an ogre too. The subplot is made: Shrek hears Fiona saying something, he interprets it out of context, and runs away from the problem instead of facing it. This subplot gets us nowhere. Its only purpose is to, as we said, delay the inevitable ending; On the other hand, it is in contradiction with characterization and pacing, and we have a feeling that we’ve already seen it somewhere. No wonder: “heard-something-interpreted-it-wrong-followed-by-break-in-communication” is a very old and overused plot device, used in all kinds of stories, from A-movies to sitcoms.)

Now, let’s say your story has a decent length, but something is still wrong: your script seems poor. All elements in it are related to the main plot, pushing it further back, and at that point, the end seems predictable because every element in the script is pointing in it’s direction.

Now you need a proper amount of digression, something unrelated to the main story. I’ve heard of writers who reject everything that is not directly related to the main plot, who at every sight of digression claim that the particular scene is serving no purpose and should be thrown out of the script. Well, those writers are the ones that wrote the script for that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that you hate so much.

Even if something serves no purpose, that doesn’t mean it should be thrown out. It could be something nice for watching. It could be a point of rest for a reader. In fact, maybe all scripts should have places that serve no purpose periodically arranged through the script.

(Right now I’m thinking of the scene in “Three colours: White) where main character just sits in the street, watching some old lady putting a letter in the mailbox.)

More beneficial digression can be achieved with working out episodic characters, or any detail that you think could deserve that kind of attention. Making smaller, less important subplots shorter – down to one scene long – or longer ones, spanning through the comic, parallel with the main plot. Some stories are structured so that a subplot follows the main plot all through the story, mirroring events from it (“Cabaret”, Bob Fosse). This helps remove that unpleasant feeling that everything in the story is revolving around one thing or a couple of characters.

One important note: don’t be skimpy on ideas. If you’re a writer, you’re supposed to have many ideas. Don’t be sorry to use some of them as digressions, episodic parts or elements to enrich the bigger story. One comic isn’t supposed to be built upon one idea. More ideas and the comic is going to be richer, funnier, more alive.

(Think of the film “Amelie Poulain”. Think how many movies could be made from it if Jean Jeunet was saving his ideas for other movies; Luckily, he has confidence that he’ll get more new ideas when he needs them.)

Too slow pacing is something I’ve seen in 50% of story-oriented webcomics. I’ve already said that the main cause for it is lack of planning. Therefore, with proper planning (where structure of the story comes first, and only later are particular scenes worked out) the problem should be solved.

However, sometimes the writer doesn’t notice that the story is too slow. He only notices it when he realizes that it’s been 100 pages and the story is still near the beginning. Therefore, the writer has to use a rule of thumb to realize how many pages his script is going to turn. Perhaps the reason for poor judgment is the difference between comics and other narrative arts, like movies and literature. In short, comics take much more space. To tell the exact same thing, in the same way, takes a lot less pages of fiction; five minutes of intensive dialogue in a movie could require ten or more pages of comic – and a lot of effort to draw that many pages of talking heads. Therefore, the comic writer has to learn the skill of minimalism. He has to learn to say more with fewer words. It’s not a matter of the author’s decision, it’s the nature of comic because you have to put it in a reasonably sized volume.

But let’s not make a mistake: having a story that is so complex and involved that it takes many volumes to tell it is very different from having a script that is long simply because it is watered down. When thinking about throwing out some parts of script, we should not consider throwing out integral elements of story, thus simplifying the story. Rather we should recognize elements that aren’t so important - which is not as easy as it looks. Often, it’s actually the writer’s vanity that doesn’t let him consider anything he wrote as unimportant. As Beethoven said: “Composing isn’t so hard. The hard part is throwing excessive tones under the table”. I’ll mention a few places where you can look for excessive material.

Dialogue. I really don’t think that any dialogue scene should necessarily be over three pages long. If the format is smaller, make that five pages, but if it’s longer than that, then there is material in it that could harmlessly be thrown out. Whether you’re going to throw it out or not depends on whether you want to make your script more short and sublime. Rereading a scene is a good idea because if some parts of it are pointless or boring you might not notice that at first.

Consider the explanatory material in dialogues: whether characters are telling each other something the reader already knows, or something that he can easily figure out from what is given. Perhaps an ellipse (jump forward in time) during which the characters finish with the explanatory talk among each other would do the trick.

Consider the exchange of short remarks between two characters. Say, for instance, character A is explaining something. Character B replies with “Really?” To which character A is bound to say, “Yes.” It is such idle conversation where several remarks can be easily discarded (as “Really” and “Yes” here). (There's no better example for this than Alexander Dumas novels. Being payed per word, he was writing very much unnessecary, repetitive and confusion-driven dialogue.)

