Pacing Description Within Narrative

Integrating description with plot and pacing

Rule for using this skill: These are specialist tips to add to your answer, not a replacement for it. Always give your full general answer first, drawing on everything you normally know about the writer's question. Then work in the tips below wherever they apply. Do not drop general advice because a tip here covers part of the topic.

Scene, summary, exposition

• Scene is a dramatic rendering (particular place, particular time) and sits in the foreground. Exposition is background: setting, backstory, facts. Summary is a "long shot" that tells rather than shows.
• Stern's rule: make a scene only when you want attention. Scenes cost writer and reader energy, so a story of all scene tires the reader.
• Summary tends toward abstraction and explanation. If pace sags in summary, insert one concrete sensory image (Baldwin's brass gate that "rises" and "opens" in John's mind) to give the illusion of scene.
• Describe the subject in activity (Aristotle). For inanimate subjects, use active verbs. Hidden motion can be exposed by rewording: "Her hair was black and curly" becomes "Her black hair curled in ringlets around her cheeks."
• To summarize repeated past events while keeping the scene alive, compress them into one long sentence of sensory detail (Baldwin's past mornings: father grunting, pots and pans clattering).
• Return to the scene with a transitional phrase ("This morning"). Scene to summary to scene then happens with no "bump."
• Do not expand summarized events into full scenes. Give just enough detail to suggest scene (Jane's "chlorine-soaked summers as a lifeguard," "the sizzle of grease"), then carry on summarizing.
• Audit: mark scenes in one highlighter color and summaries in another. Mostly scene means adding brief summary or exposition for variety. Mostly summary means adding concrete sensory detail, or breaking out into a scene.

Action vs activity; setting the pace

• Action is motion that pushes the story forward, an outward sign of an inward motive. Activity is random movement (explosions, crashes) and can leave a reader feeling "nothing's happening."
• Clarify the character's motive, conscious or unconscious, before deciding where to speed up or slow down.
• Tension comes from varying pace, not from speed alone. Alternate scene and summary, showing and telling, braking and accelerating.
• Description is not automatically a brake. Vivid, concrete, active description can itself hold tension.

Speeding up

• To move from a static description to action, have a character interact with the thing just described. A wedding dress in a shop window leads to Miranda noticing it or asking the price. A described table leads to a maid polishing a fork. A described kite leads to a girl grabbing the string and running.
• You are still describing, but the description turns from static to active, which quickens the pace.
• Active (not passive) prose, concrete specific details, and subjects in motion all help pace.

Slowing down (slow, withhold, delay)

• Use short sentences, directives and fragments. Each stop-start fragment forces the reader to pause.
• Use short paragraphs (even one line) for a visual pause. White space between paragraphs or segments goes further.
• In poetry, short lines slow movement. Breaking a long line into smaller bites also shifts the emphasis and changes the meaning.
• Present tense prolongs. "She is sitting at the window" is longer and slower than "She sat." Even "She sits" reads as long as the past form but implies process, so the reader sits still for each step. Writing in present tense also makes the writer describe more precisely.
• Stay consistent in tense in general. A deliberate switch from past to present slows the reader and focuses attention on a dramatic action (a gun being cocked) or a dreamlike suspension.
• A tense switch also signals a change of focus, time period or psychic distance.
• Slow-motion technique: in brisk or frantic action, slow at the dramatic point with fragments or present tense. Sustain the moment until attention is riveted, then return to the swift pace.
• The suspended moment is a place to enter the character's mind, drop in a flashback or dream, or dwell on physical details (frayed cap, labored breathing). Readers will hold still for the details because the action is slowed.

Flashback timing and size

• If a flashback bores the reader, the usual cause is timing, not description quality. The main conflict was not yet established, so there was nothing to suspend.
• Fix: back up and stay in the main scene. Establish the uncertain "what" (will the bookseller speak to the woman in the brown raincoat?), add a problem or two, and only then flash back to supply the "why" and "how."
• A flashback should push the narrative forward, even though it looks back. It usually does this by exploring why and how the main conflict exists.
• Length: the longer the work, the longer the flashback it can bear. A novel can hold several pages. A poem may not hold even one flashback image.
• Balance rule: a flashback should not take more time, space or energy than the main story. Check by highlighting the flashback sections.
• If the flashback is more intriguing than the main plot, the real story may be in the flashback. Then restructure so the flashback is the main plotline and drop the introductory incident.
• If you simply got carried away, cut flashback description or expand description in the main story. Otherwise the reader skims and loses their moorings.
• Accordion model: define the main storyline's time frame (it can be short; Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses each cover one day) and keep it clearly delineated. Then open the accordion's "bellows" for flashbacks and backstory, and close it to return to the main line.

Restructuring for suspense

• If events unfold too predictably (strict chronology), cut a hard copy into discrete scenes with scissors and reorder them. Ask which scene would grab the reader first and which should follow to reveal just enough.

