Welcome, one and all, to Narrativity Online Panel #3: Pacing!
Please join panelists Meg Trast (moderator), Emma Bull, Tyler Tork, Stephen T. Vessels, and Skyler Gray (with video production by Sweth Chandramouli) as they discuss tips, tricks, problems, and solutions for handling pacing in fiction.
Stay tuned for a surprise additional panelist. 😉
And don’t forget to come and play in the comments below!
That’s A Different Panel:
Is slipping information in sneakily without the reader necessarily realizing what you’ve told them Pre-Joycean?
The idea that you come to trust a writer such that when the writer makes a mistake, you assume it’s your fault for not reading properly.
How do you decide what pacing serves the needs of the story?
Pacing, Cause & Effect, and What Happens Next?
Panelists’ projects mentioned:
Tyler’s website on author websites: https://torknado.com/
Skye’s writer warm-up app is Amuseboot (a work in progress).
Stephen Vessels’ Facebook (for music posts): https://www.facebook.com/stephentvessels
Book/Media mentions:
I keep getting caught up in the panel and forgetting to write these down, but here’s what I’ve got. Feel free to add any I missed!
George Eliot, Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life
Shakespeare
South Pacific, Rodgers and Hammerstein
John Crowley, Engine Summer
Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants”
James Joyce, Ulysses
Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
Space Sweepers (Netflix)
John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Goodbye (the first Travis McGee novel)
Euripides, Orestes, in which the actor Hegelochus brought us the immortal line “After a storm again, I see a weasel!”
On the definition of pacing, and riffing off something a couple of panelists touched on: I often think of pacing in terms of emotion. Is the reader experiencing a building sense of emotion (be it excitement, glee, horror, sorrow, whatever)? If a scene has a big emotional punch, there needs to be a scene of relatively less emotion — a chance to catch their breath — before the next big emotional punch scene.
Pacing is not the same thing as emotional intensity, but they’re often working hand-in-hand.
Steve, around 44 minutes: I have to disagree with your actor friend’s statement that the direction is inherent in Shakespeare’s language. I’m reminded of two performances I saw of Hamlet — same cast, consecutive nights. The first night, the lead actor delivered the line “Cure her of that” with a chilling hardness that had us all pressing back into our seats. Next night, the same line was delivered with desperate pathos, almost begging. Same words, completely different readings. Both were equally valid interpretations of the text, and worked equally well, but completely different in effect.
Ack. MacBeth, not Hamlet. Oh, for an edit button….
Dose this mean there’s gonna be a virtual “Another Panel” panel?
Dunno! There could be, or we might just mine them for programming ideas for the in-person convention.
(I think we’re gonna need a longer con….)