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Lecture 19: Pacing In Scences and Narratives

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.