Pacing has been much on my mind lately. One of the students in the undergrad creative writing class I TA for is having awful trouble figuring it out, and I've been trying to explain it in every way I can think of. I've been looking for examples of good pacing and bad pacing. I've been hypercritical about pacing.
The pacing in There, There is interesting. The story is, of course, told in sort of montages, so we're just getting glimpses of the characters lives, but sometimes these glimpses span years. A lot of the "chapters" are sort of backstory, preparing us for the big event, the most active part of the story, The Powwow. The powwow section of the book spans pages 227 to 290. WOW! That's 22% of the book covering about an hour in real time! He's taking us through all of this movement, these hugely tense moments, and he's spending a long time giving us every detail, giving us a blow-by-blow of every characters' thoughts and feelings and actions. And it's tense. It's scary. And the detail doesn't bog it down. Of course, a lot of the reason he can go on with the same scene for so long is because it is told from several points of view, but even with that, 63 on one scene is a lot! It is a lot to dedicate without boring the reader and it felt like proof that stretching out the details during important scenes, stretching out the action, can really improve the work.
I was interested in the details he gave, too, because they weren't just physical and emotional. There was backstory in the details, too. It was really moving. The way he did Tony's scene in particular got to me, his movement into the memory of his grandmother and a happy childhood moment with her moving forward to a peaceful death borne of violence and rendered in beautiful prose: "Tony needs to be light now. Let the wind sing through the holes in him, listen to the birds singing. Tony isn't going anywhere. And somewhere in there, inside him, where he is, where he'll always be, even now it is morning, and the birds, the birds are singing" (290).
Hilary, I really like what you’re thinking about with pacing, and I agree that it seems bananas to focus such a good chunk of the book on such a specific moment. I appreciate that you address the reason it takes up so much time, the shifting perspectives. In a way, the entire story is about the powwow, even the sections that happen years and years before the powwow takes place, because readers need to understand the significance of the powwow to each character. The last 63 pages feels like a hyper awareness of these differing significances. I’ll admit that while I was reading I wasn’t focused on the pacing of the story, so I appreciate you calling my attention to it. The pacing allowed room for the narrative to be rounded out by the characters, not “bogged down.” Thank you for your thoughts!
ReplyDeleteI like this blog because it does seem like the whole book is really about the powwow, everything leading up is to set tension and build character. I think I didn't realize it before reading your post. Makes the meandering POVs even more inventive since they really do go together at the end. Like it's a trick that we "get" in that 22% of the book.
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