Thieves' Gambit, Ep. 9: Overarching Pacing
The pacing of a story determines how a story feels to read, and writers get to control that pacing by placing story elements at certain moments in the book and by how they move from chapter to chapter or scene to scene. In this episode, Anne-Marie and Erin explore how Kayvion Lewis keeps the pace fast and the tension high.
Books we talk about:
Nina Lacour’s books (like We Are Okay and Watch Over Me)
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (our blog post on how Christie keeps tension in the story)
Murder on the Orient Express film (trailer)
Erin’s percentages for overall structure and pacing:
Hook–1% pg 2 Gambit invite
Inciting Incident–10% Mom kidnapped
First Game of Gambit–13%
Intro to Thieves–14%
Romantic intro–16% pg 59
2nd Game–Museum–21%
Character Reveal–27% unwilling to leave injured player even risking gambit loss
3rd Game Train–42%
Plan Heist 3rd Game—50%
New Info–64% pg 249
Big Obstacle-70% (pg256) handcuffed to balcony
Kiss–80%
Mom’s 1st betrayal–Comes at 88%
Double Cross the Gambit–89%
Twist/ Devroe’s betrayal–94%
Mom’s 2nd betrayal–comes at 98%
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Erin Nuttall: You mean you don't expect people to be taking notes while they're driving and writing all my percentages out? 'Cause I expect it.
[Music intro]
[00:00:08] Anne-Marie Strohman: Welcome to season two of the Kid Lit Craft Podcast. This season we're doing a deep dive into Kayvion Lewis's, YA thriller Thieves’ Gambit. Today we're focusing on pacing. I'm Anne-Marie Strohman and I write for children and young adults and short stories for adults.
[00:00:24] Erin Nuttall: Hi, I am Erin Nuttall and I write for young adults.
[00:00:29] Anne-Marie Strohman: On Kid Lit Craft, we look at mentor texts to discover the mechanics of how writers do what they do, so we can apply it to our own writing.
[00:00:37] Erin Nuttall: We want to remind you that our ask the Author book club has two more events coming up this spring. YA author, Randy Ribay, is our guest in March and middle grade author Lindsay Lackey is our guest in April. They are both amazing authors and I can't wait to learn more from them.
[00:00:55] Anne-Marie Strohman: Also, we just announced in our newsletter that I'll be offering a free online workshop on March 29th. It's called Making Emotions Concrete, and it's great for picture book writers as well as novel writers. We'll talk about ways to get character emotion onto the page and how to evoke emotional responses in your readers. And you can go to kidlitcraft.com/workshops to sign up. Let's dig into Thieves’ Gambit. Are you ready, Erin?
[00:01:21] Erin Nuttall: I am ready.
[00:01:22] Anne-Marie Strohman: Okay, so we're starting with vocabulary. Today we're gonna be looking at the overarching pacing of the whole book, and in the next episode we're gonna get more granular and look at the pacing of scenes and chapters. But start us off with overarching pacing or novel pacing. What do you mean by that?
[00:01:41] Erin Nuttall: So for novel pacing, it is the speed the whole story unfolds, so it's influenced by the length of chapters, scenes, sentences, and also how fast the key plot points happen, and how quickly information is given to the reader.
[00:01:57] Anne-Marie Strohman: Why is pacing important? Why is it important to think about it when you're writing or revising a novel?
[00:02:02] Erin Nuttall: So pacing is key to a lot of things. It helps maintain the reader interest. It builds tension and creates emotional impact, and it helps develop themes and ideas. It really helps the reader connect with the characters. And it's good to know that different genres have different pacing expectations.
Readers expect action thriller books to be fast, to unfold quickly. They expect surprises, puzzles for the main character, and for the reader to figure out lots of action and movement through time and space. Not a lot of long paragraphs of dialogue or long paragraphs of description, lots of danger, high stakes, and generally a relatively physical experience for the main character.
[00:02:47] Anne-Marie Strohman: And other genres expect a slower pace. I was thinking of Braiding Sweetgrass is a kind of ecological memoir that blends stories of growing up Native American, the native relationship with the land, and a deep exploration of very specific plant biology and ecology. And it feels a little bit more like literary fiction. It's much slower paced. Regular literary fiction has a slower pace as well. Comedies might have a quick pace. Mysteries have a lot of tension, but a slower pace typically. So you read a lot of YA. Where do you see variations in pace in the YA sphere or is all YA fast these days?
