I was asked to do this topic a while ago and, honestly, this is a tough question. How to get the pacing right?

The common way of teaching pacing is to refer to a marathon run. In a marathon, the idea is to keep a steady pace, never going so fast you burn out or so slow that you're basically walking and not getting anything out of it. This is a bad way of looking at story pacing. Get it out of your head. Good stories can be fast in some places and slow in others. A story that is always in the same mode is like a piece of music with only one note- not only is it boring, but it's irritating. So, again, get that analogy out of your head.

First, we have to ask what pacing in a story really is. Pacing is two things, first, it is a method of making sure your story, as presented, makes sense, second, it's ensuring your story, again, as presented, keeps your audience engaged. IE, It does not matter if your story, at its core, COULD make sense, what matters is, as you wrote it- does it?

First, how to make sure your story makes sense. Let's say your characters are in a magic world.

*Susan waved her wand, water gathering around the thin wood and spiraling around it over and over until- boom! A blue stream blasted forward, knocking down Fred and sending him sprawling across the floor.

"As you can see," she explained to her fallen opponent, "Water magic works by gathering mana around the liquid in the air and-"

"Hold up," Fred said, as he gasped for breath, recovering his footing. "Are you really explaining this to your enemy in the middle of the fight?"

Obviously, that's an example of how to explain things wrong. It doesn't make any sense for a character to just blurt out explanations of their spell or ability or device or what have you, right when using it. (This is often done in movies or on TV, but that's a time and budget issue. A training sequence cost so much more than just having a character talk. There is no budget in a book so don't concern yourself with mimicking mediums that have one.) Likewise, it makes little sense to have a character explain who your antagonist is while he's standing over them about to kill a whole village.

This kind of pacing is all about strategy. Think, "how can I logically present this information in my world?". Sometimes the answer is exposition, but remember straight narrative exposition should be as rare as possible. What you want most is a demonstration of how a thing works or who a person is, but a second to that can be having a character explain. But even still, how can you do that logically?

*Susan waved her wand, water gathering around the thin wood and spiraling around it over and over until- boom! A blue stream blasted forward, knocking down Fred and sending him sprawling across the floor.

The man rolled back to his feet, stomping and gasping for air as he scrambled to pull out his blade.

Seeing him go for his weapon, Susanswung her wand like a blade, as if from such a great distance she was using that small twig to cut the man's throat. A razor-sharp shard of ice shot out and pierced through Fred's neck, Susan's enemy finally dead.

Stephen looked on with awe and shock."How... how did you do that?"

"Keep up- I'll show you. You see..."

Teaching an ally in a moment after the fight makes more sense. Now, would it have made more sense had there been a training scene before the above battle earlier in this purposed story of a magic land? Not really, as either would make sense- the question of explaining before or after the event itself has more to do with engagement.

The purposed scene seems to come from an action fantasy of some kind. What are the essential ingredients to an action fantasy? Why is your audience reading your story, to begin with? That is the other element of pacing, how to give your audience what they came for. In action fantasy, your audience is here for "action and fantasy" obviously. So, of course, you need action scenes and scenes of amazing fantasy lands, the more the better. However, you still have to explain how these elements of fantasy work before or after employing them in your story.

So then the real mystery is how to balance showing your audience what they came to see, with explanations of what they're even looking at. There's no easy answer to how to do that. Adding to the problem is that you still have to develop your characters at the same time and progress your plot. ALL of that has to be balanced.

The best solution I can offer is this- plan. Write ever more complex outlines of how to get from point a to b in your story.

Here's one approach.

Start by writing a list of your essential characters. Now, take each character and write down their personality and abilities and how you want them to interact with each of the other characters that you plan to have them meet (even go as far as to say "these two never meet" when appropriate).

Now to an outline of the story proper. First think of where your characters start, and where they end up. Write that down. Now write out how that journey will take play out, write it bland, just the major events that you know take place between the beginning and end. Now, look at each major event in sequence, frequently looking at your character outline- for each event, how would it make sense for YOURcharacters to get there? Yes, it is possible that as you go through your story beats and look at your characters and how their behaving- one or two of your planned story beats might radically change because you realize that big scene where you planned for Susan to shout at her brother and drive him to cry in a corner "yeah, that's a good set up, but she just has no reason to do that".

