Lecture 19: Pacing In Scences and Narratives

Every narrative has a tempo. Some stories are fast-paced and breathless, some are slow and meditative, and as always, there's a vast middle ground of narratives where the tempo varies throughout the work, depending on what the writer is trying to evoke at a particular moment. In fiction, this tempo is called pacing a rather slippery concept because it's so subjective. Some readers crave constant action and clever plot twists, while others want a story that lingers over the intimate details of a character's sensibility and relationships. Given that no book can be all things to all readers, the trick for the writer becomes finding the right tempo, or variety of tempos, for his or her particular story.

Introduction To Pacing

Pacing in fiction encompasses two levels: the pace of the narrative as a whole and the pace of individual chapters and scenes. Both of these ways of looking at pacing are based on a sort of proportion or balance. Indeed, the essence of pacing is a kind of juggling act, by which writers gauge how much information they want to get across, how many words or pages they have to do it in, and how much patience they hope the reader has.

One feature of pacing a writer must address is the length of time a story or scene takes in the world of the narrative versus the time it takes for someone to read it. On the whole, a long book that depicts a short period of time will probably be slower paced than a short book or a short story that depicts a long period of time.

But length itself is not a reliable measure of the pace of a narrative. You also have to consider the balance between the length of the story and the number of incidents and characters within it. We might call this the density of the narrative.

A third kind of balance to consider is that between action and exposition or between scene and summary.

In most narratives, the writer shifts back and forth between modes of storytelling. On the one hand, writers usually dramatize the most important and interesting events as separate scenes, with the full complement of action, dialogue, and setting. On the other hand, writers often need to get across a good deal of important background or expository information that isn't necessarily very dramatic.

Expository passages often stand outside the time sequence of the narrative such as when you pause the action to describe a setting or to tell a character's backstory—or you might simply summarize a long period of time in a few paragraphs in order to get the characters quickly from one place to another or from one dramatic moment in the story to the next.

Pacing A Whole Narrative

Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich opens with a short chapter in which a group of Ivan Ilyich's fellow lawyers talk about his recent death. After that, Tolstoy spends the next 11 pages or so of this 50-page narrative summarizing the events of the first 44 years of Ivan's life. The son of a civil servant, he becomes a civil servant himself, and his professional life is devoted to rising through the bureaucracy, while his personal life is devoted to social climbing, marriage, and fatherhood.

The overall effect of the story depends on Tolstoy convincing us of Ivan's ordinariness, but because the first 44 years of his life are the least dramatic part of the story, Tolstoy summarizes them at a rapid clip. He tells us what we need to know-and no more as quickly and efficiently as possible.

About halfway through the novella, Ivan falls off a ladder, and his injury leads to a mysterious illness that ends up killing him only three months later. Suddenly, this Everyman's life has become dramatic, and having raced through the first 44 years of his life in 11 pages, Tolstoy spreads his last three months out over 35 pages. The pace slows, and there's a greater amount of detail and a sharper focus on his day-to-day moments as Ivan weakens. As the story reaches Ivan's last day, it slows down even more, devoting the last page and a half to the final hour of his life.

Except for the opening chapter, The Death of Ivan Ilyich starts out as fast-paced exposition and becomes slower and more dramatic as it goes on, until the end, where it lingers over the very last moment in Ivan Ilyich's life.

Let's compare this story with Alice Munro's "The Beggar Maid." This story goes for 33 pages, the first 30 of which depict the first year of the relationship between its two main characters, Patrick and Rose.

Instead of segregating the exposition and putting it all at once at the beginning, the way Tolstoy does, Munro shifts effortlessly back and forth between vividly dramatized moments and sharp passages of exposition.

At the center of the story is a fully dramatized scene in which Rose breaks up with Patrick, which is then followed by a more expository scene in which she changes her mind. Then, in the last three pages of the story, Munro summarizes Rose and Patrick's unhappy 10-year marriage in five paragraphs before giving us a final scene 9 years after their divorce: They see each other in the airport in Toronto, and Rose is shocked when Patrick makes a hateful face at her, a "timed explosion of disgust and loathing."