[00:03:26] Erin Nuttall: YA definitely tends to be faster than adult fiction. Even if you are reading something that is more literary or something that I was trying to think if there was an equivalent to Braiding Sweetgrass and there probably is in the YA space, but there's not one that I know of.
[00:03:46] Anne-Marie Strohman: Hmm. It makes me think a little bit of Nina LaCour like. Her stories feel slower, but they're so short that the pace is slow, but it doesn't take a long time to read.
[00:03:56] Erin Nuttall: Yes, and I think that that is probably key for YA readers. If you do have something that is slower paced then you'll want it to be a shorter story or you would want something really surprising. And I think Nina LaCour has that as well. You get a big surprise generally toward the end and that helps keep the reader's interest. I've been having a lot of conversations lately where this generation expects things to be pretty quick and expects a lot of engagement, which makes total sense if you think about, you know, they grew up with a lot of TikTok, which is… Like, I noticed the way I watch TikTok versus the way my kids watch TikTok is very different. They rarely make it through a whole video. I usually watch a whole video. And so there's, there's a different pacing that is expected in YA.
Uh, especially though, quick paced if you're doing an action or a thriller and, like we've talked before, this, Thieves’ Gambit, is actually a relatively long book. It's 364 pages, my copy anyway. And that's kind of long, but it doesn't feel long because the pacing is, quick.
[00:05:08] Anne-Marie Strohman: When I think of Thieves’ Gambit and pacing, I think fast.
[00:05:11] Erin Nuttall: For sure. Yes. And it is remarkable how many things happen, but she's able to do that because of the way she has structured the pacing to be so quick. So that was one reason I wanted to talk about it today was because you might think, oh, well if, if things have to happen fast, maybe I can't have as many things happening. But there's a lot going on, so.
[00:05:35] Anne-Marie Strohman: You can shove a lot in a book. We're gonna get granular in terms of what's inside of a scene next time. But I think it's important to start with chapters in the context of this larger overall pacing. We talked about scenes in an earlier episode and we talked about the acronym GILGOE, G-I-L-G-O-E, get in late, get out early. And that's specifically talking about trimming as much extraneous stuff as possible, but thinking about getting into and out of chapters is really important to how fast or slow a book feels. Can you talk to us about how chapter, beginnings and endings help us?
[00:06:11] Erin Nuttall: Right. So I first noticed this idea of GILGOE, of getting in late, getting out early with Dan Brown, which is Da Vinci Code, which I read, you know, like everybody else of my era when it came out. It was super popular. And he did this idea where you grab someone's attention in the first sentence and you grab someone's attention in the last sentence of a chapter.
So for the first sentence, we have a few examples from Thieves’ Gambit. “I stopped by the hall corner listening, waiting for the guard to get close enough.” And so immediately you're like, okay, then what? Right? Is she gonna knock the guard out? Is she going to hide? What is she going to do when the guard gets there?
And then another one is, “I think we should offer them a truce”, which if you know Ross's character then that is a surprising sentence. She actually isn't the one saying it, but even the fact that she's listening to that is a surprise. And so you want to know why that is a good idea in this gambit where they're all competing.
Another one was “I woke in a small windowless room”. And hello, you gotta know why she's there, where she is, how she got there. And so there's a lot of tension just in that first sentence, in those first sentences. So, and I would say, I mean, I did not go through every single chapter. I thought about it, but I didn't have time to go through the beginning and ending of every single chapter to see if there was one where she does something different and does like a less catchy sentence. These were just random chapters that I opened to, and I wrote the first sentence down. And it was something I noticed when I was reading that she really grabs your attention right away and you wanna know what's gonna come next.
[00:08:01] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah, I've heard it talked about like forward lean, right? It makes you lean into the story. You're like, what? On the edge of your seat. What happens next?
[00:08:08] Erin Nuttall: I like that idea. Yeah, for sure. And I think that is something that is appealing for readers of this style of book. They want to be pushed forward and they want their attention grabbed. So with the same idea is the kicker. And it can be called a lot of different things, but that's a term that I think I got from David Gill.
