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Managing Fictional Narrative Flow - Scene/Narrative Summary
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 9
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The problem of pace is familiar to almost anyone who has written a short story. It's impossible, and also inadvisable, to give an account of everything that happens to all characters throughout the entire time span of a story. It's boring for the reader, exhausting for the writer, and a waste of paper. One of the more amazing things about the reader of fiction, if fact, is his or her ability to infer events that occur outside of the story's reportage. Readers are perfectly willing to accept that since the last time they observed a character, he has gone to bed, gotten up, shaved, showered, dressed, etc.
One of the first practical things a writer can learn in working with pacing is that much of a story doesn't even have to be told. The very most basic decisions a writer makes are at the level of exclusion or inclusion--does this or that need to be in the story. Hemingway is famous for his use of exclusion as a dramatic tool. All of the very famous "Hills Like White Elephants" is built around what has been excluded from the story.
Often, too, you won't realize that a passage is unnecessary until you've completed a number of drafts. It takes a great deal of nerve in redrafting to decide that you don't need the scene that you spent hours getting just right. Overcoming the attachment and acknowledging that the story as a whole will be better off without it is one of the hardest redrafting decisions you can make.
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