To be clear, I’m talking about American sports here. I don’t know how it’s done in other countries, but it does seem like soccer doesn’t suffer from what I’m about . .
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Way back in December, I went to a NY Islanders game, which I haven’t done since I was a kid. This is hockey. I was ready for some exciting, nonstop action like I remembered from the past. They would be quick to get things moving after a penalty and make sure people don’t cool off. I mean, people are always cheering and excited at these games. I did hear that live football games have a lot of pauses for commercials and the baseball games I’ve been too can be a little slow. Yet, the former required a lot of set up and the latter is a fairly low action sport when compared to the constant movement of hockey players. So, how did it all go?
I couldn’t believe how often the action stopped to clean the ice, get some rest, or other things that I simply couldn’t understand. There would be an average of 2 minutes of action and then a long pause. I guess it was to get a bunch of commercials in on the television, but that didn’t give me any solace. Didn’t help that the team I wanted to win was getting their butts kicked. Even if I wanted the agony to end quickly, it felt like the experience was designed to drag on for reasons beyond the actual game. The flow of action was so jerky that it took a lot of effort to not pull out my phone and catch Pokemon instead. Think I did do that near the end.
This also got me thinking about writing a story. There should be pauses between action scenes, but not to the point where it’s like stop-and-go traffic. You also need something interesting to happen for the entire audience during the lulls. Write stories more like soccer where there aren’t many full stops of the action and the slowdowns still have some game progress. Not like the sports that will take a sudden break and not show anything happening to those watching in person. It risks losing the audience and having to struggle to get them back.
Now, a big difference is that those at a sporting event can do other things. Talk with others, get food, hit the bathroom, throw things at the other team to get kicked out (you know which fandoms do this), or just stretch your legs. You paid a lot for that ticket and are kind of there, so you feel much more obligated to stay. There’s also an understanding by many that this happens, which is why you have people launching shirts into the crowd and mascots doing stuff. Guess this does mean that there is some action even though it isn’t the actual game.
Stories don’t have this benefit. A reader can take a break to do those other things, but they aren’t doing it because the story stopped. It’s usually a need and they plan on going back to the story if it hasn’t lost them. If there is this kind of pause and the person walks away from the book, it’s more likely that they won’t come back. Not unless they are the types to see these things to the end regardless of the frustration. At the very least, you have a reader who will never touch one of your books again. So, you have to be very careful with the flow of action.
This isn’t to say that books don’t have commercial breaks of some type. One could look at chapters and chapter breaks as spots to give the audience a rest. Unlike some types of sports, you have to give some temporary closure and not make this so sudden. The audience needs to be able to walk away for a bit and come back, which again means you need it to work with the flow. Still, these are the spots that you can use to create this pauses in the action. Even looking at them as mini-cliffhangers, similar to end of a quarter or half, that will be swiftly fixed.
Maybe this is a shaky and simplistic analogy, but I think it works. An author who enjoys sports can look at this explanation and get a good idea on how not to do a flow. They can look at their own feelings when a sport is abruptly paused and they are left hanging until the action starts again. Then, make sure such a sensation isn’t created by your own writing. Whatever helps you improve your style, right?
So, what do other people think of this analogy and comparison?
Legends of Windemere 