It’s All in the Timing

As an editor, I have the pleasure of working with writers of both short and long fiction, everything from microfiction all the way up to novels. These are very different beasts, different forms. Longer flash fiction is different to microfiction. Short stories are different again. As are novellas. But one thing that applies to all lengths of fiction is the importance of pacing. There is a difference between how time works in the real world and how time works in fiction. The number of words we dedicate to describing any one event is important and it is often something that I pick up on in my editing work, especially in how writers have tackled the biggest, most dramatic moments within their stories. I often find myself writing things like “does this description feel too hemmed in?” or “have you given yourself enough space here to do this moment justice?”

Since it it so universal between different forms and something that all writers struggle with at one point or another, I thought it would make a good focus for this month’s article.

Time in the real world versus time in fiction

In the real world, time is consistent. Seconds tick into minutes. Minutes tick into hours. They say that nothing is certain in life except death and taxes, but time feels pretty certain too. We know that three o’clock follows two o’clock. We know that the 3rd September follows the 2nd September (except, of course during the eleven day shift). Every week that passes contains the same number of days as the week before. Every day contains the same number of hours. If we were going to make a visual of what time looks like in the real world, it would perhaps look something like this:

Of course, that isn’t how we actually experience time. We all know that time flies when we’re having fun and drags when we’re not. On days where we have a hundred and one things to do, we suddenly look up and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. And on days where we’re waiting for something exciting to happen, time digs its heels in and scratches to a halt. So, our experience of time is not quite the same as reality. Any given minute can seem slower or faster than the one before. And our visual becomes something like this:

But this isn’t how things work in a story. One of the big differences real life and life within our stories is that stories generally demand a little more structure to them. A story has a focus to it. A narrative has an arc or journey that is travelling from A to B. Along with that narrative arc, we have an emotional arc. Things build up towards a dramatic event. And in order to make that upwards build as effective as possible, we often want to create an effect of time moving from fast to slow; something that perhaps looks like this:

So, we have the inverse of real life. The “boring”, non-important minute rushes past, but the exciting or dramatic minute is stretched outwards to its limits.

Within a microfiction or flash fiction, there might be one moment a writer is building towards, whereas in a short story, novella or novel, there might be multiple climactic moments. Generally, we want a sense of things getting bigger as we move towards the main climactic moment of a story, so in this scenario, the visual might become something like this:

That first minute in the first build might warrant one or two words whereas the minute represented in grey in the fourth build might warrant several thousand words, possibly slowing down time until it is almost at a standstill.

How do we slow down time?

It’s all very well and good for me to say, we need more word count in the pivotal moments of our stories. But there is a big difference between simply padding things out (and bogging a reader down in unnecessary detail) and growing the scene in an organic fashion (in order to heighten a reader’s engagement). The first feels like it would be as problematic as time rushing by too fast. But the second has the chance to deepen the emotional resonance and tension.

In The Art of Time in Fiction, Joan Silber puts it like this:

“Length is weight in fiction, pretty much. The longer something takes, the more emotionally important it is. In a movie, when a camera pauses over something, we know it’s crucial.” (p60)

Silber talks about time in different categories. She talks about “long time” where time is compressed either through summary or describing habitual action. And she talks about “slowed time” where a “very short piece of action is examined very, very closely.” She continues that, in slowed time, “we are not in the realm of event, we are in the realm of consciousness.” The central character we are following has become hyper-conscious of their world, hyper conscious of their thoughts, their feelings, their senses, their actions.

We look at these elements in my “Colourful Characters” course. There, we are focusing on creating depth to our characters. But there is an overlap between character development and pacing because it is in these pivotal moments that the truth about a character really comes to the fore. We see how they react, how they think, how they feel—and this shows a reader who they really are. How would they act if they’d just learnt they had six months left to live? How would they act if they’d just won the lottery?

From Silber’s suggestion above, we have four concrete things to focus on:

• Actions / body language. In any given moment, a character is doing so much with their body which a writer might observe. If the narrative perspective is looking at a character from outside in, what details might you pick out that suggest how a character is feeling? For example, a character experiencing fear would probably be tensed in some way. A character who is sad might have drooping shoulders. If the narrative perspective is internal, think about a character’s breathing or their body temperature. As a handy reference for bringing body language to life, why not download the “Body Language Bible” from my website?

• Senses. In moments of heightened emotion, we can often be more aware of what we see, hear, taste, smell and feel. To both slow down time and invite a reader to live this moment through your character’s eyes, think about these sensory details. What are they? What is the unique way that a character hears something or sees something or feels something? In the stretching out of a scene, can you touch on all five “basic” senses? To help with writing about the senses, you might like my “Sensory Inspiration” resource.

• Thoughts. Characters have an internal monologue accompanying them as they navigate their world. In the lesser moments, we probably don’t need to hear their thoughts. But as time stretches and the thing they are living through gains more impact, it feels as though delving deeper into internal thought is a good way of achieving that slow-motion effect on the page. On my “Colourful Characters” course, I get writers to ponder the different types of thought a character might have. We have analytical thoughts, random thoughts, hypothetical thoughts etc. The deeper you delve into those different varieties of thought, the more texture you will bring to your scene.

• The scenery. In the quote I’ve picked out above, Silber makes reference to the cinematographic, and I always think there’s a lot we can learn as writers from pondering filmic technique. When a camera lingers, a viewer has a lot longer to take in the scene and the same thing holds true for our fiction. One way of slowing down time is to simply admire the scenery. Where is a character? What is it like? In part, this comes back to those sensory details I’ve mentioned above, but it also involves description; what things do you choose to describe, and in what level of detail. On my “Glorious Words” course, we spend a whole topic focusing on specificity, but in a nutshell, I think we want to describe the most important elements (to a character or situation) in rich detail and leave everything else in broader brushstrokes. So, if a character has just stumbled upon a magic portal to another dimension, then that portal would probably warrant a full description whereas the precise colour of the grass underneath it probably wouldn’t.

How much is too much?

How do we know how much to slow down time? At what point do we risk boring our reader? I think we’re all wary of letting our stories roll past too slowly because we don’t want our reader to start yawning. We certainly don’t want to bog them down before the story has got going. But if we’ve done our jobs correctly then once we’ve set up the tension and intrigue of a story, a reader will thank us in the long run for making them wait to find out what happens, for immersing them in these pivotal, important moments rather than just saying, “And then he died then they had a funeral then Cara was sad then she got on with her life…”

Most of us tend to underwrite the pivotal moments of stories. Many of us underwrite them by a lot. So, my advice would be to remove that worry about boring your reader from your head and to challenge yourself to either revisit a piece from your archive or start a new story and have a go at stretching out the climactic moments for as long as you can. Can you make it a third or even half the word count? I always think learning how to write is a lot like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”. We need to experience too little and too much before we can find just right.

New story

I had a new story published towards the end of last month where I allowed myself to wallow around in my love of words and word invention. I *may* (if I’m feeling well enough) run a workshop on word creation later in the year:

Green to the nubbing-cheat (Matt Kendrick | Gone Lawn)

New essay

I’ve also published an essay about my illness for anyone who would like to know more about living with “Trevor”:

Two-thousand-two-hundred-and-thirty-one Days Under the Weather

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