Pacing — Big & Small Moments: Story Savvy Self-Editing Episode 36

I failed to meaningfully address specificity as a great tool on this topic. More specific detail communicates higher importance and relevance. Generalizations and vagueness communicates lower importance and relevance. So, within your good judgement, what kind of scene you are working on, and maintaining balance between dialogue, action, and description (not overdoing any of them), try adding specificity to make moments bigger, and reduce specificity to make moments smaller.

Other episodes and topics mentioned in this one:

Episode 13: Global Story Pacing—Rises and Falls

Episode 18: Appropriate Intensity & Impact

Episode 25: Subplots & Plot Threads

Episode 30: Scene Core Events



Happy editing!

Episode 36 Overview:

Pacing — Big & Small Moments

“Do I need to pad out my story anywhere to make sure I deliver the right reader experience and make sure I’m not rushing past the best bits? Are there any smaller or less important moments I need to slim down so that the reader doesn’t get bored or think that something is more important than it is?”

We continue to discuss novel structure pacing in our series on self-editing strategies for writers. This time we focus on scene-level editing comparing scene pacing vs global pacing as we discuss writing big moments and small ones. Rebecca gives many author self-editing tips in this podcast for fantasy writers. 

In episode 36 of the Story Savvy Self-Editing series, developmental editor Rebecca Hartwell and aspiring fantasy author Agnes Wolfe explore pacing at the scene level. They discuss how to sharpen big moments so they deliver and how to trim or cut small moments so they don’t exhaust readers. They also compare scene pacing to global pacing, discuss how to avoid accidental big moments, and explain how to handle unresolved Chekhov’s guns across series.

Rebecca explains how focus, stakes, and emotional weight make big moments resonate with readers, and why underwritten climaxes can collapse a novel’s momentum. They cover practical strategies for spotting overwritten small moments, preventing pacing burnout, and ensuring each scene supports the larger story arc.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to elevate your big moments so they feel impactful
• Why accidental big moments can throw off your pacing
• When small moments should be cut, trimmed, or dialed down
• How to handle unresolved Chekhov’s guns across series
• Common pacing mistakes that flatten climaxes and stall momentum

Recommended Resources

• Author’s Alcove Membership: www.authorsalcove.com

Chapters

[00:13] Intro
[01:19] Scene Level Pacing
[02:11] Defining Big and Small Moments
[03:41] Scene Pacing versus Global Pacing
[04:40] Making Big Moments Feel Big
[06:21] Structure & Word Count in Big Moments
[08:33] Accidental Big Moments
[11:00] Small Moments vs. Deleted Scenes
[14:35] Unresolved Chekhov’s Guns Across Books
[16:21] Common Mistakes with Big Moments
[21:16] Small Moments Not Small Enough

See you next week for episode 37: Handling Jumps in Time, Place, & POV!

Episode 36 Transcript:

Pacing — Big & Small Moments

Rebecca Hartwell: Hello and welcome to the Hart bound editing podcast! This is episode 36 of the weekly Story Savvy series where we tackle the 52 biggest self-editing topics and tips to help you make your good story great as an aspiring author asks me, a developmental editor, all of the questions you’ve wanted to. We have covered so much in this series so far, including the last two week’s episodes on discussing sensory immersion. So, sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Today, we are going to revisit story pacing, this time, looking at some new aspects of it. By the end of this episode, you will hopefully feel confident gauging whether or not your big moments are paying off and satisfying, and if your small moments are perhaps misleading and in need of tweaking. Joining me today to ask all the questions is my good friend and cohost, Agnes Wolfe. Welcome. 

Agnes Wolfe: Hi! I’m an aspiring fantasy author who hopes to release her first middle-grade fantasy later next year, and also I am the host and founder of Authors’ Alcove. So today I’m here to tackle this topic more at the scene level or, rather, page level, rather than the full global level. So first off, I’m kind of excited about this one because this is actually what I’ve been working on specifically through my series, and I’ve gotten quite a significant way through that, so this is really exciting. Anyway, I often like to make sure, before we even start, that we know exactly the definitions and all of that, and we don't necessarily need definitions but can you just talk specifically about what we are really talking about today? 

Rebecca: We are talking about making sure that the moments that are actually important to your plot, characters, or world come across that way to the reader, and vice versa. 

Agnes: So, what are we defining as big moments or small moments here? I know we’ve touched on this in previous episodes, but clearly it’s always helpful to start out with.

