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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 move beyond simply categorizing the types of pacing found in fiction to an observation that I find more useful as a writer: the pace of a passage usually exists in a clear relationship to the level of narrative tension in that passage. Though this observation does not hold for every passage, an understanding of the general relationship can be helpful also in understanding those cases where it does not hold true.
The first point at which we touched on the issue of narrative tension was during our discussion of plot. The narrative arc we said, was a graphical representation of narrative tension in a traditional story. It illustrates the general rise in narrative tension from the start of the story though the climax, and the subsequent decline of narrative tension through the resolution phase of the story.
While the model is useful for understanding the overall tendencies of narrative tension in traditional stories, it does not take into account the fluctuations in tension that exist within stories as they progress from passage to passage. The rise in tension that exists in most stories is punctuated by moments of more or less tension, producing an uneven heightening of the overall conflict of the story.
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