And it is the idea that the last sentence of each chapter should kick the reader into the next chapter. We don't want them to put it down. We want them to keep reading to find out what happens next. And I vividly remember it being very late at night and my husband, who likes to read but is also very good at putting the book down when he needs to, and he is continuing to read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code 'cause he has those great kickers that push you into the next one.
And Lewis does the same in Thieves’ Gambit. Here's just some random ones that I picked out just flipping through the book. So for a little last sentence of these chapters, “they're going to win.” So yeah, that's a little dangerous. They're going to win. So we know it's not Ross who's going to win and why does she think that? And wait, is she right? “And then with that, she left me. Again.” And so you know, now what's gonna happen, right? What, what happens after she's left? What choices does she make? How does she feel?
And I really liked this one. “I hated myself, but I raced toward Yeriel.” Because we get to know right there that Ross doesn't want to necessarily be doing—she doesn't think it's wise to be doing what she's doing, but there's something pushing her to do this.
Now what, what's gonna happen when she gets to Yeriel? In this specific chapter, you know, Yeriel is her direct competitor who's been injured and Ross is racing toward her instead of trying to escape and win,
[00:10:01] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah, we talked in the action scene section about having times for reflection and needing to have that action reaction idea. And none of these end on the contemplative parts, right? They're all ending in that there's an action. We don't know what the reaction is gonna be. We're waiting, we're turning the page for that.
So while you do wanna have those moments of reflection and interiority, rarely do they end a chapter. In this book, at least.
[00:10:28] Erin Nuttall: Right. Well, and that's the kick, right? That's how they kick you into the next chapter is because you want to know what happens, how, what is the sequel? How do the characters react to this big thing that just happened? Another thing I've heard about it described is you end the chapter with something going sideways.
If you expect things to be going along in a certain direction, and then like this one, “I hated myself, but I raced toward Yeriel”, then that's a sideways direction. And so that is, again, no time for the sequel, just the scene, just the immediate action, and then we won't find out the rest until the next chapter.
[00:11:10] Anne-Marie Strohman: So my guess would be that in a book like this, chapters would be pretty short and that we'd be able to page through pretty quickly. Is that the case? Is that one technique that she uses to keep up the pace of the book?
[00:11:21] Erin Nuttall: So I thought that I would say yes to that, but I did go through the whole book and there is a wide variety in chapter length. There is a mix of short chapters of three and a half, four pages to one chapter was 15 pages long. As I was counting that one, I was like, how is this so long? Because honestly, reading it, I didn't feel that way.
And part of it is because when she does the longer chapters, she has scenes that almost function as chapters where you have that short sentence at the beginning that grabs your attention and then that, kicker sentence that kicks you into the next scene. But she has decided to structure it in a way that the chapters are a mix, which definitely works and I have seen it differently.
Dan Brown, for instance, since I already was talking about him: his are all very short. Very, very short, like a page, page and a half. They're super short. Inheritance Games, also very, very short. So I think you can do both, but you don't need to think that short is the only option.
[00:12:29] Anne-Marie Strohman: Because if it's paced, as we'll talk about next time, within the chapter and within the scene, if it's fast paced, then it can be longer.
[00:12:38] Erin Nuttall: Right!
[00:12:39] Anne-Marie Strohman: It's fine. You don't have to have that chapter ending to be the thing that, that pushes the book along.
[00:12:43] Erin Nuttall: Correct.
[00:12:44] Anne-Marie Strohman: So are there other techniques within chapters that Lewis uses to keep the pace up?
[00:12:49] Erin Nuttall: There are a lot of techniques that I noticed as I went through this trying to spot pacing methods. She has a lot of physical action, which is not a surprise as this is an action thriller style book. There's a lot of verbal sparring. And physical sparring. I, I sort of listed that a little differently than just physical action. Physical sparring or I, I would say more like fights, whereas physical action would be more like climbing and jumping and running and that kind of thing. There are puzzles to be solved. They are a different style of puzzle than like, say Inheritance Games. Since I brought it up before, Da Vinci Code. Also, both of those are similar in that they are puzzles where you're figuring out words and a number combinations and things like that.
These puzzles are more like, how do we get from A to B? How do I steal X and then get to Y. You know, these kind of things where it's more of a thieves’ puzzle.
