Beyond the Endless Sky

Plot & Pacing

So I lumped the two of these together, mostly because I was thinking about them at the same time.

They are closely related, after all. At least, as far as I can tell.

Both of them, after all, directly relate to making sure the story is interesting. The plot needs tweaking because if it isn't interesting, why bother writing it. As for pacing, doing it well can make even a dull moment fascinating. Done poorly, it can ruin even the coolest scene.

Take a car crash, for instance. Plot would influence how hard the car hits, what lead up to the car crash, who was in the car, and what happens because the car crashed. This can be anywhere from a blunderous and perfectly mundane fender-bender, or a car smashing into the side of a presidential motorcade. Both are car accidents, but the plot is very different between the two.

On the other hand, pacing and flow can affect how those scenes are read. Take that fender-bender. Describe a whistful drive where your intrepid motorist is describing the new, fascinating looking opera house. She's an architect, so her descriptions are lurid and detailed, you're well into your paragraph, she's fascinated by the facade, and—

BAM!

She rear-ends another vehicle at ten clicks an hour. So slowly her vehicle's airbags don't even deploy. But this fairly mundane event is a dramatic shock to her, and it carries well to the reader.

Or your driver knows it's happening. Same character, but you step back from her internal monologue just a little, and she isn't getting into quite the same detail. Just enough, though, that you know she isn't watching the road when the predictable happens. She hits a vehicle at ten clicks an hour, the airbags don't deploy, and she's made herself even later for work.

They read very differently. And depending on what you're going for, both could work.

It just has to be interesting.

Now, since I've wandered off from the plot, let's get back to that before I lose it completely.

Plot in Beyond the Endless Sky has it's own distinct advantages and challenges. Since Clarissa is on a boat for pretty much all of it, she's being carried through the plot. So no matter what she does, the plot progresses. The downside is she's being carried through the plot, rather than affecting it. This makes it easy to stay on point, and easy to let the story get kinda dull.

So the key point to make sure I remember is to make sure the plot has stakes. After all, there is only one important rule to the plot, whatever it is. It has to be interesting. And part of making it interesting is making sure it matters to the protagonist, even if her hands aren't on the wheel.

Part of that is making sure she relates to the danger she and the Child are both in. And the most perilous part of her journey is in the cargo hold.

After all, she's travelling with a box full of antimatter. And for those of you who don't nerd out over how much physics has learned in the last few decades, antimatter could also be called inverted matter. You know how protons and electrons have a positive and negative charge? Well, with antimatter protons have a negative charge and electrons are positive. This works, unless antimatter collides with matter, at which point both explode. And that explosion is a theoretically perfect conversion of matter into energy, which means on a per gram basis it is theoretically the most powerful explosion possible.

(For reference, the most efficient thermonuclear bombs manage a 0.5% conversion from matter into energy)

So to avoid overwhelming the dramatic tension, Clarissa doesn't know what antimatter is. Vincent does. Mercy knows precisely the consequences of the box's contents getting loose. Everyone else knows it's really, really bad. This allows me to up the tension of the plot just by letting Clarissa learn gradually what's inside. But to make sure that tension keeps rising gradually, I added a few pieces.