Pace

3 Key excerpts on "Pace"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  On Editing

  How to edit your novel the professional way

  • Helen Corner-Bryant, Kathryn Price(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • John Murray

    (Publisher)

  7 Pacing, tension, overwriting and cutting

  Perfect pacing means knowing your material inside out. Not only do you need to make each scene carry the right weight, but you also need to exercise restraint and subtlety when it comes to pacing your plot – often a big ask when you have a lot of surprises you’re keen to reveal. By listening to your writing’s heartbeat you’ll learn to feel when a scene should be speedy or slow; and by forcing yourself to keep your story’s secrets for as long as possible you’ll ensure that there’s a constant thread of tension pulling your reader onwards.

  Pacing is often one of the last things an author thinks about. It tends to be the area that we, as readers, are least aware of – whilst we may judge characters or writing style, we don’t regularly think, gosh that was well-Paced. But readers are conscious of the pacing, whether we realize it or not: we all know that feeling of being swept along by an exciting action sequence; or the frustrating sense of stasis when a story’s going nowhere. Using pacing, the writer can control these responses, guiding us through the action at an appropriate rate.

  There are two levels to pacing. Firstly, it provides a heartbeat for your scenes and chapters, dictating how fast the action moves, minute-by-minute. This is partly about tension – how much conflict, threat, and mystery is present in a scene, and how much it grips us. But it’s also about prioritizing your material: what is each scene doing, and how much weight do you want to give it? Big, important moments need more time spent on them.

  Secondly, pacing acts as an overarching pulse for the story and again, here, tension plays a big part. A story that’s full of questions, leading us inexorably towards their answers, will grab a reader, whereas one that lays out everything upfront creates less motivation to read on. Prioritizing your material is important here too: deciding what a reader absolutely needs

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Aggressive Fictions

  Reading the Contemporary American Novel

  • Kathryn Hume(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  NARRATIVE SPEED IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION

  Many contemporary novels subject their readers to a breathless sense that the events are hurtling by too fast for real understanding. Scenes and focal figures change quickly, and helpful transitions are missing. The resultant feeling of excessive rapidity is what I mean by narrative speed, and for many readers, this speed produces frustration and serious discomfiture. This effect occurs so frequently in contemporary fiction, and its mechanics are so readily grasped, that it seems a good place to start investigating fiction that denies readers their expected comforts. The immediate lesson to be learned? Relax. Give up the assumption that you must control a text. Then, perhaps, you can enjoy it.

  Why has speed become a commonplace in fiction? What effects do authors seek by using it? Why do they refuse to supply the connections and transitions that would help their readers? These questions confront readers of numerous recent novels, and they invite us to ask how one might best understand speed as a narrative technique and as a factor that makes readers feel rebuffed or even attacked. Narrative theory to date seems to offer relatively little insight into these problems. Critics have so far theorized Pace (fast or slow) in just four basic fashions: (1) prose portrayal of physical speed; (2) narrative retardation; (3) the amount of story time covered per page; and (4) fictional reflections of cultural speed.

  Critical concern with portraying physical speed focuses on the modernist fascination with the sensation of speed and how to represent it in painting, sculpture, and writing. This is only marginally relevant to the kind of frantic narrative I am trying to analyze, because narrative speed does not necessarily increase as one describes physical speed, though the two sometimes coincide. Thomas De Quincey’s prose, for example, actually slows down as he attempts to catalog the sensations of fear provoked by a speeding mail coach. One significant connection between mechanical speed and prose speed has been helpfully analyzed by Stephen Kern.1 In exploring the speed-up mechanisms of the modernist era—bicycle, telegraph, telephone, car, and film—he notes that reporters wired stories to their newspapers. He attributes to this practice the paring away of unnecessary words, the “telegraphic” style that gains recognition in the writing of Ernest Hemingway.2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Art of the Cut

  Conversations with Film and TV Editors

  • Steve Hullfish(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Any good storyteller has a sense of both rhythm and pacing. My dad used to tell this particular ghost story around the campfire when I was a kid. It started slowly, mysteriously. His speech was slow. The exposition of the story was slow. It built a sense of mystery and expectation. But then, as he started to build towards the climax of the story, his sentences got shorter. His delivery got faster and faster. Then as the final revelation was about to occur … a pause for dramatic effect … and the release of suspense. All pacing and rhythms.

  A joke is essentially just a very short story, and we all know that with a joke, timing is everything. Timing in this case is all about the Pace of the telling and the rhythm of the release and punchline. Even a comic with a seemingly monotone delivery, like Steven Wright, has a tremendous sense of pacing as he sets up and reveals information. Many of the jokes have a lightning fast delivery of exposition followed by a Paced delivery of multiple punchlines or points where the audience needs to come to a realization of something.

  “The audience needs some sense of both predictability and surprise.”

  So when you think about what it means to Pace your edit or have rhythm, consider that this doesn’t mean that you have the ability to make a cut on a beat. Consider that the audience needs some sense of both predictability and surprise. In music, pacing is often defined merely as tempo. Yet, tempo is merely the base time against which the rest of the music plays out.

  The tempo of a piece of music may stay completely consistent throughout, but the music can still be Paced, with sections of eighth or sixteenth notes followed by the release of a whole note or rest.

  Dance has pacing and rhythm as well. Dancers and choreographers do not simply make a movement or step on every single beat. The beautiful flow of a well-choreographed dance is something we can all aspire to as editors. Dance rushes forward, then holds, then flows elegantly, then spins and drives. Some things happen on the beat, and there are times when beats go by with no motion … the movement is suspended for a moment, not arbitrarily, but in a deliberate, Paced way. When has the audience had enough speed? When does the eye need to rest on a beautifully held form in preparation for the next rush of movement or subtle gesture?

  Pacing is Musical

  Hullfish

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book