Rebecca: Absolutely. Big moments have high stakes, high emotions, big reveals, point-of-no-return choices or actions, or are a vital precise setup for something that is going to come later with a nice payoff, or they can be the wrap-up and payoff of an existing plot thread that was set up earlier. On the other side, small moments are everything else. Or, if you want to get narrower in that definition, they’re the moments that are needed to transition from one thing to another, are needed to account for realistic time passage within a conversation or scene, or moments that only exist to set up something in more of a general, background way, be that characterization, or world building, or tone, something like that.

Agnes: So, how is this topic different than episode 13, and how are they also related?

Rebecca: Here, we are looking at the aspects you can tackle by just reading the one page with the moment on it. In episode 13, we were talking about tackling the pacing of the whole book, or acts and sequences of scenes, and how each chapter scores with an eye towards adding, deleting, rewriting, or rearranging scenes to maximize your story pacing at the global and holistic level, and in those senses. What we are talking about here is more how you are delivering those small moments within a scene or chapter to fine-tune that pacing, and making sure that it will be perceived by the reader how you intended it to be.

Agnes: So, lets first tackle big moments. How can we make our big moments feel like big moments? 

Rebecca: Doing so is all about narrowing focus; forcing the protagonists to deeply and irreversibly interact with that moment, making sure that noticeable stakes and a needed choice are inherent in that moment, and to some extent about adding extra movement to big action moments and extra description, or big revelations, or seed-planting moments to those kind of big moments, to make sure that they’re all landing right. A couple other aspects to keep an eye on around helping these big moments land include, first of all, you can try naming some small aspect of that bigness, or a larger part of that bigness, within the narration, dialogue, or internal processing, to help it feel like a big moment. You can also make sure that you are showing that the immediate consequences and resolution of that moment are deeply felt and impactful to how things move forward to really hammer home how big the event itself was. It’s all about reader experience, really. If a big moment doesn’t feel big when it’s happening, it’s really going to confuse or disappoint your reader. 

Agnes: So, when I think of big I also think of visually big, but I do want to ask you, are there certain things we should consider around word count, or descriptions, or other areas that have more to do with the actual structure of a big moment, rather than the actual sharing and emotional experience? Are those related at all?

Rebecca: Sort of? I don't have a super clear answer that I can offer here. Sometimes, shorter or less described moments can feel smaller, particularly in slower-paced scenes. However, shortening narrative and reducing description can also make a big moment feel bigger in a fast-paced scene. I think that in general, the actual structure of a big moment versus a small one is how much emphasis and attention you put on the moment. So in some spots, longer passages can really hold focus, force deep exploration of the moment, and really push a ton of meaning and interest into it. In other spots, padding things out with more description that are more background or tertiary to the moment at hand can help make it feel smaller by mixing the moment in with a lot of other smallness. You really have to make that call for yourself in each moment, bearing the other considerations that we are going to go over in this episode in mind. I will say, the closest thing I will do to a blanket statement here is, overwriting small moments and under-writing big moments is the most common issue that I see by a mile, but those are both very squishy terms, over-writing and under-writing, with a wide range of specific definitions, meanings, or applications depending on the moment that’s being looked at.

Agnes: Speaking of that over-writing and under-writing, how can we tell if we have written an accidental big moment? 

Rebecca: Ooh, tricky question. First, I want to say that, if I’m understanding this question correctly, I might rephrase it as “what happens when you write a small moment that feels way bigger than it should.” Because at the end of the day, that’s what an accidental big moment is, phrased in a way that correctly identifies it as a small moment, which then allows you to more easily reach for a solution. How you can spot this can be very, very tricky. Getting feedback on that from outside readers is how I can say confidently I have found and fixed issues like that in my own work. It might also help to go back to that concept of ranking things, aspects, moments, by impact and intensity, which I’m pretty sure I went over in episode 18, on intensity. So, if you have a handful of moments which you suspect might be coming across as bigger than they should, try assigning them an honest number for how intense or big the stakes, emotion, or impact on how the plot moves forward are. Where does that fall against the same score for a big moment you are sure is actually a genuine big moment? Then rank how “big” you think those two moments are coming across, being portrayed to the reader in your language, and descriptions, and balances, and everything else. Look for disparity between those two sets of scores. If your authentic big moment is, let’s say, an intensity score of eight out of ten, but then the less big moment you are questioning only scores four out of ten, but they are both being presented to the reader like eight out of ten, then you need to very much go in and lower the presented bigness of the lower intensity one so that they are more proportional to each other. I hope that makes sense.