[00:13:52] Anne-Marie Strohman: Well, and we'll talk about heists in a while, and a lot of them are heist planning puzzles.
[00:13:57] Erin Nuttall: Right, and, and those kind of things. Danger, physical danger, helps keep the pace going quickly. And injuries, there are a number of injuries that happen. The one thing that I probably wouldn't have thought of off the top of my head, but as I was looking through, was the reminder of stakes.
The way that Lewis does it is, frequent and quick generally. And I think that also helps 'cause we remember why Ross is doing what she's doing. We don't have to dwell on it, but that gives you a little bit of emotional heft to what you're doing. And it's not super heavy, so you get to move on to the next physical thing, if that makes sense. Ticking clocks are big ones. There’s the security at the museum does a walkthrough every 20 minutes, for instance, so that there are a number of ticking clocks. But that's one of the first ones. Actually, it's not now that I think of it. Not one of the first ones, but it is on page 81. So it's early in the book.
There were a couple other ticking clocks. so having that, that definition of time definitely helps. Then the last one that I thought of was vehicles. There's a car chase, there is interaction on a train, there's interaction on a couple of different planes. And those kind of things I think are just inherently quick 'cause they move quicker than the human body moves. Right? And you have to react quickly. It's another thing where you're upping the pace. I mean, you could have also like a train scene that is very long and slow. I think of the building tension of maybe like, in Murder on the Orient Express. The train ride itself takes up such a huge portion of the book and there is danger and there is, you know, murder, but it unfolds much slower and there's a lot of interiority, so it changes the pace. A vehicle doesn't necessarily make it quick paced, but it certainly can.
[00:15:58] Anne-Marie Strohman: It definitely can. That car chase scene we looked at. So all of these different elements are things that really create tension for the reader. We again, feel I'm on the edge of our seats. We have forward lean, we're invested in what happens next, and that helps keep the pace up. And especially since she doesn't make us wait a long time for answers, at any point, which I think helps speed it up. With a mystery you might have like a longer…Like you might have the question very early and it's answered quite late. And with this thriller version, like things are answered pretty quickly. And then we get big reveals too that add even more tension.
[00:16:35] Erin Nuttall: Yeah.
[00:16:36] Anne-Marie Strohman: And so like for instance, you know, will Ross get the ring from Noelia at the museum? Like three pages later we know. Will Ross's team keep the phone when they're on the train? Four pages later, we know that.
[00:16:47] Erin Nuttall: I do think because you have those quick reveals, then you do get to have more adventures. And that does definitely compact time for the reader because you're having another adventure, another adventure, another adventure.
[00:17:00] Anne-Marie Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:01] Erin Nuttall: But that's not the only place. The puzzles, the way that the puzzles are solved , is another way.
[00:17:07] Anne-Marie Strohman: Let's dig into puzzles. Tell us about puzzles.
[00:17:08] Erin Nuttall: Okay. So like I mentioned earlier Lewis gives the reader and Ross a lot of puzzles. And they are varied. Some of them are, are, are easy and some of 'em are, are not. So the first game that she encounters once she joins the gambit is getting out of the locked room. That's easy. Much like the very first time we see Ross and she's in the box and she's doing the jigsaw job that whole scene actually, it has varied puzzles.
It's easy for her to get out of the box. It's easy for her to pick up the vase that she needs. And then it gets less easy 'cause the cat causes a problem. But even that only lasts like… the cat shows up, she gets rid of it, and then she moves on to the next puzzle and she's able to get out of the house and then the cat shows up and that time it's a little harder to get rid of.
The whole scene takes I think maybe four pages or five pages. And so I think that helps: having puzzles where some are easier, some are not. Again, like stealing from the museum, she goes into it thinking it's gonna be a snap and it is not. but even the ones are bigger problems, they are never a problem for long.
Like the whole museum scene is maybe five or six pages. A big problem that Ross has is when she's handcuffed to the balcony and she's able to solve that in a few pages. But I think what is key and why we understand that it's a big problem is that we see her struggling to come up with a solution.
We see time passing. We get a reminder of the stakes. She gets to have a brief moment of emotions where she kind of sobs where she has some regrets. It's so very YA. She regrets not kissing Devroe when she has the opportunity. And then suddenly she gets new information, the kids on the other balcony and their Nerf guns, right?