The nature of Alice Munro's "The Beggar Maid" dictates the story's pacing, starting slow and speeding up to lead us to the devastating scene at the airport in the end.

The pacing and the balance between action and exposition of each of these stories reflect the different intents of their authors.

Tolstoy wants to show us that most of Ivan Ilyich's life has been shallow and selfish; thus, he races through the first 44 years in order to linger on the last three months, when Ivan's suffering allows him to feel compassion for his wife and son in his last moments. In order to do this, the novella needs to start at a rapid pace and slow down as it goes, reflecting Ivan's own moral and spiritual journey.

In "The Beggar Maid," however, Munro is more like a lawyer building a case. To prepare for that focused moment of loathing on the last page, she needs to show in slow, patient, dramatic detail why Patrick and Rose should never have married in the first place and why they did anyway. Having done that, she can then fast-forward through the marriage itself and through the 9 years after it before dramatizing the final encounter.

Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries is set during a gold rush on the west coast of New Zealand during the 1860s, and it has a complicated plot involving secrets, conspiracies, and betrayals. Interestingly, Catton chooses not to dramatize many of the most striking scenes-including a shipwreck and a possible murder-and, instead, structures the novel as a series of long conversations between various combinations of her large and diverse cast of characters.

During these conversations, the buried plot of the novel is slowly revealed. There are a few passages of scene setting and action, and in nearly every chapter, Catton pauses the conversation to tell us something about the history or psychology of one or more of the characters in it. But on the whole, the novel moves at a steady and unvarying pace, as the reader eavesdrops on these conversations in real time.

In the end, the novel is more about the nature of storytelling itself-about how people construct reality out of the stories they tell each other-than it is about the working out of the actual mystery.

Written by a veteran of World War I under the shadow of World War II, The Lord of the Rings is a narrative about the end of one world and the dawn of a new one and the effect of the cataclysm on both individuals and whole races of people.

Because he wishes to immerse us in this epic tale, Tolkien varies the pace throughout the book, letting us know what's important and what's mere background or scene setting by slowing down and dramatizing the most important moments and summarizing the less important ones.

Unlike Catton, whose intent is more postmodern and cerebral, Tolkien's intent is to allow the reader to visit Middle Earth and participate in its history. Thus, he skillfully varies the pace, alternating thrilling or dramatic scenes with passages of exposition or backstory, partly to give the reader a breather and partly to prepare us for what comes next.

Pacing Individual Scenes

How a scene is paced depends partly on its function in the narrative as a whole and partly on the author's intent: Is it important or not? Is it inherently dramatic or not?

Scenes that introduce new characters to a narrative tend to be played out at a slow pace, in real time. This is also true of scenes of domestic life that are intended to show the characters at home, in a setting that is familiar to them.

In contrast, intensely dramatic or violent scenes can be played out either fast or slow, depending on your intent. At the end of Melville's Moby-Dick, for example, Captain Ahab and the crew of the whaling ship Pequod chase the great white whale for three days, and the suspense is stretched out for 40 pages. But then, Ahab's death happens in a flash. The effect is shocking and ruthless a dazzling example of how a sudden shift in pacing can open the abyss at the reader's feet.

Slowing the pace of a scene can allow you to wring the last bit of suspense or mystery out of it. In John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the aging spy George Smiley has been assigned to discover the identity of a Soviet double-agent, who has been working at the highest level of British intelligence for 30 years.

The book's pace varies throughout, but in its climactic scene, Smiley is hiding with a gun in the kitchen of a safe house, where he has lured the double-agent. He knows that the next voice he hears will tell him which of his trusted friends and colleagues is a traitor. At this point, le Carré slows the narrative down, telling us every detail, making us sweat alongside Smiley.

The events in this passage an unseen man coming to the door and Smiley's racing thoughts—would take only a few seconds in real life, but le Carré almost cruelly slows them down, making us wait for the big reveal.

Writing Exercise Prompt
Select one incident from something you've written and try writing it several different ways-as a summary, as a close third-person narrative, er as a long dialogue scene; take note of how the difference in pace and approach changes the effect. Then compare the results and see which one best serves the intent of the narrative you've written.