Agnes: It really does. So I feel like this question is kind of an offshoot of that question, but this time specifically talking about small moments. When do we know if it really is supposed to be a small moment, or maybe it should be a deleted scene?

Rebecca: Yea, this one hits me in the author. So, it’s relevant to talk about this because you don’t want to overburden your reader with things they feel like they need to remember or emotionally invest in when that isn’t the case. If you treat too many things, or everything, like it’s a big deal, then the reader will quickly burnout on that and nothing will continue to feel big by comparison. Sometimes this can be used intentionally as red herrings, like in a mystery novel, but I recommend against doing so often. Only use it sparingly, and try to only do it in appropriate genres that expect red-herrings. Outside of that, I encourage folks to read up on Chekov's gun. I assume that most readers have at least heard of this, go read an article on it. Essentially, if you put any kind of emphasis on introducing a gun, or metaphor for it, early on in the story, that gun had better go off later in the story. Otherwise, you are presenting a small moment of introducing a gun as bigger than it should have been. If that gun doesn't go off later in the story, readers will feel like the book is poorly designed, poorly conceived, poorly executed, or poorly edited. So, if you want to introduce something for the sake of it, as flavoring or immersion, or for a similar reason, then make sure it feels as equally small as intended, and that will spare your reader this feeling or conclusion about the poor quality of the story. So, how you make a small moment feel small is keep the protagonist more interested in something else, pushing the thing more to the background, more to the side of the focus. You can just describe it less. That’s probably the most common issue and solution that I see. You can make the protagonist’s reaction to that moment flatter, so removing or dimming that emotional reaction to the moment. You can reducing the stakes and you can shortening how long the thing, or the moment, is discussed. There’s a handful of other tools you can try. It really, really depends on the specifics of the exact moment, and what considerations are currently making it feel too big which needs to be dialed down. So, speaking directly to your question of how do you know if it’s just a small moment that needs to get dialed down, or scrapped entirely, just go back to that purpose. Is it serving a purpose? If you took it out, would it create a plot glitch somewhere else? Would it make conversation that you are saying take 30 minutes feel like it only took 10? There’s something in there to assess and at the end of the day, you need to make that call.

Agnes: So, I have a question specifically, actually about my book, is, I had a Chekov’s gun situation that did not have the trigger pulled at the end. So, you pointed that out and I realized it’s because I actually needed it to happen that way something happens in another book, but I forgot to reintroduce it later on so that you, as the reader, did not… You were like “Ok this was a pointless situation, you should take that out”, and I was like, “Oh”. So how would you suggest letting people know, OK this may not be as small as it seems when it might not pertain immediately.

Rebecca: I feel like I've talked about this from a different angle in earlier episodes in the series. If you want to do a moment like that, that is setting up a Chekov’s gun that isn't intended to go off until book four, touch on it again at the end. If within the narration, or your character specifically, inside themselves or to another character, acknowledge, “Hey, wasn’t that a thing?” and name that it is left unanswered. That allows the reader to go, “I see the author is remembering it, we will get to that”. That’s all that really matters. You just need to acknowledge, “Hey, I did ask you to invest in this, and I did ask you to remember this, and I did put emphasis on this. In this last chapter, or second or third to last chapter of this book, I’m just going to take a sentence here and reassure you that was intentional. We will get to that, bear with me.”

Agnes: So, what is, I feel like I ask this every episode, but what is one of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen writers make around not treating the big moments like they are that? Or, particularly, in a way that really hurt their pacing? 

