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Managing Fictional Narrative Flow - Scene/Narrative Summary
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 9
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While this discussion may be helpful for understanding how stories can be framed, it may seem a little short on practical tips for working with pacing. One of the more useful techniques I've found both for identifying shifts in pace and for managing them in your own work involves the use of what I call chronology tags. Like dialogue tags ("he said," "she said," etc.), these tags serve to keep the reader oriented within the story. Dialogue tags help the reader understand who is speaking, and chronology tags help the reader to follow shifts in chronology and pacing.
Chronology tags tend to vary a bit more than dialogue tags, but familiar examples might be "One night...," "On Jenny's first birthday,..." and "During the Spanish Civil War,..." They tend to appear as the very first words in a paragraph, and usually at the transition into either scene or summary. This is no accident either, as they represent the very most basic information a reader needs to know to understand narrative--the sequence and chronological relationship of events.
I divide them into two types of tags, scenic chronology tags and summary chronology tags. Scenic tags are those that refer to a single point in time, such as the first two examples above. Almost every time you encounter a scenic chronology tag, it indicates a shift into scenic pacing and (generally) out of summary. Summary tags indicate the opposite shift, and refer to spans of time, such as the third example above. They are also often characterized by words which indicate duration or ongoing progressive action, such and "during" and "throughout."
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