Pacing

In literature, pace or pacing "is the speed at which a story is told," which is "not necessarily the speed at which the story takes place." The working rule: word count reflects an event's importance, not its duration. Genre sets the expectation, comedies and action running faster than drama and suspense, and the tools split by direction. To speed up: dialogue, action, short sentences and short scenes, active voice, skipped steps and cut words. To slow down: description, narration and introspection. Effective stories weave the registers and balance fast against slow, because constant action produces monotony, and most stories err on the slow side.

For serial writers pacing is the retention mechanism: each chapter has to land enough change to justify the reader coming back, and the chapter ending is the pressure valve, the cliffhanger. The usual drag is undigested exposition, delivered before the reader needs it.