Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, and today I am here with Joshua Esso, long-established,

wonderful fiction editor. I had him on a couple years ago to talk about his book mood and

atmosphere, which you may remember. Well, today he has a new book about pacing. And so we're going to talk all about

that. And if you're not a fiction writer, you're still going to love it because we're going to

talk about all your favorite books and movies and how they do this well and maybe sometimes not so

well. Joshua, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Hi, thank you for having me back.

Yeah, I'm always excited to talk with you.

Yeah, same here.

Wonderful.

So pacing is this whole, you know, additional thing that can make a book work or a movie work or not work.

What are some of the movies or books that you've seen that do pacing just especially well?

I think there are a lot, but one that I was specifically thinking about just yesterday was a movie called Memento.

Oh, yeah. Have you seen it?

Yes, I loved that.

It's an amazing movie. It is a masterclass in storytelling. And what that particular movie does is it starts at the end and then each scene works backwards in time. And it sounds really wonky. I understand that. But the way that it was put together tells such a compelling story. It

somehow manages to create the momentum in the storytelling moving backwards, and it keeps you hooked.

It keeps you trying to guess what's going to happen. And instead of wondering actually what's

going to happen, you wonder, how did that happen?

How did the events that I'm looking at right now come to be?

And you keep watching to see the origination of all of those things.

Yeah, that movie was an absolute trip.

And you can imagine, when you hear the concept, it could have been a complete disaster.

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