FOR EDITORS, PROOFREADERS AND WRITERS

Learn what pace, urgency, momentum and tension are and why they’re distinct elements of crime, mystery and thriller scenes, even though they often work together.

• What scene pace is
• What urgency is
• What momentum is
• What tension is
• Why understanding the difference matters

Pace is the speed at which readers move through the scene’s narrative. It can be fast, slow or somewhere in between.

A fast-paced scene doesn’t necessarily mean it’s full of action or full of movement at speed. For example:

• One fight scene might include lots of short, choppy movements like jabs, punches and kicks that each happen in less than a second, and yet the reader’s attention is drawn to each of those precise and specific actions. The drama is therefore high, the scene action-packed, but the pace is slower because readers have to move through the details of the narrative.

• Another fight scene might have a faster pace. Just a couple of blows land before one of the characters is out for the count. Readers therefore move quickly through the fight.

Nor does a slow-paced scene have to involve events that take place over a long passage of time. For example:

• Several hours, or even days or weeks, might be summarized in a sentence or two, so that readers move through the passage of time quickly.

• Equally, a character’s reflection on how upset they’re feeling and why might plausibly occur in their brain in a matter of seconds, but the space given to it on the page will be greater, and the reader will move at a slower pace through that narrative.

Tip for writers and editors
What matters is that the amount of description appropriately slows or speeds up how quickly readers move through the details.

Urgency is often confused with fast pacing, but I like to think of it in more specific terms – not in terms of speed, but in terms of a narrowing window of opportunity and the cost or stakes if a character fails to act in time.

​That doesn’t mean urgency won’t require speed on the character’s part. It might very well, but it’s not automatic. Speedy action could therefore be a consequence of an urgent deadline, but it might not be. It depends when the deadline is. For example:

• A character might need to evacuate a building within nine minutes because a bomb is timed to explode, threatening the lives of hundreds of people. The urgency is born from the nine-minute deadline and threat, not how fast the occupants hurtle out of the building or how panicked they are. 

• If the bomb-disposal crew arrive, the scene’s pace may slow so that readers home in and experience the clock counting down as the protagonist traces and snips multiple wires in a bid to deactivate the device. However, the urgency is still in play, because if they fail, they’ll die.

Tip for writers and editors
What matters is that readers understand what the cost will be if the character doesn’t achieve their goal in time.

Want to explore further?
If you’re working on a scene's pace, urgency, momentum or tension in crime, mystery or thriller fiction, Line Editing for Crime, Mystery and Thriller Writers explores these topics in even more detail.

Momentum is another element that sometimes gets mixed up with speed. In fact, momentum is about forward direction, not how fast an action is being carried out.
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Key to momentum is cause and effect – something happens that causes another thing to happen. We experience momentum in our daily lives even in the most mundane of tasks. For example:

• I’m thirsty and cold.
• So I put my stove-top kettle on the hob.
• But the doorbell rings so I head down the hall and open the door.
• Because the kettle’s been left unattended, it begins to whistle shrilly, which makes the dog go bonkers.
• So I hurtle back up the hallway to the kitchen, trip over the dog and sprain my ankle.

And so, an initial pressure point – me being thirsty and cold – leads to a seven-hour wait in A&E. That’s momentum in action. (And a reason to get an electric kettle that switches itself off.)

The example above has lots of drama going on, just as there might be in a chase or escape scene, or during a fraught evacuation or interrogation. But momentum is key in even the quietest of scenes because it ensures that the scene’s changing and developing rather than remaining static.

Here’s a summary of a far gentler scene on pp. 72–3 of Tim Weaver’s No One Home (Penguin, 2019).

• David Raker, a private investigator, awakes from a dream at 2am. Because he dreams infrequently, he feels disoriented.
• So he gets up, goes to his desk and reviews photographs of nine missing people.
• But now that he’s fully awake, he decides to check the devices he’s recovered. The phones and tablets reveal little, though small details help him (and readers) understand a little more about the missing people’s lives.
• Because reviewing the information has been emotionally draining, and it’s so early in the morning, Raker retires back to bed.
• But he can’t settle, and he hears a noise in the corridor.
• So he investigates. The corridor is empty but he hears the noise again in his friend’s adjoining room.
• So he enters to discover that the noise he’d failed to identify was actually his friend crying.

It’s a gentle, slow-paced scene that moves from Raker’s initial waking and disorientation, through to professional curiosity, then alarm, then personal revelation. Each development in the scene has a causal effect on the next, so readers are always moving forward and learning something new, even if it’s a small detail or a changed emotion.  

