Lessons Learned: Prose and Pacing Flow

Hello, friends.

Finishing the first draft of The Templars of Alderath felt like crawling across a finish line with a torn rucksack and one boot missing. I was proud of it. Relieved. Slightly feral. But when I started editing, I ran into something I didn’t expect.

The prose was… fine.

Nothing glaring. No obvious beginner mistakes. And yet, when I read certain sections, they felt clunky. Not wrong. Just heavy. Like the gears weren’t quite catching.

That’s when I started paying attention to flow—not in the vague, “make it smoother” sense, but in the mechanical sense. Flow is how one beat hands the baton to the next without the reader ever feeling the author’s fingerprints. It’s momentum without visible pushing.

Here are a few things I only learned after wrestling an entire manuscript into shape.

Connecting Action Beats (The Missing Glue Problem)

One of the first things I started noticing in edits was a strange, jarring sensation between paragraphs. I’d end one paragraph with an action beat, start the next with another action beat, and something felt… cut. Like I’d deleted a line and forgotten to replace it.

Nothing was technically wrong. The sentences worked. But the transition felt abrupt in a bad way and I realized flow often breaks at paragraph boundaries—not just mid-sentence. That white space is louder than we think.

Here’s the problem in its simplest form:

He slammed the door and drew his sword.

He lunged at the guard.

Clean. Functional. Slightly robotic.

The fix wasn’t adding fluff. It was adding glue. I started rewriting the final line of the first paragraph so it ended anchored in the character—some note of perception, reaction, or intent.

He slammed the door and drew his sword, steel ringing in his grip.

Then he lunged at the guard.

It doesn’t have to be interior monologue. It just has to root the motion in perspective. Instead of dropping the reader off a ledge, you give them a ramp.

Action, Dialogue, and Interiority—Oh My

I'm pretty active in my craft learning and knew about these pieces in my head, but at some point during edits, I really started to understand these three levers when writing a scene:

• Action
• Dialogue
• Interiority

That’s it. Everything falls into one of those buckets.

When prose “flows,” it’s usually because those three are woven together in a balanced way. When it doesn’t, one of them has taken over the room.

The most obvious offender for me was action overload. It looks like this:

He grabbed the lantern. He turned. He ran down the hall. He shoved the door open.

Nothing is technically wrong. But read enough of that and your brain starts glazing over. One diagnostic I started using was embarrassingly simple: if I saw “He/She” or a character’s name starting several sentences in a row, it was a red flag. That’s not just a sentence variety issue—it’s a beat variety issue. Too many pure action beats stacked together create the “laundry list” effect.

On the other side, too much interiority turns the prose into molasses. The character thinks. Then thinks about thinking. Then reflects on what that thinking means. The story slows to a crawl. Too much dialogue without grounding action turns the scene into a stage play floating in a white void.

When readers feel like “nothing is happening,” it often wasn't plot problem. It was a balance problem of these three levers.

And here’s the hard-earned part: knowing this academically is different than recognizing it in your own prose. I had to see my own paragraphs tipping too far in one direction before I really understood what this balance meant, how it effected the reading experience, and how to spot it quickly.

“Suddenly” — The Misunderstood Tool

If you spend any time reading writing advice, you’ll eventually hear this: never use suddenly.

I understand why. I overused it in my first draft. Most of the time, it’s a crutch. If something is truly sudden, the writing should make it feel sudden without announcing it. But during edits, I found one narrow, legitimate use for it.

“Suddenly” is not for surprise. It’s for reader reorientation during an un-signposted interruption.

Specifically, when you have back-to-back action beats and the second one interrupts the first without a clear lead-in, the reader sometimes needs a small internal shoulder tap. Not the character—the reader.

For example:

He reached for the relic on the altar.
A blade slashed toward his throat.

Clean, but slightly disorienting. Who moved? From where?

Now with reorientation:

He reached for the relic on the altar.
Suddenly, a blade slashed toward his throat.

The word cues the reader that attention must shift immediately.

Contrast that with this:

They were eating doughnuts when suddenly there was a knock at the door.

Cut “suddenly,” and nothing changes.