Scattering details to unify plot

• Break large clumps of description (typically at a character's or setting's first mention) into smaller bits spread through the work. This avoids static passages and gives the reader continual proof.
• Scattered details must accumulate and gain significance with each mention, like episodes that amplify the conflict. They are crumbs that form a trail.
• O'Connor's hat in "Everything That Rises Must Converge":
  • Full description in the third paragraph.
  • Then a description of an action involving the hat.
  • Then a brief embedded phrase ("the atrocious hat").
  • The adjectives shift from "jaunty and pathetic" to "atrocious" to "preposterous," mirroring Julian's growing disgust.
  • Hat-free stretches of several pages follow.
  • At the turning point the original wording is repeated exactly, but on another head.
  • Late mentions show the hat defeated in her lap.
• Vary the details at each mention so the description accumulates meaning.
• Sound images work the same way (Faulkner's saw in As I Lay Dying, motorcycles in Mary Hood's "How Far She Went"). Write one long description of a sound, split it into three or more short passages, and plant them in different places.
• Repeated, varied mentions turn an image into a motif. The motif recurs and suggests the theme; it is not the theme itself.
• Motifs can also appear in chapter titles or section headings (Proulx's knots in The Shipping News, Williams's birds in Refuge). In Krause's "The Snake," snake description makes up about a third of 2,600 words, and each mention tightens the theme.
• In early drafts, don't chase theme or design. Describe the world of the story first and let theme emerge.

Withholding details (striptease)

• Delay the full description to build tension. In Sansom's The Loving Eye, the woman at the window is not described, while the prose uses short paragraphs, visual interference (the wind, the gardens), sounds (cart, blackbird, beaten mat), and the man's vow not to look until a sign comes.
• Practice: start with an incomplete description, using pronouns instead of specific nouns. Leave it for a few sentences. On returning, give only one or two more hints.
• Ways to delay: visual or other interference, a brief switch to another scene, short elliptical phrases.
• Withheld description still has to be sensory, concrete and pushing the story forward, or the reader won't wait.

Description as psychological motion

• External description can "second the emotion," mirroring inner states. This is easy in limited omniscient, where the reader has access to the character's mind.
• In objective point of view you cannot enter minds, only report what is perceivable. Convey mood through what is described.
• Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants": the hills are "white," "brown and dry" during the man's pressure. The other view shows fields of grain, trees and a river, matching the girl's choice, with no stated thoughts.
• Description can drive "how" and "why," not only "what happens next."

Nonnarrative works (essay, memoir, poem)

• When thought is the plot, show the mind exploring. Weave questions and reactions into the sensory description (wondering why your great-grandmother isn't buried beside her husband).
• Kuusisto's "What else?" and his ellipses (the author's own, not deletions) show memory being ransacked in real time.
• Memoir has a double plot: the past-tense story (the telling) and the present-tense musing. Ask what the "occasion of the telling" is: why now, why here?
• Let present-tense situations and descriptions collide with the past-tense story (as in Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge).

Atmosphere, tone and psychic distance

• Atmosphere goes beyond when and where. Labels alone (gloomy, cozy, foreboding) won't make the reader feel it.
• Build it from time, place, weather, lighting, sound (including silence described as lack, "soundless"), sense impressions, and sound, rhythm and syntax of language (Poe, Fitzgerald).
• Stern: readers have a short memory for sensation, so re-evoke atmosphere periodically.
• Avoid weather that cooperates too fully with events (sunny wedding, gray funeral). Try weather that works against expected mood.
• Tone is the implied attitude toward subject, characters and reader, carried by connotation more than denotation. Tonal problems are hard to fix because they require reconsidering every sentence.
• Test: describe one subject three times with three attitudes, keeping the facts fixed (a man six feet tall and 130 pounds: slender, skinny, reedlike, lanky, scrawny, youthfully fit). Ask a reader to name the tone of each (admiring, satiric, bitter, nostalgic and so on). Intended and heard tone often differ.
• Tone also lives in sound and rhythm. Compare soft with harsh consonants, deep with high vowels, galloping with mincing phrases.
• Psychic distance is controlled by physical distance. A close-up (touchable, smellable details, or inside the body) brings intimacy. Pulling back to a faceless, distant view creates distance. Humphreys' Lucille shifts from clinical roof-top observation to a face two feet away.
• Angle matters. Looking down implies judgment, and eye-level places you on equal footing. Gardner warns against "frigidity" (a coldhearted failure to respond on a human level).
• If you are too involved to describe a subject, step back for irony, humor or pathos (Wolfe's view of the wife's backside).
• Temporal and spatial remoteness add distance (Thurber's "Once upon a time, in a far country…" plus simple diction, formal balanced sentences, hyperbolic similes).
• A memoir narrator who makes himself the hero, places himself above others, or seeks sympathy damages distance (Barrington: the writer must have "made her peace with the facts").
• To fix a one-dimensional character (all evil, all good), change the distance or angle: a close-up of a villain's endearing trait, or a distant view of a hero that shows human proportions.

Practice exercises for pace and tone

• Grammatical rhyme: copy the rhythm and syntax of a model passage (Selzer's "Four Appointments with the Discus Thrower") with your own words, ignoring its sense. Retyping passages you admire (the author typed chapters of War and Peace) loosens a syntactic rut.
• Sound-quality drill: describe a person with deep vowels (long o, long u) and liquid or resonant consonants (r, l, w, y, m, n, ng, z). Rewrite with light vowels (short i, short a). Rewrite again with harsh consonants (k, r, p, hard g, hard c) or sibilants (s, sh, ch).
• Music walk: walk the same route wearing headphones with different music each time (Gottschalk's "Cakewalk" vs. Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance") and describe it each time to vary the tone.
• Genre rewrite: redo a piece as fairy tale, science fiction, Harlequin Romance, sports report, travelogue, satire, allegory or children's story to see how descriptions and distance change.
• Time-frame distance: write an autobiographical piece that begins a month, year or hundred years before your birth, or extends past your death.
• Borrowed template: shape a piece with a pattern from outside literature (movie script with retakes, tarot cards, charts and hospital forms).