Tip for writers and editors
What matters is that the scene progresses logically, regardless of how fast that progression occurs or whether or not there’s a deadline with a cost attached to not meeting it.

Tension is apprehension or uncertainty about what might happen. Again, that tension might exist in a passage with a slow, deliberate pace that’s designed to draw readers’ attention to details, or a fast pace where a situation quickly escalates.

In the slow-paced Raker scene outlined above, there’s tension – first on account of Raker’s disorientation, then the unease he feels when he hears a noise he can’t explain. That tension resolves in the heartbreaking understanding that his friend is in emotional distress.

However, later in the book, we learn that Raker has been imprisoned underground for several weeks. The pace is fast – we learn how he’s used this time in the darkness to put the evidence together. Though his situation is grim, the tension is low because it’s evidential piecing-together.

But then a sliver of light appears, along with a rope. The pace slows as Raker, now out of reflective mode, focuses on his present dilemma – the rope might be a trap. He decides to climb anyway,  and readers experience his terror and disorientation as he discovers he’s in the middle of nowhere and someone is trying to shoot him. A game of cat-and-mouse ensues, followed by a fight scene.

​Throughout this extended sequence that covers several chapters, the tension is thick enough to cut, as a terrified Raker tries to thwart his attacker and stay alive.

Tip for writers and editors
What matters is that any certainty about the outcome is delayed. That keeps readers rooting for the protagonist and turning the page to find out what happens.

Understanding the differences helps writers diagnose why a scene feels rushed, static, flat or slow in the wrong places.

Details might need to be summarized quickly (fast pace) because they’re important for reader orientation, but that’s all. Equally, they might matter and the pace might need to slow, because without them, the issue is resolved too quickly and there’s no tension.

Details that don’t affect what happens next – that seem to arrive in a void – can leave readers feeling stranded, unsure why they’re accessing an important moment of reflection or backstory at this point in the scene. Whether the information is whizzed through or described with precision, there still needs to be cause and effect so that the reader moves forward logically (momentum).

Narrowing windows of opportunity (urgency) will determine the actions a character takes and when they take them, and while momentum needs to be intact, the pace and tension may ebb and flow.
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And uncertainty might last for only a short moment in a passage (as is the case in the first Raker example), or stretch out over separate chapters (as in the second Raker example).

Pace, urgency, momentum and tension can all work together, but they do different things.

Pace controls how quickly readers move through a scene, urgency narrows the characters’ window of opportunity, momentum keeps the scene moving forward through cause and effect, and tension creates uncertainty about what will happen.
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Use them together, but don’t treat them as interchangeable.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

• Get in touch: Louise Harnby | Crime Fiction & Thriller Editor
• Connect: X @LouiseHarnby, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Learn: Books and courses
• Discover: Resources for authors and editors

Fiction line editing isn’t a mysterious instinct. Discover how analytical editors can learn the skills and frameworks they need to edit fiction.

• A special kind of brain?
• You don’t want to line edit fiction
• You do want to line edit fiction, but think you can’t
• There isn’t a special fiction-editing brain
• How fiction editing is talked about
• Analytical editors are better equipped than they think
• Structure gives you somewhere to start
• Instinct comes later

Some editors assume they’re simply not wired for fiction. They’re too analytical, too academic or too comfortable with the logic of non-fiction.

But I don’t believe there’s a special kind of brain required to line edit a novel. Fiction line editing isn’t a mysterious instinct. It’s a skill, and skills can be learned.
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In fact, many of the analytical abilities experienced non-fiction editors already use provide an excellent foundation.

Some editors don’t want to line edit fiction, and that’s fine.

You might love the precision of academic editing, the structure of business content or the satisfaction of making complicated non-fiction clearer. You might look at a 90,000-word novel and feel absolutely no desire to get involved whatsoever.
Fair enough. Nobody needs to edit everything.
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However, there’s another group of editors I’m much more interested in …

Some editors would love to line edit fiction. They love reading novels and are curious about how their colleagues go about working on it. Perhaps they’ve even considered taking on fiction work, but pulled back because they think they can’t.

The doubts I hear most often from editors
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard colleagues say things like, ‘I’d love to work on fiction but …’
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• ‘my brain isn’t wired that way.’
• ‘I’m too analytical, too literal, too academic.’
• ‘I’m in my comfort zone when I’m working with arguments, evidence, facts and information.’
• ‘it’s all a bit of a mystery to me.’