Rebecca: First of all, I think it's great that you ask this question in every episode. One of my favorite sayings, literally as long as I can remember, has been, “The only thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from the mistakes of others”. That is what a lot of this series is about so continue asking this question. To answer that, the first thing that comes to mind is there was one book I edited, I think it was late last year, where the climax took less than one full page. It had great buildup in the story up to that point, great escalating tensions leading up through that third quadrant, and then wham bam thank you ma’am it was over. This is kind of an extreme example, as the climax is and or should be the biggest big moment of an entire book, but it’s a clear one. So, in that case, the issues around this big moment not delivering like a big moment were layered. First of all, the author didn’t make the big moment hard enough to reach the far side of. So, when you look at a big moment, you’ve got some build up to it, and then let's say this is the big moment. There’s space there, and making it more difficult to get to the other side can very much increase the bigness of that moment. If that author had added a few hurdles, setbacks, twists, barriers, and or difficult choices for the protagonist to make, that would have helped a lot. Second layer on that, they didn’t narrow their focus, as the narrative, as the protagonist, or for the reader. The protagonist was still thinking about the subplots pretty heavily while they were in that pivotal climax of the primary plot, which kept it from feeling emotionally big. In real life, when something really matters, we give it our full and undivided attention. Writing big moments in fiction should absolutely reverse engineer that to give that same sense to the protagonist and the reader. And then the last layer on this that I feel is worth mentioning here is, that the author described some vital details during the climax needed to understand what was happening. Yes, I will acknowledge this could be taken as hypocritical. I constantly recommend explaining things just in time for it to be very relevant versus just in case, but the climax is an exception. The reader has to know everything they need to in order to understand the climax before they get there. At the latest, all of the technical know-how, the world building, the power establishment, whatever, those pieces need to be in place and understood by the end of the chapter before the climax chapter. If that means that a certain aspect that is going to get used in the climax needs to be forced to become relevant earlier in the story so that you can do that just-in-time explanation before the climax, then so be it. That is the right choice, rather than waiting until the climax to go, “Oh, by the way dragons are a thing” or whatever the piece is that you would need to explain the climax. Find a way to bring it up tangibly before then and do the explanations there. The big moment failing to feel like or failing to be presented as such results in all momentum of the story being snuffed out in a beat. All of the momentum the author had done a really, really good job of building up in this story that I’m thinking of, over probably seventy thousand words, maybe eighty thousand words, just winked out when that climax failed to payoff the catharsis promised. Without high stakes, high emotions, large victories, be that internal or external, a sense of sacrifice or loss, or whatever other values you want to equate to “big” in your specific genre and story, the moment will not pay off. And that is second only really to expositional stagnation for stopping momentum dead in its tracks.

Agnes: So, I just want to wrap up real quick, I do have one last question. What about, it’s kind of the same question, what about not making small moments feel small enough, and how does that affect the pacing?

Rebecca: When your small moments don’t feel small enough, you run the risk of your pacing constantly pushing too hard, which can burn out your readers, and I've touched on this a little bit before here. The most common issue that I see on this topic is authors describing everything like it matters a lot. That just isn’t feasible in fiction. I am sure that some real, living people feel like every tiny thing in their real lived-life, every minute of it is a Very Big Deal, but most people don’t, and would probably agree that that sounds exhausting, and probably insanity-inducing. So, remembering that having some small moments in and around the big ones is a much better mindset and approach for fiction. Yes, I suggest emphatically and often that you not bore your reader, but sometimes you do have to mention a meal being eaten, or a car being driven, or a piece of clothing being assessed for value or status, something like that. And doing so in a way that supports the big moment that I suggest that all scenes be built around, that scene core event, go back to episode 30 I think it was. Keeping that balance so that it is supporting the big moment but doesn't steal the focus away from that big moment is the goal. I have edited a number of books where I ended up mentally exhausted trying to keep track of everything in order to provide good feedback on what I thought was a cram-packed, super complicated plot with tons of foreshadowing, only to reach the end and realize in retrospect that less than a quarter of those “hey! Look at me! Remember this detail!” moments actually were that. I ended up needlessly mentally exhausted by all of those small moments coming across like I really needed to notice and remember them, and readers are going to, again, find that either disappointing or frustrating when they reach the end and go, “Are you kidding me? I didn't have to remember all those details? Why did you do this to me?”

Agnes: Thank you so much for your insight, I really appreciate all that you shared, and I think this episode, particularly because this is what I’m focused on, is very important and I might have to review some of the things that you said because this is exactly what my round of edits have been, looking at the scene level, making sure that the pacing is right, making sure that that scene is important. Although, I am touching back on the beginning, too, a little bit at the moment, but again, it's because I'm looking at the overall pacing of scenes and importance of stuff. Thank you very much.

Rebecca: You’re very welcome and it’s delightful when one of these topics is very much where you are at. It feels good! So, thank you to everyone who has followed along with this series. We would very much appreciate it if you could like and subscribe to The Hart Bound Editing Podcast and the Author’s Alcove podcast, where you can find lots more content for fantasy readers and authors beyond this joint series. Next week, we’re going to go over how to best handle and present to your reader jumps in time, location, and POV in narrative fiction, and how to check and polish those spots in your own manuscript. Looking forward to it!

Agnes: I can’t wait to chat with you again —see you then!

Rebecca: Thank you so much for listening to the Hart Bound Editing Podcast. I look forward to bringing you more content to help you make your good story great so it can change lives and change your world. Follow along to hear more or visit my website, linked in the description, to learn how I can help you and your story to flourish.

See you next time!