Part II of a series. Part I is here.
manuscript revision, and especially to check its pacing and accumulative
effects, we have to get into the mindset of an imaginary reader, which is hard
to do for many reasons. One of them is the fascinating fact that time has many
faces.
As the French theorist Gerard Genette explored in great
detail, there is story time—the
actual duration of the story events covered (a day, a year, a lifetime), which we can never experience
directly—and then there is discourse
time, the amount of time taken to actually tell that story. Story time
(duration) can vary radically: a novel can be about a man going to lunch for
fifteen minutes, or about three generations living on a family farm for a
century. Discourse time is often measured spatially, as words or pages. A story about
a man going to lunch can take up 10 pages of discourse time, or 300, why not? (Nicholson
Baker’s Mezzanine manages to make an
entire novel of lunchtime by being a vehicle for the narrator’s absurdly
digressive associational thoughts with occasional dips into personal memory;
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which
has a story time of one day, is
nearly as expansive, but leans even more heavily on memory.)
A 1:1 story/discourse time novel about a man’s life would take a lifetime to read, just as a 1:1 map of the world would be as big as the world itself (both may score points for realism but not for helpfulness or artistic effect). The difference between story time and discourse time gives
us lots to play with as writers. We can compress and expand, and we can alter
pacing throughout, summarizing years into sentences and shifting into
“slow-mode” and stretching high-intensity scenes across many pages.
In revision mode, if we note that our writing seems to plod
along, too evenly, with little variation in emotional effect, we can see if
we’ve overlooked those compression and expansion possibilities. Even if we’re
already aware of time’s flexible potential, we may still not utilize time to
maximum advantage. In error, we may compress where we should expand, because we
arrive at a scene that is emotionally hard to write about, or some part of our
story we haven’t sufficiently imagined (or researched). We may expand where we
should compress, simply not realizing (until a kind first reader informs us)
that we’re spending way too much time on boring details or slow-paced dialogue
or anything that doesn’t advance the story.
On the page, that’s story time and discourse time –
complicated enough.
But think of all the other ways we experience time, as
writers and readers. This is where things get even more interesting during
those final manuscript revisions.
Let’s say I write a scene about parents coming to visit
their daughter, an anxious mother and her new baby and the husband the parents
don’t like. The story time covers dinner and post-dinner visiting — about
three hours. The discourse time is, let’s say, about 4500 words.
On a good day, I write about 1000 words; in a good week,
maybe 3000. So I can guess this scene would have taken a week and a half to
write. Maybe longer. I could label that “composition time.” I can
unscientifically guess that many before-bed readers open a book for 20 minutes
before turning off the light. At less than 2 minutes per page over 15 pages, my
imaginary reader might not have time to finish the scene in one quick reading
session. (Should it be shorter? Or is it just right? And what about the great
majority of the book’s scenes, which are only one-third to one-half as long? Which
will have insufficient impact due to their brevity? Which will have
insufficient impact because a reader can’t process them in one sit-down reading
time, or can I write a scene so riveting that the reader will stay glued to the
end, even after her spouse complains about the light?)
Now that I’ve forced myself to do the math—which I wouldn’t
have done, if not for this blogpost—what does it tell me? What can you tell first readers to look for if
they’re helping bring fresh eyes to your manuscript?
same words or repeat a metaphor, the reader will experience those repetitions
only hours apart. I may not realize that I use certain words or types of punctuation
too often (semi-colon or em-dash addiction, anyone?) but a fresh reader will.
my reader’s memory enough, especially when she can read so much more quickly
than I can write? How many times do I need to remind her that so-and-so is the
narrator’s sister?
took me months to write the process by which my narrator fell in love, learned
to cope with a first baby, became jaded with life, found new hope (and also
some dark truths). Does each stage happen too quickly in my novel? Does the
progression feel real for the reader? Do I build up to the climax sufficiently,
or hit it like a huge speed bump?
part apart that the effect is too subtle for the reader? Can he hold clues and
cues in his head, which are strongly imprinted in mine only because I’ve spent
so much time writing this novel? What happens too slowly? When does the reader
say “enough already, I get it!”
These are only a few things you can think about in terms of
composition speed (slow), reading speed (fast), and also the mind of the writer
(heavily invested, possibly obsessed) versus the mind of the reader (less
invested, less patient, more easily irritated).
In reading for revision, we must be aware of time’s many
faces, and the many ways we experience story as it’s imagined, written, and
read, by ourselves and others. We can learn, as authors, to become our own best
editors. And we can recognize the need to make use of another set
of fresh eyes when the time is right.
Good food for thought, Andromeda. I just bookmarked this to come back to it when I'm revising.
Great advice, nicely articulated. Especially like what you pointed out about blogging – it often provides an opportunity to reflect in ways we might otherwise overlook.