Give them an awkward sentence, a structural inconsistency or a poorly organized chapter in a non-fiction book and they’re perfectly happy. But give them a novel and suddenly everything feels different ... subjective, instinctive. Even a bit mysterious.

​And I don’t buy it. I think they’ve been fed a myth.

I honestly don’t believe that fiction editors are born with a mysterious ability to look at a passage of prose and simply know what’s wrong with it or what’s right with it, why it’s working or not working, why it’s engaging or flat.

I’d even go as far as saying that I think that approach is a little arrogant.

That’s not to say that experienced fiction editors never work intuitively. We do. We might sense that a scene is dragging, that a character’s reaction doesn’t quite ring true, that the viewpoint has become unstable or that a piece of dialogue isn’t doing what the writer needs it to do.

But that instinct didn’t appear from nowhere. It was built.

It comes from knowledge, close reading, experience, pattern recognition and practice.

The very same thing happens in other kinds of editing:

• A humanities copyeditor might spot a problem almost before they can articulate why it’s a problem.
• A medical editor might immediately recognize a weak transition or an unsupported claim.
• Someone who works regularly with reports or grant proposals might sense that a section is in the wrong place before they’ve consciously analysed the structure.
• A business specialist might identify a slip in brand voice before they’d nailed the specifics of why the language isn’t sitting quite right.

And yet we wouldn’t usually describe those abilities as mysterious, not at all. Instead, we’d recognize them as expertise. And just like non-fiction editors, the skills fiction editors have learned eventually become a kind of muscle memory.
​
So why do we sometimes treat fiction differently?

There’s no shortage of advice about editing fiction: Show, don’t tell. Avoid head-hopping. Make your characters believable. Give every scene a purpose. Raise the stakes. Keep the reader turning the pages. Watch the pacing. Make the dialogue sound natural.

All of these ideas are important. However, there’s a huge difference between knowing a principle and knowing how to analyse a manuscript to check whether those principles are in play.

Suppose you’re reading a scene and something feels flat. What do you do next?

• Advice like ‘improve the pacing’ isn’t much help if you don’t know why the pacing feels slow in the first place.
• ‘Make the character more engaging’ doesn’t tell you what the current version is failing to achieve.
• ‘Show, don’t tell’ can be actively unhelpful if it encourages an editor to start treating every piece of narrative summary as a problem.

For someone who thinks analytically, a collection of fiction-writing and editing principles can feel frustratingly loose.

You know the terminology and you understand the advice in theory, but when an actual manuscript lands in front of you, you still don’t know where to start.

I think that’s where many editors conclude that they simply don’t have the right instincts for fiction. And yet I’m not convinced that it’s because of how they’re wired.

​I think instead that what they’re actually missing is structure.

If you come from an academic, technical, business or other non-fiction editing background, you already know how to analyse and ask questions such as:

• What is the writer trying to achieve in this section?
• Is the information the reader needs actually here?
• Is it in the right order?
• Does this follow logically from what came before?
• Is the writer assuming knowledge the reader doesn’t have?
• Is this sentence saying what the author thinks it’s saying?
• Has something important been left unexplained?

Those habits are critical for novel editing, and while the questions and the language used to explain the solutions might change because a work of fiction is trying to do different things, the shift is sometimes actually quite subtle. Plus, the underlying analytical process is still in play.

And so the fiction editor might ask:

• What is the writer trying to achieve in this scene?
• What does the reader know at this point?
• What does the viewpoint character know?
• Where’s the reader’s attention being directed and what are they being encouraged to expect?
• Are the events in the scene in an order that demonstrates cause and effect?
• What emotional response is the scene trying to create?
• Is the prose creating that response? If it isn’t, why not?

​Those are analytical questions. And once you start asking them, fiction becomes much less mysterious.

This is where I think people sometimes become wary. When those of us who love an analytical approach to fiction editing start talking about ‘frameworks’, ‘systems’ and ‘analysis’, it can sound as though we’re trying to turn fiction into mathematics.

Put Character A here. Add some conflict on page 12. Insert an emotional response. Increase tension by 17 per cent. Novel edit complete.

If only! But that isn’t what I mean. Good fiction is far too varied for that.

For example, a literary novel and a fast-paced thriller are not trying to create the same reading experience. A comic novel can succeed by doing something that would be disastrous in a psychological thriller. And a technique that works beautifully for one writer could feel completely wrong in the hands of another.

And so a framework isn’t there to tell us what a book must do. Instead, it helps us work out what this particular book is trying to do – and whether the choices on the page are helping it succeed.