And then she has a solution and it's solved and all of that is four pages. And yet we know it was difficult because we get those levels, even though word wise it doesn't take that long, if that makes sense.
[00:19:19] Anne-Marie Strohman: And it's just one piece of a larger sequence of puzzles too, right? Like they're trying to get the sarcophagus, which is kind of the longest heist. But even when we look back at the jigsaw job at the beginning, there are like six stages to that job. And so we move really quickly from one to the next, and it allows the solve, solve, solve, solve, solve problem, new problem, solve, new problem, which keeps that pace up. And we talked about that balcony scene in episode five with our Cool Gadget of bobby pins.
[00:19:47] Erin Nuttall: We, we did, and I actually think that's why people enjoy heist stories is because by their very nature you have a lot of different problems that come up one right after another. And they're solved quickly and frequently in a way that is unexpected. Like that balcony scene where the kids in the next door balcony are able to help her out.
And that's unexpected. And so it, it engages the reader in the puzzle. And yet I don't have to fully commit 'cause I know Ross can solve it. You know, as a reader, that may, that can make it really enjoyable. And it can help keep you actively engaged in the story.
[00:20:34] Anne-Marie Strohman: So we've looked at pacing chapters and creating that forward lean, and using multiple problems and puzzles that get solved fairly quickly to move the story along. But part of pacing too is where the events fall in the novel as a whole and looking at that whole structure I think can help us out with this and I know you love your percentages, so can you talk to us about how Lewis is pacing this overall structure?
[00:20:59] Erin Nuttall: Yeah. I know you were teasing me about my percentages just the other day. But I find them really helpful, at least the way my brain works and hopefully others. Because you might read this and think, yeah, okay, so I have quick pacing, but how do I put different pieces of the story together?
And so that's why I like to go through and look at the different percentages. So we have the hook where Ross is invited to the gambit right away at 1%. And then the inciting incident where her mom is kidnapped at 10%. And that's like Mom kidnapped/join the gambit 'cause that all happens really quick, right together and they're tied.
And then guess what? She's in the first game of the gambit at 13%, is when she is in the locked room. And that's really fast. We meet the thieves: 14%. And the romantic interest is introduced in 16%. So we have in the first less than 20%, we have everything we need to know going forward.
[00:22:04] Anne-Marie Strohman: Right, and we have really two worlds she's built too, right? We have Ross's family experience and then we move into the gambit. So she does a lot of setting in that less than 20%.
[00:22:16] Erin Nuttall: Right. And also as we've mentioned, there's the jigsaw job. There's stealing. We didn't even bring up stealing the money, I think it was, from the boat. I can't remember what they're stealing from the boat. There's so many action scenes.
[00:22:32] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yes.
[00:22:33] Erin Nuttall: Um, and then she's in the middle of the gambit. It's a lot right at the beginning. But if you look at how this is paced compared to even a hero's journey, you might see that a lot of it is very similar. You have a lot of the same touchstones. You know, it might take a little bit longer in a hero's journey to actually get started on that journey. But we do still have a lot of the same touchstones.
So going forward, we have the museum, which is the second game, at 21%. So we're still less than 25%. One of the big things that I noticed was the character reveal about Ross's character, how she was unwilling to leave Yeriel behind, even though it risked her own gambit loss. It risked her being able to save her mom. And that is a big character reveal. And I think that that's important, especially because she set up everything so nicely beforehand. So we see how important that is to Ross, and that's at 27%, which is about, so, like the 25% is usually when we break into act two.
It's usually when our journey begins and so you can look at it similarly. If you have something where you have a big important reveal in your action book that, if you hit around 25, 30%, then you're in a good zone, right? The train scene is 42%, and then when we have, you know, the big midpoint turn, that is when they're planning the heist at 50%.
[00:24:10] Anne-Marie Strohman: The sarcophagus heist.
[00:24:11] Erin Nuttall: Yeah, that's the heist in my mind because even though there are lot of heists…
[00:24:16] Anne-Marie Strohman: There are a lot of them.
[00:24:17] Erin Nuttall: That's the big one, right? And it's the one that ends up revealing a lot by the end. And so I think that that's an interesting place for it to start is 50% where, now we're looking at everything has changed.
