From Sluggish to Fast-Paced: 6 Ways to Create Momentum in Your Novel

‘Slow’ is a dagger to the heart for any writer, especially when a reader follows it up with the words ‘got bored, did not finish’. Great novel ideas can be felled by a sluggish pace, especially if your characters spend too much time fretting and brooding and doing busywork.

The answer to maintaining a good pace in your fiction is to think in terms of forward momentum.

This is a sense that every scene is building towards something vital. The characters act, they take risks, they want things, and they go for what they want.

Here are six ways to build and maintain forward momentum:

1. Make sure there’s a ‘big dance’ happening at the end

In my youth, I read a lot of YA novels and watched teen rom-coms. A recurring theme was the ‘big dance’, a school prom or similar, in the final act. Think, Mean Girls.

Early in the novel, characters are preoccupied with picking a theme for the big dance and deciding on decorations. Then there’s the agony of trying to secure a date for the big dance: hoping the person you like asks you, plucking up the courage to ask them, getting turned down, crying in the school toilets, etc.

By the time the last quarter of the novel/movie rolls around, the big dance is in full swing. Someone’s snogging on the dance floor. Someone’s boozing on illicit alcohol. Someone’s screaming at their frienemy over the sounds of boy band pop music.

You may be wondering what on earth a ‘big dance’ has to do with anything if you’re writing a thriller or a sci-fi adventure or a searing piece of literary introspection. Well, stay with me.

No matter what your ‘big dance’ looks like, you should make sure to have one. This is a final-act setpiece that your characters spend the whole novel planning towards. It could be an end-of-summer party. It could be a battle of the bands. It could be a day of political protest.

The important thing is that it’s planned. The characters know it’s happening and they’re planning for it. Of course, the ‘big dance’ will spiral out of control (the peaceful protest turns violent, the summer party is a chance for airing of dirty laundry), but your characters don’t realise that yet.

A final-act setpiece gives your novel a shape, a definite end point that the reader can anticipate. It gives your characters something to do from the start, lets them play a part in building up the story.

2. Save the flashbacks for later

If driving towards a ‘big dance’ helps to keep a steady, satisfying pace, then flashback scenes have the opposite effect. Flashbacks, by definition, are backward-looking, so when you include too many flashbacks, you’re destroying forward momentum.

I’m not anti-flashback, by any means. They’re crucial for deepening characterization, and they can be handy for revealing secrets and plot twists. But too many long flashbacks, too early in your novel, are absolutely deadly for pacing. Every time I read a book where chapter two or three catapults me into a flashback, I groan.

My advice is to delay the inclusion of flashbacks for as long as possible. Get the forward momentum of your story in full swing, before you include the lull of a flashback.

You should also think seriously about whether every flashback needs to be a full scene. Micro-flashbacks, consisting of a few paragraphs (or even a few lines), can be just as effective as longer flashbacks, and they don’t interfere with the pacing in the same way.

3. Sharpen the stakes, make your characters want things

I know many writers find it artificial to assign characters goals, but it is worth thinking about what the people in your story actually want and what they’re able to do to get it.

(If you’re not sure what your characters want or what they might be prepared to do to get it, that’s a characterization issue. For an easy fix, I recommend checking out my free ebook, The 15 Minute Character Creator.)

Your characters will have long-term goals. They’ll have short-term goals. They’ll have secret, emotional goals. They’ll have ‘shit, the house is on fire’ immediate goals. A character who is working on achieving multiple goals at once is a character with forward momentum.

Also, make sure the stakes are high enough. What do they lose if they don’t achieve their goal? Can you, the author, make it so that they lose a whole lot more? That’ll make for a story that has more juice, more momentum.

4. Always complicate the situation

If a section of your novel seems flat, static, with not enough happening, that’s probably a sign that you need to throw some complications at your protagonist.

Here’s an example I’m borrowing from Libbie Hawker’s Take Off Your Pants, a great book on outlining your novel.

The premise of the scene is that a dad needs to pick up medication for his child. But what if the child is having a health episode and needs the medication right now? And what if it’s late at night and the roads are icy?

Here you can see how to take a sequence that has some movement and given it a whole lot more movement.

5. Use story beats

Creating forward momentum is as much about characterization as plotting, but plotting is important. I recommend looking at story beats, such as those from Save the Cat.

Don’t be a slave to a beat sheet, but think of story beats as a useful series of hooks that help to hold up the heavy fabric of your novel.

Similar to including a ‘big dance’ at the end of your book, having a ‘midpoint twist’ or a ‘dark night of the soul’ moment can give an amorphous, sluggish novel a more satisfying shape.

I know some people find story beats restrictive, but the big secret is that you can flex and move them as much as you like. But make sure you at least consider them.

6. Shift your protagonist’s mindset from scene to scene

One of the most life-changing pieces of writing advice I’ve read is from Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid. It’s this: your protagonist should exit every scene a slightly different person than they entered it.

They should be changed by every single scene. Whatever happens in the scene, it shifts their mindset in some small way. They go from dejected to inspired. They go from irritated to furious. They go from hopeful to suspicious.

Obviously, the emotional journey your main character goes on, with every scene changing them subtly, can create a rolling-stone-heading-downhill sort of momentum. But only if you make sure they’re actually changing.

If you’re anything like me, once you try and account for what the mindset shift of your protagonist is in every scene, you’ll encounter scene after scene after scene where they don’t change at all. Time to pull out your red pen and do some editing! When you reflect on your novel and realise it’s slow, sluggish or downright boring, that’s usually due to a combination of factors: characterization, plotting, and narrative choices. But it’s never too late to salvage a story, build up momentum, and transform it into a book that’s nail-bitingly fast-paced.