That distinction really matters. Analysis isn’t about forcing a manuscript to conform to a template, but rather about understanding cause and effect.
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• If the writer includes X or withholds Y, what does the reader experience as a result?
• If the viewpoint shifts there, what changes?
• If this paragraph explains the character’s emotion directly, what effect does that have compared with allowing the reader to infer it?
• If that line of dialogue was removed, what’s lost or gained?
• If the backstory in this scene is moved somewhere else, how would that affect reader engagement?

Once you can see those relationships, you can make editorial decisions for reasons you can explain.
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That’s much more useful than ‘It just feels wrong’. In fact, it’s essential because fiction editors need to be able to explain and justify their recommendations to an author, not just suggest changes that appear random and based on gut feeling.

This is the part I care about most when I teach fiction editing (and when I report to my clients).

I want editors to have a way into the manuscript.

I’m not talking about a giant checklist they have to apply mechanically or a set of commandments, but rather a route – a way of getting under the skin of a novel at scene level.

If something feels like it’s not working, I want them to be able to slow down, break the problem apart and ask useful questions:

• What’s happening here?
• What’s the writer trying to make the reader notice?
• What information is available?
• What’s being implied?
• Whose perspective are we experiencing?
• What changes during the scene?
• Where does the pressure, energy or tension rise or fall?
• What does the reader want to know next?
• Does the prose support the intended effect?

From there, you can start identifying why a passage works or doesn’t work. And once you know why, your editorial suggestions become much more precise and genuinely useful for your author.

Instead of saying ‘This scene is a bit slow’, you can explain what’s making it feel slow and offer options that would solve the problem.

Or rather than saying, ‘I’m not connecting with this character’, you can examine what information the reader’s been given, the degree of psychic distance, what the character wants and how their emotional responses are being presented.

Or rather than ‘This dialogue doesn’t sound natural,’ you can look at what the speech is actually doing: whether both characters sound the same, whether they’re saying things they already know for the reader’s benefit, whether the exchange has an underlying purpose, whether the characters are responding to one another or simply taking turns delivering information.
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The judgement is still yours, but now you have something to base it on.

There’s nothing wrong with editorial instinct; it’s incredibly useful. But I think we sometimes get the order backwards.

We tell people to trust their instincts before they’ve had the opportunity to develop them.

An experienced editor might read three lines and immediately sense a point-of-view problem, whereas a newer fiction editor might need to stop and work through it deliberately, asking questions such as:

• Who’s perceiving this?
• Could this character know that?
• Whose language is being used?
• Have we moved from one consciousness into another?

That slower process isn’t evidence that they’re bad at fiction editing, but rather that they’re practising their art and honing their skills.
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And when you do something consciously often enough, eventually you start doing parts of it automatically. In other words, the framework doesn’t replace instinct but instead helps you build it.

The terminology can make fiction line editing feel more alien than it really is. Words and phrases like psychic distance, viewpoint, backstory, scene momentum and character voice might feel unfamiliar, but many of the underlying editorial skills aren’t.

• If you already edit non-fiction, you’re used to asking what a section is trying to achieve and whether every part of it is contributing to that purpose. In fiction, you can apply the same thinking to a scene.

• If you work with author or brand voice, you already know how to assess consistency in diction, tone and register. Those skills are useful when you’re looking at narrative and character voice.

• If you analyse the order in which an argument or explanation unfolds, you already understand the importance of progression and cause and effect. Fiction asks you to apply that thinking to narrative momentum.

• And if you regularly decide how much background information a reader needs, and when they need it, you’re already dealing with a question that fiction editors encounter constantly when working with backstory and exposition.​

​The terminology and material change, but the analytical habits are often much more familiar than they first appear.

If you don’t want to edit fiction, don’t. There are plenty of other kinds of editing, and nobody gets bonus points for taking on work they don’t enjoy.

But if you do want to line edit fiction and the thing stopping you is the belief that you’re too analytical, too academic or simply not wired for it, I’d ask you to challenge that assumption.

Your analytical brain may not be the obstacle. In fact, it might be one of your biggest assets. Why? Because you already know how to examine language closely; identify patterns, inconsistencies and gaps; and ask what a piece of writing is trying to achieve and whether it succeeds.

Working on fiction doesn’t mean throwing those skills away, but instead learning how to apply them to a different kind of text.

Fiction editing isn’t some mysterious instinct, I promise you. It’s a skill. And skills can be learned.

