posted
I hope I phrase this question right. I am struggling with the difference between the physical time that passes in a scene versus the readers emotional perception of that time. To give an example from the story I'm working on.
I have a character (with cable modem equiv.) who exchanges two volleys of one line emails. (The type when you are both online at the same time.) She then has a chat session that is seven lines long. In between all of this there is a lot of emotional work happening. I've given her eight minutes to play this out. Tight, but reasonable. The problem is that when people read it, they feel like it would be half an hour at least.
Another example, in the opposite direction, I have read several published books, which do things like have characters drink five cups of tea in the course of ten lines of continous dialogue while they wait three hours. You know the things I'm talking about.
How do you fix the perception of time while not messing up the actual time? I think that's the question I want to ask. I might also be asking, "Does anyone else have this problem?"
posted
It's a problem a lot of people have. In fact, I think it's one of the problems at the base of "show, don't tell."
When you "show" a scene, you have to try to convey it as it happens (in what I've heard called "real time"), and that can be tricky if there is a lot going on.
When you "tell" part of the story, you are trying to convey stuff that takes longer to happen than it does to tell--you crunch all that happens into a relatively few words.
The real struggle comes when so much is happening that it takes longer to read it than it does for it to happen. (Movie makers use slow-motion montages as one way to deal with this--to make sure that the viewer "gets" everything that happens. Readers can go back and reread something that isn't quite clear, but viewers in a movie theater can't go back until they get the movie on VHS--can you "rewind" DVDs? Our DVD player only lets you stop the whole thing and go to the scene menu and start from the beginning of a scene.)
The problem you've brought up, MaryRobinette, where something that reads relatively quickly gives the reader the impression that it takes longer than you intend for it to take may indicate a problem with "telling" or there may be some other clarification problem.
Most "showing" should be perceived by the reader to take the same amount of time to happen as it does for the reader to read about it happening. If you want to speed up the reader's perception, you may have to try using shorter words, shorter sentences, clipping sentences (leaving out words like articles), etc.
posted
This may be a case where you must adjust your writing style to fit the scene. These emotions come quickly and probably deserve very short descriptions, maybe even one word sentences.
I suggest you check out anything written by Anne Tyler. Her characters spend a lot of time exchanging dialogue and feeling emotions at the same time. Somehow Tyler communicates the emotion quickly without interrupting the conversation.
posted
The point about writing style is well-taken and, in fact, part my problem with this particular example is that I have a 1st person narrator writing in the style of Austen. (To deal with that I should post it in Fragments and Feedback, but I'm interested in the theories behind it and am not to the point of desperation. Yet.) The length of sentences often has more to do, for me, with the tension involved in a scene. A quick sentence means urgency. For me.
When describing action, this seems easy to fix. But there are times when a character needs to have a series of thoughts between actions. A flashback doesn't seem to interrupt the sense of time within a scene in the same way that - for lack of a better word - current thoughts do. Why is that? They are both presented as thoughts of the character.
I'll try to find examples that aren't related to something I'm working on.
posted
A flashback is more engaging... it suggests that your character has stopped taking note of what's happening in the outside world in order to think in depth about something that has happened to them previously. Whereas a character can think 'surface level' thoughts about things that have happened previously without implying that much concentration.
So, in a way, it's about the amount of time the character spends thinking.
Also, it's about the amount of time the reader spends on the section... if it's too long, they'll forget what's happening in the "present" scene.
posted
I know what you mean about the time crunch problem. I've seen a couple things done that can help. First, a page or two of thought in the middle of a direct dialogue can work well, as sort of an emotional aside. Say character A asks a question to character B (our POV char). This illicits a series of thoughts from B, which the reader sees and usually doesn't feel like time is moving when that happens. Then, to land the reader safely back into the flow of time, char. B replies to the question (carefully phrased in a way that reminds the reader what the question was 2 pages ago).
The other thing you can do, and I have seen it done well a few times, is say. "All of this took place in only a moment." Of course, this tends to be a trifle disengaging for the reader, but if it's done at a point in between say a deep thought and a piece of action, it doesn't detract (imho). I would also think this exact phrase couldn't be used more than once in a book. Maybe twice. Any more than that and the reader starts to notice.
posted
The difference between a flashback and what Damon Knight referred to (as opposed to a flashback) as a memory, could be compared to my theory on "show versus tell."
A flashback is usually treated like a scene, in that it is "shown." A memory is treated like a summary and is told.
A flashback happens when a writer stops the action in a story to show a scene that occurred in the past (usually because a character is remembering it, but not always--sometimes authors just stick in flashbacks because they can't think of any other way to convey the information).
A memory (as used by Damon Knight) is when a character thinks back to something and only remembers the part that is relevant to the scene the character is experiencing at the time. The information from that memory is more or less "told" to the reader instead of shown, and because of that, it is not as distracting or detracting from the current scene.
If you can do a memory instead of a flashback, you will have a better chance of keeping the reader with you and you will avoid stopping the momentum of the story. This is one of the times when it may be better to tell instead of show.
posted
Thank you, this thread has helped to clarified some issues I've been dealing with lately - namely the balance between detail and pace. I think I'm starting to get a handle on it and now I just have to get it from my head to the paper correctly.
[This message has been edited by Kickle (edited June 05, 2004).]
Printer-friendly view of this topic