This tool only works in tight, action-on-action interruptions. Anywhere else, it’s usually just noise.

Cause and Effect vs. Stacked Motion

One of the more humbling things I discovered in edits was how often I was stacking motion instead of building momentum.

First drafts love this pattern:

He shoved the table.
The lantern fell.
The room caught fire.

Everything is technically happening. But it reads like a list of events, not a chain reaction.

During edits, I started compressing those beats into causality:

He shoved the table, knocking the lantern sideways—

Now the fire doesn’t just happen. It feels inevitable. The second action is born from the first. That small shift changes everything.

Flow improves when motion feels caused, not merely listed. The reader isn’t just watching things occur—they’re watching consequences unfold.

The word then can help here too:

He shoved the table, and then the lantern toppled.

Used sparingly, it clarifies sequence. Abused, it becomes duct tape slapped between weak sentences. It should guide flow, not compensate for a lack of it.

Somewhere around draft three, I realized something that would’ve saved me time earlier:

Movement isn’t momentum. Causality is momentum.

Paragraph Breaks and Scene Breaks — The Invisible Pacing Controls

Paragraph breaks and scene breaks aren’t formatting decisions. They’re momentum decisions.

You don’t really understand that until you’ve edited a hundred thousand words and realize half your pacing problems weren’t sentence-level—they were structural. I went into edits looking for clunky phrasing. I came out realizing I needed to rethink where I was letting readers breathe—and where I wasn’t.

A. Paragraph Breaks Control Speed Within a Scene

Breaking too often fragments flow. Not breaking enough suffocates it, because paragraphs are like pacing valves.

Short paragraphs accelerate and intensify. A cluster of them can make a fight feel frantic or an argument feel sharp and escalating. Long paragraphs, on the other hand, slow the reader down, make them sit in a moment, process it. Neither is wrong—but both are important to understand.

Dense blocks create drag—even when the prose itself is fine. I had scenes that were technically clean but felt heavy simply because they weren’t breathing with better placed paragraph breaks. And, I had others that felt rushed and choppy purely because I had too many short, clipped paragraphs grouped together. An elegant blend works best, I found.

For example, a nice flowing paragraph, followed by a quick punchy one works great to call attention to an important action or thought.

I also found that what you end a paragraph with, changes the forward pull. End on an action beat, and the reader leans forward physically. End on a character-grounded note—an emotion, a realization—and you create a smoother ramp into what follows.

Somewhere in the middle of edits, I realized I wasn’t just editing sentences. I was editing a white water rafting journey, with full control of the river.

B. Scene Breaks — The Death of Transition Passages

This one hurt a little, and was the cause of a lot of word count bloat.

I had a habit of writing transition passages between scenes. Characters leaving the tavern and walking to the castle. Riding from one city to another. Packing up camp. Moving from point A to point B while nothing meaningful happened.

Every single time I cut those sections, the story improved.

Those passages rarely added anything to the scene. More often, they ruined it by bogging it down with boring repetition. How many ways can you write two people walking from point A to point B? The answer is one...over and over.

To solve this, I started looking at published novels—the big boys and girls, and I found the solution. They don’t apologize. They just cut.

Hard scene break, then jump right to the next scene with no filler.

In The Templars of Alderath, Chapter 41, “Consequences,” Niotta and Kieran perform a dramatic act to slow the enemy’s advance. After learning this lesson, I applied it to the scene and found that not only does this technique remove filler, but I could actually use the scene break for fun effects.

For example, they blow a tunnel entrance to block the enemy.

Scene break.

We jump straight to them being chased. En media res. I even let them exchange a quick, playful line about underestimating the power of their pursuers and use the scene break to make the joke hit harder.

The moment landed ten times better because of that scene break.

In the end, I learned that readers don’t need to watch characters travel. They need to watch them arrive.

Conclusion

Flow isn’t flashy.

When it’s working, no one notices it. Readers don’t stop and admire how smoothly one beat handed off to the next. They just keep turning pages. The moment they start feeling the author pushing or pulling however, that's when you'll start seeing comments about pacing and prose in reviews.

If you want to see these lessons in practice, you’ll find them woven throughout The Templars of Alderath.

See you next week.