8 ways to improve pacing and build tension in historical fiction

One of the best ways to keep readers engaged in a story is to keep the pace moving and tension escalating. Here are eight ways to improve your novel’s pace and build more curiosity-inducing tension into the story.

1. Trim away overwriting of historical details.

A densely packed paragraph that describes every detail of your character’s location but doesn’t do much else to move the story along is not going to entice your readers to keep going. Choosing one or two very specific details can bring the world to life just as well.

2. Summarize or condense setting and time changes to keep the story moving.

Travel, passage of time, and daily activities can often be glossed over or condensed unless a major plot event occurs during the travel.

3. Clean up clunky dialogue to improve tension and pacing in your story.

Make sure characters are not telling each other things they already know or diving into small talk that has nothing to do with the plot. Dialogue is rarely a good place to do world building or create descriptions of characters and setting. Instead, focus on making the dialogue about subtext and building tension between characters.  

4. Make sure your characters’ goals, motivations, and conflicts are clear.

Characters should be challenged and forced to make choices that change their perspectives over the course of a story. Ideally, your character will have a story goal, one that they try to achieve throughout the entire story. It should be very clearly tied to their internal and external motivation (which by the way, do not have to match). There should also be smaller goals along the way. Think of those as stepping stones to the larger goal. And each of those goals, large and small, should be challenging to reach.  

5. Keep the tension escalating by increasing the stakes.

What is the fallout if the character does not reach their goals? One way to increase the stakes is to introduce a series of setbacks, with each one eventually making the character more determined than ever to achieve their goal.  

6. Stoke the curiosity of your readers.

Leave them hints about the possibility for conflict to come and then make sure you deliver that conflict. Thwart their expectations with a disruption they don’t see coming, and then escalate it all by adding another disruption soon after.  

7. Make sure subplots are firmly connected to the main plot.

If a subplot drifts off into a more interesting diversion it will pull focus and tension from the main story. Readers will be left wanting more, but ultimately unsatisfied because all the action is in the subplot.

8. Adjust your writing at the scene level.

You can control pacing by through dialogue, inner thoughts, descriptions, and language used. To speed up the pace use more active verbs and shorter sentences, lots of snappy dialogue, less description and fewer inner thoughts. Conversely, to slow the pace down and focus in on the emotional experience of a character add more descriptions of setting and internal life, use verbs that invoke a slower experience of movement along with longer sentences, show more reactions to the experience and slow down the use and pace of the dialogue.

Looking for feedback?

If you are struggling to create tension in your manuscript or keep your pacing just right then my mini edit might be a good way to learn how to improve your work in progress. You can check out my services page to learn more.