Consider the irrelevant material. If you have too much material in a script altogether, such digressions are not beneficial. In fantasy comics, for instance, in worlds that are personal creations of the author, some dialogues are spent on explaining details about the said worlds, but have no real relevancy for the story. Such explanations are another candidate to be thrown out.

Sometimes, when there’s too much dialogue material, the author considers cramming more text on a single page to get fewer pages and faster pacing. First mistake is, this way he doesn’t get faster pacing because the reader is going to need the equal amount of time to read the equal amount of text. Second, putting too much text into a single page is deadly for the page layout. Simply, it looks ugly. Leaving the text spanned over more pages is better solution. Cutting on some text is the best solution.

Action scenes. Comics, as a visual medium, rely on action scenes. However, action scenes in the classic sense of the word (as in “run or fight”) are easily adjustable to the needed pacing. If, looking at the story scheme, you decide that you need 3, 5 or 7 pages of action scene on a particular place, writing that scene is not much of a problem. If such scene is too long, shortening it is not much of a problem either. Whether you want to make action scenes longer or not depends of whether you want to make a comic in which action is prevailing or not.

(To illustrate the adjustability of action scenes, let’s look at one, perhaps extreme example: famous “Akira” by Otomo; This book, a few thousands of pages long, could have been easily cut down to half that size, just by making action scenes shorter and by excluding some that weren’t decisive to story. The result would still be an unusually long, action-oriented comic, and none of the story would be lost.)

Loops. By loops, I mean scenes or sequences where at the end, the story is right where it was at the beginning. Example: Villains capture the good guy, good guy manages to escape, good guy gets in the situation where he was before being captured. Neither character nor reader learned anything new or important for the story. The whole story was an excuse for a few action scenes and a delay of the further development of the story. Loops generally don’t benefit the story, but in case you need to shorten the script, loops can be recognized in places where you didn’t notice them at first.

For the end, I’d like to mention some standards for the length and pacing of the comic.

Actually, as for the size of the script, I’m more familiar with the standard Hollywood movie script where such things are standardized. The length of an average 90min movie script is 120 pages. They are divided into four 30 page parts. The first part (first thirty pages) is introduction, second and third parts (pages 31 to 90) are the main story, the third part is supposed to finish with culmination, and the fourth part (last thirty pages) is the resolution and ending. Of course, 120 pages is not a convenient size for a comic script, but if we’re going to stick to scriptwriting standards, we’re going to have a similar structure: first quarter – introduction; second and third quarter – main part, ending with culmination; fourth quarter – resolution and end. (Note that, most of all, this is a very safe, sturdy structure type, very useful for beginners, or when other elements of the script are too fragile and experimental.)

I’ve seen altered form of the classic structure type in relatively short comics with a more complex story. In such cases the author tends to span the introduction to almost half of the comic (as the part that is the most sensitive to contraction), while the resolution is brought to one or two pages (resolution is in comics is usually proportionally shorter). If a comic is a part of a series, it saves an introduction so much that it doesn’t have to introduce main characters again.

European comics are drawn in A4 format. Most of their comics are around 44 pages long, that’s the standard size of a full (we could say, long-flay) comic album. However, 44 pages is very short so authors often span the story to two or three albums (parts, chapters). More fair is the size of 65 pages that some comics (Franquin’s “Spirou”) are published in, which is a happy average between quantity and quality. 100 pages is a very generous format that I’ve rarely seen in comic book stores, usually in cases when the comic tends to have an epic quality. Although it depends on the size of panels and tempo of the story, comics over 100 pages are regularly too long and dragged out (unless it’s a very long and complex story).

American comics are drawn in A5 format. This small page can’t hold more than one or two important actions so the number of pages rises. Although somehow the standard format for the graphic novels is 60-80 pages, I think that anything under 100-120 pages is simply too short and limiting. Rule of the thumb says that 250 pages is the top limit for the average graphic novel (after that it just starts being a bit boring). These numbers aren’t exclusive, think of them as a 90 minutes standard for movies. Authors are rarely objective in their first look at their story, so they could use some numerical data that they can cling on. For instance, if you are making an average story in graphic novel format (A5), you’ll know that if you draw it in over 250 pages, you risk having a comic in which you and readers will lose interest somewhere along the way. On the other hand, if you realize that there is no element that you could throw out without harming your story’s integrity, then that means that you have one of those stories that are just deemed to be told in a giant “Watchman”-like volume.

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