Like if you're looking at a hero's journey, right? We get some new information at 64%. It's when she finds out more information about the people who run the gambit. And so she is able to take charge in ways that she hasn't been before. She's sort of been at their mercy and now she has new information. The handcuff to the balcony scene that we talked about earlier. That's like her big obstacle. And that's at 70%. And that is when Ross has the most difficulty, when she's by herself and has to solve a problem on her own right there. And that's, like I said, that she showed some regrets. She sobs, which we don't really see her do very often, and that's at 70%. Which I think is, we're going into the rising action that that is, is part of that. I feel like that that's an important obstacle for her to have right there. She and Devroe kissed at 80% and honestly I think that could be in a lot of different places, depending on who your character is and what their issues are.
But because Ross has so many issues with trust, I think that it's super important that it's this late. It takes her this long to decide that she's willing to do that. And then 88% Mom's first betrayal. And I'm reading the book and I'm like, oh no, this is it. We're at the, what is it? The night of…
[00:26:03] Anne-Marie Strohman: The dark night of the soul.
[00:26:03] Erin Nuttall: The dark night of the soul. That's what I thought when we got here. But then…
[00:26:09] Anne-Marie Strohman: We should say too, we're in the end game here, right? We're in the final task where they're individually competing to steal the person. To capture, kidnap, the person.
[00:26:18] Erin Nuttall: Yes, I did forget to, actually, I did forget to put that on there. I got so involved in the betrayal from the mom and in the kiss. Okay. Okay. All right. You caught me out. Well, and honestly, just thinking about, you know, would you be able to put that in a different spot with a different character?
And I do think you could, but for Ross, I feel like this is such a great— 'cause she's opening up, she's worked successfully to heist the sarcophagus with her team, she has this new information about people who run the gambit. So she is really high at that 80%. then her mom betrays her and then the gambit double crosses her. So mom is 88 and then the gambit double crosses her at 89%. Then we find out the big twist. I hope you've read the book. This is the biggest twist. Devroe betrays her.
[00:27:14] Anne-Marie Strohman: Which we talked about in an earlier episode, but it is a big twist.
[00:27:18] Erin Nuttall: And I will say part of that, I think, comes up because she's setting up another book. But still it's huge, especially because the kiss was at 80%. So Devroe’s betrayal is at 94%. And then we have Mom's second betrayal at 98%, which again is because she's setting up another book. I think normally we would, you'd be in your denouement here. But…at 98% you would hope.
[00:27:46] Anne-Marie Strohman: I do feel like the book feels like it lands at the end. The gambit is finished. There's a conclusion. There's stuff that sets up another book, but it's not dissatisfying.
[00:27:56] Erin Nuttall: I do think it is set up so that if she did not have a second book coming out, then you still get to be satisfied as a reader. You just think, oh, now she's wicked Ross, right. Or something. Right, because she trusts no one, not her family, not anyone.
[00:28:12] Anne-Marie Strohman: And it gives us that forward lean again. Like what is that Ross like?
[00:28:17] Erin Nuttall: Right. And that could just be, honestly, I find that a little delicious actually. If there was no second book and that was how she ended it, I think that is not your usual ending in YA.
[00:28:30] Anne-Marie Strohman: Mm-hmm . Mm-hmm
[00:28:31] Erin Nuttall: But I do find it kind of a fun way to go even if, even if there isn't one, but it's awesome to set up the second book that way.
[00:28:41] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah. Well, and it gives Ross a twist too, right? Mom has given a twist. Devroe has given a twist. Mom's given another twist, and now Ross gets a little twist at the end.
[00:28:52] Erin Nuttall: It is a way that she sort of, takes back the narrative, right? So I agree. I do find it really a fun way to end. I [00:29:00] would say with an action book, you may not need a very long denouement. I do think that for the Harry Potter books that denouement goes on a long time, like almost every book.
[00:29:12] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah. Well, when my son was, I think junior high, maybe early high school, he would read books and he would read through the climax and then just leave the book.
[00:29:20] Erin Nuttall: I get that.
[00:29:22] Anne-Marie Strohman: He would never read what happened at the end. I'm like, that's the best part, and he's like, I've zero interest. I know how it ends.