• Fiction editing courses
• Fiction editing books

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

• Get in touch: Louise Harnby | Crime Fiction & Thriller Editor
• Connect: X @LouiseHarnby, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Learn: Books and courses
• Discover: Resources for authors and editors

Learn about how pressure works in crime, mystery and thriller fiction, and how it shapes character behaviour, emotion and momentum.

• What scene pressure points are
• Why pressure is important
• Why pressure doesn’t have to be dramatic
• How to keep pressure active

Pressure points are the problems, questions, threats, needs or emotional strain that shape a scene. They shape how a character behaves – emotionally and physically – while they’re managing pressure.
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They might arise from something a character is hiding, pursuing, trying to understand or frightened of.

Pressure is the backbone of a scene’s momentum. It’s the reason why this scene, right now, at this point in the book is relevant and needs to progress. Think of it as a jumping-off point.

Pressure points in novels are not unlike pressure points in real life. Think about the various things you do throughout the day, and what the driving force behind each of those is. For example, you might:

• hurry the kids to eat their breakfast so they won’t be late for school
• take an earlier train to work so you can catch up on a project that’s running behind
• discuss a scene in your novel with your writing-group friends because you’re struggling to make the voices of two characters distinct
• feel confused because your partner seems distant but won’t say what’s on their mind.

​The text in bold reflects life’s pressure points. The text in italic is how that pressure shapes actions and emotions. It’s a good reminder that even everyday actions have some sort of impetus behind them that drives what we do, and it’s that impetus that needs to be captured in a novel’s scene.

Want to explore this topic further?
Pressure is a recurring theme throughout my book Line Editing for Crime, Mystery and Thriller Writers.

Pressure absolutely doesn’t have to involve high-octane, all-guns-blazing action; it might just as well be quiet and reflective.

Take a look at the five scene summaries below, and notice how the temperature of the pressure shifts according to what Espin, our investigator and viewpoint character, is dealing with.

• High-drama scene: Espin has learned about a potential witness to the start of a fire that killed a family on a suburban street. He approaches the person as they emerge from a pub, but the witness catches sight of Espin and bolts. A chase commences. The immediate pressure comes from Espin’s need to catch up with this person.

• ​Medium/low-drama scene: Espin has to stop the pursuit when an old sports injury flares up in his knee, making him hobble. The witness evades Espin, and the pressure now comes in the form of managing his immediate injury and then devising another method of locating and approaching the witness.  

• Medium-drama scene: Espin uses a go-between to set up a meeting with the witness. The immediate pressure comes from the witness’s lack of trust in him, and Espin has to work hard to persuade the witness to come to the police station.

• Medium-drama scene: The interview takes place, but proves difficult. The witness appears nervous, distracted and hesitant. The immediate pressure comes from the difficulties in getting the witness to open up.

• Low-drama scene: Espin goes over the witness’s statement, which conflicts with other evidence. The pressure now comes in the form of making sense of the contradictions in the information he’s gathered.

An immersive scene doesn’t require pressure to be completely resolved. Uncertainty’s often critical in crime, mystery and thriller fiction because it keeps readers turning the pages as they seek understanding and try to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

Equally, if the pressure doesn’t change, the scene could end up dragging because readers aren’t discovering anything new.
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The solution is to review scenes to ensure that the pressure shifts. Here’s an example in which Espin is interviewing the witness, whom we’ll call Arne Nilsen. I’ve numbered each line so we can track how different pressure points emerge and manifest.

Example

Pressure analysis

• 1–6: The initial pressure point in the scene arises from Espin’s need to get Nilsen to talk, and Nilsen’s apparent distrust of Espin’s reassurances, which can be inferred from his relentless scratching.
• 7–8: Nilsen then reacts forcefully, slamming his fist down, and reveals a new piece of information. Espin, having got his witness to speak, now has a new pressure point: the need to keep the conversation going.
• 9–11: He’s unsuccessful and lets the witness go, then considers the incident report in relation to what Nilsen said. Now there’s yet a new pressure point: making sense of the conflicting evidence.

The pressure in that scene isn’t completely resolved. However, the pressure points change depending on what the characters need, discover and experience.

Pressure can be inferred from a character’s dialogue, thoughts, subtext and observable behaviours. It can be dramatic, reflective or somewhere in between.

​What’s important is that the reader understands where it comes from and how it changes so that the scene moves forward.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

• Get in touch: Louise Harnby | Crime Fiction & Thriller Editor
• Connect: X @LouiseHarnby, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Learn: Books and courses
• Discover: Resources for authors and editors