Pacing and Time
Some thoughts on the difference between Narrative Time and Duration
Pacing (sometimes also known as Narrative Time) is how quickly the story unfolds, and has a lot to do with the reader's experience of the story: when they learn what information, how swiftly and in what context. The duration of the story, as measurable by calendar or clock time — sometimes called "real time" or "story time" — is the quantifiable span of time over which the story takes place from beginning to end (one could further quibble over whether to include all flashbacks in this timespan).
You can have all sorts of combinations, when it comes to Pacing and Story Duration, and pretty much any of them can work. Though "fast-paced" is often associated with commercial success and considered a virtue, and “slow-paced” may be associated with more “literary” styles, it’s not that simple. Many excellent, commercially successful texts unfold at a slow pace, and vice versa. A few examples will help clarify the distinctions:
Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a fast paced story that unfolds over a short period of time (a single day).
Two very different fast paced works that unfold over long time periods: David Copperfield, which carries Dickens's semi autobiographical narrator from childhood through adulthood, largely telling the story in chronological order, and Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, which spans more than a decade but generates its swift pace through short chapters, dramatic action, and point-of-view and time shifts.
Famously slow-paced works that unfold over a short periods of time include Joyce's Ulysses and "The Dead," Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, and Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine.
Two slow paced stories that take place over long time frames: Proust's In Search of Lost Time and (not quite so long a time frame) W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn)
And finally, a reminder that no book or story need stick to a single rubric: the temporal hybrid form of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in which the first and last parts unfold at a slow pace over short periods of time while the central "Time Passes" section moves through a long period of time (a decade) at a comparative gallop.
Technically, what makes the pace slower? Longer sentences, longer paragraphs and longer scenes; more interiority and more flashbacks (or as Joan Silber calls them in her excellent guide The Art of Time in Fiction, “switchbacks”). The pace seems faster when there is more action, more suspense (often created by withholding or omitting information or skipping time), events moving clearly forward, less interiority.
PROMPTS
A few tasks to try when evaluating the time scheme and pacing of a project:
Write out a strictly chronological list of the major events and also an alpha to omega "playlist" of your scenes in the order in which they occur in your text (include as many flashbacks here as you feel like charting – the level of detail is up to you and what's useful to you in getting an oversight of your work).
Annotate the "playlist" with page length and an indication of how important the scene is in your story. Analyze the number of pages spent on the various scenes and whether the space you devote accords with the importance of the scene.
Consider that in some stories, some pivotal, pace and plot driving events take up zero (or almost zero) page space, as they happen off-stage and function as black holes at the center of narrative galaxies, organizing the story without being directly visible.
Pay attention to your sentence, paragraph, scene and chapter lengths. Shorten them when you want things to move along at a quicker pace. With the possible exception of chapter length, where I think regularity is often a virtue and appreciated by most readers, attempt to introduce a certain amount of variety, if you find you are extremely consistent. Nothing puts a reader to sleep like a metronome. Even better if you can find patterns in those variations:for example, you might try to make your sentences or paragraphs mostly of medium length, punctuated by occasional staccato or extended passages, at somewhat regular intervals.
If you enjoy The Engines of Narrative, or know someone who would, you might be interested in the prose workshop of the same name, led by me three times a year in the free, member-supported virtual writers space The 24-Hour Room. It’s generative, supportive and challenging. The Summer 2024 session will take place Wednesday evenings (ET) from June-August. Find out more here.