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Managing Fictional Narrative Flow - Scene/Narrative Summary
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 9
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I want to cover a portion of Gerard Genette's ideas on pacing, (as related by Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse) just to give us a common vocabulary to work with. Genette's treatment of pacing makes explicit many things that as readers we implicitly understand. As writers, it's important for us to have a language to understand and discuss pacing, and Genette's breakdown is both explicit and limited enough to serve as a useful tool.
Genette's ideas are based on the observation that the story-time, the chronological time which passes for characters and between events in the story, exists in different relationships to the discourse-time, which is the time required to narrate the story. The events of "A Christmas Carol," for instance, cover roughly a full day, from Christmas Eve through Christmas morning (excluding the flashing back and forward). This is the story-time of Dickens' story. It doesn't take most readers a full day, however, to read the story--more like an hour and a half--which represents the discourse-time of the story.
Because the discourse-time of the story is so much shorter than the story-time of the story, certain parts of the story-time have been condensed. This condensation is neither universal nor uniform within the story, though. Some moments in the story have not been condensed in the least, some condensed entirely, some omitted all together.
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