Pacing, Zommed Out

I wrote an article about pacing a while back, focusing on the technical aspects of holding tension. I briefly mentioned how pacing applies to the larger scale too:

To take it one step further, from Part 1 to Part 3, Elena gets in deeper and deeper trouble, climaxing with her almost getting killed. I slow the action down a notch in Part 4, before the conflict becomes sector-wide in Part 5. Elena and the crew of the Charon have a small sidequest on Horizon Station, which is very much intentional. I’m slowing the pace down a bit, to build it up again. Well, “slow” for Sector 36.

In this article, I want to talk more about the larger story arc, especially as the serialization of the novel here on Substack reached Part 4.

Beware, spoilers ahead for the whole book.

The first three parts of the book focus on Elena and her mission. If Doctor Linton had survived, Sector 36 could’ve been more of a spy thriller. Elena getting in and out of the dangerous sector, navigating threats, and achieving her mission. I wanted to make it clear though that, as strong as she is, our protagonist is swept away by the events happening around her which she has no power to control. She is just one person, one of the many millions caught in the war between the military and the corporate private armies. The war itself ends up being less important when the Taurans come back and threaten the whole civilization.

In Part 1, First Mover Advantage, we get to meet some of the main characters and get immersed in the world of Sector 36. Only later do we realize that Elena never had a “first mover advantage,” that she was outmatched from the get-go. The tension builds up mostly through Elena’s paranoia, her slow realization that things are a lot worse than anticipated, and discovering she is being followed.

Elena continues her mission in Part 2, Exhaustive Search. We get the first violent confrontation in Shock Factor, we learn more about her in the flashback chapter Door Knockers, with the intensity increasing all the way through the last chapter, Terminus, in which we learn the fate of Doctor Linton.

Part 3, Scar Tissue, starts with Elena heading into a trap and the brutal fight in Flop. This is what I consider the first peak of tension. As Elena’s chapters are very intense, I intersperse them with slower ones: a flashback chapter and the first Marcus point-of-view chapter, Redeployment.

After the brutal fighting in Part 3, the action slows down a notch in Part 4, Asset Allocation. During this part, the pieces are put in place for the escalation to come: Marcus gets a briefing; we see what Abyssal Mining is up to with the Vesper point-of-view chapter; while Elena and the Charon crew visit Horizon Station.

Part 5, Weapons Free, is the next step on the escalation ladder. Elena’s mission becomes inconsequential as the whole sector gets engulfed in a war. We get to witness the paramilitary ships committing genocide. In terms of the book’s intensity crescendo, I view this as the second peak.

Then comes the aftermath of the war in Part 6, Ruins. The title itself has a double meaning: First, there are the ruins of Echo Point, where most of the action takes place. Second, the ruins of the sector after the war. The action shifts from the macro back to Elena, Marcus, and Vesper, all of whom end up together on the abandoned planet.

In Part 7, Anomaly Detection, we get to see the chaos left in the aftermath of the war between Ingram and Arcturus and the return of the Taurans. This is the third escalation - from Elena’s mission, to the sector-wide conflict, to another alien incursion.

Finally, in Part 8, Extinction Event, the action slowly ramps down as Elena gets a better understanding of what the Taurans are about, and (most of them) manage to finally escape Sector 36 in the final chapter, Fold.

To sum it up, that’s the shape of it: three peaks of escalation, each bigger than the last, with a breather in between. As I said in the previous article, pacing doesn’t only apply scene to scene, it works at the macro level too.