Pacing is the fine art of writing a story so that everything happens when and as it should. Your work has a rhythm, is composed of a series of events that must occur for the story to get from beginning to end, and good pacing means that each event has been placed in the timeline where it best fits. Good pacing means not rushing through events, letting them develop enough to give everything a proper amount of time and attention. It means never lingering too long on the areas that need little development or may bore the reader or both.

Sometimes pacing depends on what kind of story you're writing. Different kinds of stories build themselves in different ways, to different goals, and determining what kind of story you're writing is the first step towards knowing how to lay things out at a proper pace. Genre novels conform to specific guidelines. Mainstream novels conform to certain patterns, depending on the subject matter of the novel. For example, mystery novels are paced in stages. You begin with a 'wham' event, a small one, that introduces the mystery to be solved. In television terms, this is the teaser, the opening scene that plays before the credits. Then you introduce your characters, with more or less time depending on how well known you expect them to be to your readers, and you begin the action. You should have two or at most three more 'wham' events in your story, and the action should rise towards each of these. Again, if you correspond the outline of your novel to the script of a television episode, your 'wham' events will be the moment right before the commercial break that are designed to keep the audience on that channel or, in your case, keep the reader turning pages. After that there's a brief pause and down-shift of tension, a high-suspense scene of a stalking or the adrenaline-surge-inducing discovery of another body followed by a moment of calm and maybe even relief. The conclusion of the mystery will be brief and consist of a one-scene 'wham' event, followed by one or two scenes at most of wrap up in which everything is explained and the characters are allowed to recover a little bit from the events of the book.

Epic fiction, usually found in the science fiction/fantasy genre, consists of three major stages with a varying number of sub-stages, and is most commonly found in the monomyth pattern. The monomyth, also known as the Hero's Journey, was developed and highlighted by Joseph Campbell in 1949, and the most common manifestation of this pattern is found in the Star Wars trilogy. If you divide the whole work into quarters the first stage is usually one quarter length, the second stage is one half, and the third stage is one quarter again. In the first stage you have the Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, and then the Call hunts you down and beats you until you comply. Perhaps not quite that aggressively but it has become more and more common for the following stages of the first third (Supernatural Aid, the Crossing of the First Threshold, the Belly of the Whale) to become more violent and separate the protagonist more decisively than it has in the past. Adventures are then had, the rule of three tends to dominate, lessons are learned depending on what you want your main character to do or what puzzles he or she has to solve. The conclusion varies somewhat more than the outset. Sometimes the hero doesn't want to go back, sometimes the hero must make a daring last minute escape, it varies. The hero must then either return home or to the new home he or she has made, and reconcile who he or she is now with that home environment.

Romance follows a pattern that, while not exactly similar in exact structure, is nearly identical to the mystery genre in that the greatest part of works follow the guideline. I've heard a rumor that certain publishing houses have page by page guidelines where the hero or heroine is introduced by page X, barriers to the romance are introduced by page Y, etc. Lacking such a style guide in front of me, the overall structure of the romance novel roughly follows a smoother bell-type curve: introduce the protagonist (usually a heroine but sometimes a hero) and describe their life in a few scenes or couple of chapters, introduce the love interest who always comes first. Increase the attraction and tension, or possibly just the tension if it starts out as one of those hate to love them relationships, slowly escalating till you reach the peak of the curve, where everything not only seems to be going well, but is also full of joyous energy because, hey, love! Then the obstacles become a factor, and the energy shifts down again, until the point where all the barriers are in place and everything seems lost. The length of the section where victory and happily ever afters are pulled out of the jaws of certain defeat tends to vary between everything solved in a single scene, to some sort of trigger moment that causes a chain of solutions over several scenes; you can pick and choose depending on what seems most appropriate to your work. And then, as with mystery, the concluding scene that sums everything up and ties off the loose ends. The ones that aren't sequel hooks.

Comedy is very hard to write in an entire novel. Because comedy depends on not taking things too seriously or presenting serious problems, it rules out the majority of plots as they usually develop. Contrived stupidity is the most common source of plot tension or conflict in a comedy work, with improbable coincidence being next highest on the list. For this, your best bet is to pace a longer work like a series of interconnected short stories, more like a 'braided' novel than an anthology. Literary wit should be snappy, jokes should be swift and no longer than a sentence or two or even a single phrase, and may refer back to themselves as the work goes on. Alternatively, you could do what a number of authors do and couch a mystery, romance, or action story in a comedic style. In those cases, the pacing would come from the underlying structure's genre and the dialogue and description style would come from a comedic standpoint.

For general fiction, there is no one rule of thumb. Everything takes as long as it needs to to make a point. Dialogue in and of itself should not go on for more than three lines or so without a point or purpose, something to establish within the story or to set a mood or forward the plot. Things that might be established include character attributes, setting descriptions, moods or conflicts or history. These are all reasons to have your characters have a dialogue. Action should rise throughout the work, whereby action refers to active, usually transitive verbage and conflict that is pushing the plot forward in some way, working towards an ending. The conflict can be mental, physical, or emotional. Openings of longer works should hook the reader within two pages but do not necessarily have to be active; they can be stylistic or character driven. Closings and wrap-up should take no more than two scenes.

In short, the structure and pacing of a work very much depends on what kind of work it is. The central conflict of a story determines how fast or slow the action moves, so choose your genre and your conflict wisely, and handle it with care. Pace is one of the most difficult aspects of writing to master, but it will either help your story or hamstring it and maybe kill it entirely.

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Dialect and Language
Applying Writing Advice
Tenses and Person

Outlines
Research
Pacing
Personal Style
Tell the Story