[00:29:28] Erin Nuttall: I get that. And I do think that it's fun. And what makes it possible, I will say, is because Lewis sets up the trust issues so well and continues hitting on that throughout the story and then, in a way, resolves the trust issue at the end. Not the way that you may hope, but definitely is still resolved. And so I think that is why it is so satisfying.
[00:29:56] Anne-Marie Strohman: So what did you learn from all these percentages? And I will note that we will put this list of events and percentages in the show notes so you can see them in front of your face.
[00:30:06] Erin Nuttall: What? You mean you don't expect people to be taking notes while they're driving and writing all my percentages out? 'Cause I expect it.
I talked about it a little already. I found it really interesting how the story still fit nicely into the general Western style storytelling that we are used to. And I think that should make it feel less daunting to someone who wants to try this and hasn't ever tried this kind of thing before. To see that we can still hit all of these big points and keep it chockfull of action and puzzles and car chases and emotional trust issues and still fit in that storytelling.
So if you are the type of person who, which I actually really am a lot of the time, who knows the big scenes. Then you can be like, okay, well, so my big scene for the turn at 50% is going to be X. And then, you know, your inciting incident, you’ll know that in an action book you'll want it earlier than you might want it in a hero's journey.
But you can kind of put those in the places and write to them. And to me that feels less daunting than being like, oh, I just gotta take care of this. All those actions see what happens. So, what about you? Did you get anything the percentages?
[00:31:30] Anne-Marie Strohman: Well, I think really in looking at the percentages, it's just trying to tell you how much time each thing should take up in the book. Right? And so if you have, say that initial jigsaw job heist was like 10% of the book. That would maybe feel long, especially at the beginning. But those percentages can say like, that's a 1 and 2%, and then we're moving on to the next bit.
So, kind of gauging how long each piece should be is what, if I twist it in my head like that, then it, it helps me. And knowing that the big heist starts at 50%...
[00:32:05] Erin Nuttall: Right.
[00:32:06] Anne-Marie Strohman: And goes through longer, I don't think I would've noticed that, but we understand how heists work because they've, I mean, 'cause we've seen heisty things, but also within the book, she gives us the template for heists over and over again. And then we get to sit in this longer delicious, higher stakes, higher complication heist for a longer percentage of the book.
[00:32:28] Erin Nuttall: Right. And honestly, before I did this, I would've put that big sarcophagus heist later. I would've thought it was closer to 65%. And I think that is because she does so much work in the beginning. Because we have, you know, the inciting incident is at 10%, but by the time Mom gets kidnapped, we've already had the jigsaw job. We already know how Ross feels about trust. We already know that Ross really wants to try to find some friends and get out of this lifestyle and be a little more normal. And then we have another heist where they're stealing from the boat. And then plus we know the plan that Ross has in her mind of how she's going to escape her own mother.
That's in the first 10% and because all of that is there I think it gives us more breathing room later. But yeah, knowing these percentages really helps me to understand, like you're saying, how long things should take.
[00:33:29] Anne-Marie Strohman: And as we talked about in our shifting desires episode, that Mom being kidnapped at 10%, like that really does have to happen early or we get invested in her desire for gymnastics camp so much that shifting over to the heist is harder.
[00:33:44] Erin Nuttall: Oh, for sure. And it's so funny 'cause as I was going through here the email that she gets from the gymnastics camp people like, Hey, are you coming? It almost jolted me. I was like, wait, I forgot about gymnastics camp.
[00:33:59] Anne-Marie Strohman: Which is good. You should forget about gymnastics camp. There are a lot bigger stakes.
[00:34:03] Erin Nuttall: There are definitely bigger stakes than gymnastics camp.
[00:34:08] Anne-Marie Strohman: So Erin, what are you taking away from today?
[00:34:11] Erin Nuttall: That is a good question. I feel like I learned a lot trying to figure out how this book was paced. And so I hope listeners have learned a few things. I think my biggest one is the varied puzzles. That was kind of a surprise to me that…Not necessarily that we needed varied puzzles, but that even the harder puzzles needed to be solved relatively quickly, and yet there are ways to make them feel hard so that the reader knows they're hard, which is not something I'd really noticed when I read through it the first time. What about you?
