100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 3)

52) What to Do with Quiet Scenes

I thought I'd actually veer back onto the main road for a bit by writing a section on technique, and last night I saw a question on the Improve Your Writing Club forum that made me think some people might wonder about it too. 

(Also, one day, I'll write about writing short sentences.) 

(And not using too many brackets.) 

(Kidding.) 

(Sort of.)

AAAAAAaaaaaaanyway. The question was about writing the quiet scenes in a story. See, a lot of people struggle with writing them in a way that isn't boring. And it's an important thing to know, because quiet scenes are vital to a story's pacing. 

I've already written about Pacing in Part 1 (Section 25), since the pace at which you're telling your story could end up being one of the major foundations to the story's tension. To recap, the function served by pacing is by revealing new information and events at just the right pace to keep the reader immersed. 

Both slow and fast pacing can achieve this, as long as the pacing is neither too fast nor too slow. Slower paced stories tend to have more of what I call quiet scenes, but this does not mean that a slow-paced story is automatically more boring than a fast-paced one. 

As I'm writing this, I'm thinking about tuning a guitar. The story will be the sound a guitar makes, while the individual strings would be the tension of the story. Guitars can be tuned into different chords, which all sound different from each other (and give the listener a different feeling) just like stories can be adjusted to feel different from each other. Adjusting the pacing is like tuning the guitar. For the chords to sound the way they're supposed to (or the story to feel like it's supposed to/immerse the reader), each string must individually hit the right note. 

Sometimes, no matter how high you want the pace of your book to go, you're going to need to relax the pacing for some things in order to make everything in the story work right. 

This is where those quiet scenes come in. They ease back the pacing in order to fulfill one or all of these broad functions: 

To give both the reader and the characters a moment to catch up and reflect on what had happened up to that point. 

I don't know about you, but I hate when something major happens (say, a beloved character dying), but the story never allows that moment for it to sink in. 

Especially when that also means that essentially, it doesn't give the character time to react with the right amount of emotion to what had happened. Instead, it gives the reader a sense of Oh, my best friend in the whole wide world died, but I'm kind of busy here, so...

Or the whole world has fallen apart, but all the characters ever do is hop from one battle for survival to the other without actually taking stock of what has been lost. 

Simply put, this doesn't work. If the reader isn't given the chance to feel with the character, he/she isn't as invested in the outcome, and people just don't feel as much when things just keep happening. So to keep a reader invested, there must be a moment or two in which the reader and character can come to terms with everything. 

To provide a more effective means of sharing new information.

By more effective, I mean more likely to make the information stick in the reader's mind. Think about it this way... If you're sprinting down a street after... let's say a guy who stole your mother's hand-bag. What do you notice?