Stories don’t always need to have a fast-paced plot to stay interesting. At the same time, you don’t want to send your readers to sleep with lengthy passages that go nowhere. Follow these 5 tips if you want to make sure your story stays compelling, even if nothing much is happening on the surface.

1. Relish the language. Don’t just describe things without thinking – do it as creatively as possible. Vibrant and creative language can do a lot to capture, and keep, a reader’s attention. Check out work by Vladimir Nabokov to see how this is done.
2. Break the story up into smaller pieces. Have very short and digestible chapters, or sections; these can add to the feeling of a faster pace. Kurt Vonnegut is brilliant at this, so read his books for an example.
3. Skip ahead in time. Don’t feel like you have to describe every moment in painstaking detail. It might be enough to just skip to the important events, even if they happen days (or more) apart.
4. Focus on writing good, pacey dialogue. Cormac McCarthy does this very well, and this allows him to get away with lots of very long-winded and grandiose landscape descriptions.
5. Slow-paced doesn’t have to mean a lack of tension or drive. Make sure there is at least a little bit of conflict, or disharmony, whenever possible. This keeps our interest because we want to see how things are resolved, even if the tension is only something small, like that our protagonist is slightly uncomfortable because the weather is hot.

Have fun writing!