[00:34:46] Anne-Marie Strohman: I think I'm taking away the connection between pacing and tension. I think in a lot of craft books and craft conversations, they're kind of equated or like stuck together, and I’ve thought about them individually, but I haven't really thought about how they're connected. And that high tension can lead to choices that will feel a faster pace, the reader will feel a faster pace. So I wanna play around with tension and how it affects…
[00:35:11] Erin Nuttall: Yeah, I, I think that would be an interesting thing to play around with for sure. And we're actually gonna talk a little bit more about tension and pacing in our next episode where we look on a smaller level at a scene and how that is paced.
Okay, so Anne-Marie, what is this episode's Cool Gadget?
[00:35:30] Anne-Marie Strohman: So today's Cool Gadget is something we saw in our last episode on action. They’re Adra’s razor rings and like Noelia's credit card cutter in that same sequence, the rings are innocuous objects that have a more sinister side. And they’re yet another example of how brilliant Lewis is at setting things up. So when we first meet Adra, before we even know her name, Ross draws attention to her rings.
She says “she wore a ridiculous number of sparkling rings. At least one on each finger, very sharp rings.” That's kind of the end of a paragraph of description. So our attention's drawn to that. And then Ross calls her ring girl in the narration eight times in the next 10 pages, which I had completely forgotten about.
[00:36:15] Erin Nuttall: I did too, yeah.
[00:36:16] Anne-Marie Strohman: And in one example of those ring girl things Ross tells us “Ring girl flipped her ponytail while her rings twinkled. It was honestly one of the most effortlessly glam things I'd ever seen.” So she sees the rings in a positive light and it's kind of a marker of who Adra is. And then ironically, when these rings become razory for Ross, ironically, Ross has just swiped the museum ring from Noelia and fought her for it, and then Adra holds a blade at Ross's throat. She doesn't know that it's the ring, she just knows that it's sharp. Once she recognizes that it's Adra, she looks down and she sees that the blade is one of the razor rings.
And we looked at that fight in our last episode. If you haven't listened yet, you can hear in detail how that goes. But I wanna point out one clever moment. So after Ross wrenches the razor rings off Adra’s fingers, she gets distracted by Yeriel getting shot. And so Adra pushes Ross off, and then this is the narration.
“There was a subtle tug at my side. She was pickpocketing me. Life snapped back into me. No! Adra’s hand clenched. She was on her feet in an instant. ‘Thanks for the new ring,’ Adra winked.” Lewis halos Adra’s rings at the beginning by introducing them at that end of that paragraph, having Ross call her ring girl before she knows her name, and then playing with this idea that Ross has just stolen a ring from Noelia, and we get that wink at the end. And it feels very clever when I pull it out like that. I'm like, maybe this is too clever, but within the story, it feels really organic. There's a lot more going on, so it just feels like a touch instead of when I pull it out, it feels very obvious.
And especially because the museum ring is only one of many objects that are being stolen, so we don't really think anything of it being connected to this fight with ring girl until the end, or I didn't, at least. So. It's another example of Lewis' clever writing that feels seamless and organic.
[00:38:18] Erin Nuttall: It does definitely feel very seamless and organic, and I had not even noticed that until you pointed out that we have a fight over a ring and then the rings become the weapons, and then the ring is stolen. And yes, that is very clever and I think if Lewis only did it there, it would be obnoxious.
But because she does that kind of thing all the time it just feels organic like you're saying. And it feels like yeah, of course. Which is awesome. That's what I want. I want people to read my stuff and be like, yeah, of course. Of course it's clever.
[00:38:53] Anne-Marie Strohman: Of course. Of course. So that's it for today.
[Music outro]
[00:38:59] Anne-Marie Strohman: If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more content like this at kidlitcraft.com, where you can also sign up for the Ask the Author book club, classes, and our free workshop on emotions coming up March 29th. Find us on social media @KidLitCraft, and you can support this podcast on Patreon.
We've also got t-shirts and drink wear. And phone cases, and you can find those at Cotton Bureau. We'll put a link in the show notes.
[00:39:25] Erin Nuttall: Please download episodes; like, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen; and let your writer friends know about the podcast. We can't wait to nerd out with you.
[00:39:36] Anne-Marie Strohman: Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