Say your characters slay a dragon. Don't bother thinking of the most logical way to do that, think only of the most logical way your characters would do that. Sure, a bazooka would make sense in a fight with a dragon, but none of your characters carry one, so that doesn't matter. Sure it would make sense for a troop of five to flank the dragon from different directions, but no way is Susan leaving her little brother Stephen alone in the middle of a fight- at least at this point in the story. Remember, this isn't a story of how to beat a dragon, this is a story of how Susan and Stephen and their friends beat a dragon.

At this point, you've handled a lot of the issues to do with pacing. You've created many of your major action and drama scenes and figured out how your characters interact and move through them. Now the next struggle is "how to explain what's going on to the audience?".

Since you see how your story is playing out in front of you, it's all a matter of choosing your moment. Decide- what do you want to be a mystery when and what do you want to be revealed and when? Now, again, look at your characters. What makes the most sense for them? When you want something revealed, how would they reveal it? Maybe Stephen is a questioning child who badgers his sister constantly to explain everything and she does her best for him. However, Susan is a good teacher, and she knows she can't just answer his questions straight out, so she often answers in brief and then picks moments of relative safety to actually show him what he needs to know and to have him practice.

Maybe your villain DOESN'T like to explain his plots to the heroes, as he only sees them as speed bumps on his road to power. Thus Susan and her team will have to scrounge for information and the audience will learn as she does.

A guideline is that readers like to feel like they are experiencing the world through your characters. So everything you explain, do your best to have it revealed through a character or revealed from their perspective. It's boring to have information just shoved in your face- so much more interesting to have someone ask the questions you would have asked and learn that way- even MORE interesting if that character is moving about and interacting with elements of what they're learning while learning it.

So don't just say how water magic works, have Stephen ask his sister. Don't just have her answer, have her explain it while showing him, and while he struggles to copy her.

Another guideline, you want each scene to be fun and engaging. When it comes to exposition, there are two primary ways to make learning about your world fun (at least as I see things, if you can think of another way, by all means, incorporate it).

First is to surprise your readers with a show of things they need to learn about, letting them anticipate learning, for example, how each new spell works. Show them the instrument that they will learn these things through as early as possible, like say, quickly show Susantraining her brother early in the book, but at first, only show him struggling and not getting "something". Now have Susan in a huge battle, showing all her stuff to defend her brother. Next scene, Stephens is practicing and trying to master many of the spells we just saw.

The second is to make your readers feel a sense of accomplishment. For instance, through that training, show your readers how magic works in your world. Now, the battle scene comes and we, the audience, are dropped right into it. Make sure your hero ONLY uses spells she just taught her brother. With excitement, the reader might realize "I can figure out how Susan can win!". They might even venture to guess how Susan will act in each situation, knowing both her personality and powers. Thus the readers are now playing a game of actively trying to predict how the scene will play out based on what they know. Don't be afraid of your readers being right either. A scene being predictable because your readers understand your story isn't bad. What's bad is the scene being predictable because your story is too similar to other stories.

As a literary example, if you're a Sherlock fan, is this your "look at how clever Holmes is" scene or your "crime scene showing"? In SherlockHolmes, you'll see each type of scene in nearly every story. Holme's"look at me" scene is generally when Holmes makes a deduction about something, like say, learning that Watson's brother is a drunkard by looking at Watson's pocket watch. "How could he know that from just a pocket watch? Read on to find out!" Holmes then explains the trick after it has been done. The crime scene show is showing you all the information in a case that Sherlock is dealing with and how he's interacting with it. Now, knowing Sherlock'smethods and what he's looking at- can you predict what he's going to do next? Can you solve the case? Oh- Holmes split off into a muddy alley adjacent to the crime scene- why did he do that? Can you figure out what he's doing without reading another sentence? Do you knowHolmes that well? (Note, crime scene show takes a good amount of planning and well-thought-out consistent characters. Such scenes don't just happen.)

I hope this helps. Plan, plan, plan. Remember, this is about having your story make sense and be engaging. Unfortunately, the pacing is a question with many definite wrong answers, but only guidelines when it comes to right answers. That being said, take these tools, experiment, get some readers, and figure out what works.