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Managing Fictional Narrative Flow - Scene/Narrative Summary
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 9
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If your story employs traditional techniques, it's likely that most or all of the moments you chose will have been scenes in Genette's use of the word, where story-time and discourse-time are relatively equal, and the reader is exposed to the story's events at the same pace that the characters experience them.
If I had likewise asked you to pick out three or four moments of relatively low tension, and your story uses traditional techniques, you would likely have pulled out moments that would fit Genette's definition of summary. The tendency for scene to encapsulate moments of high tension and summary to carry moments of lower tension seems relatively intuitive. If there's not much tension inherent in a sequence, a writer must move the reader through relatively quickly in order to keep the reader's attention, so pace picks up. If a moment is charged with tension, then generally the writer wants to keep the reader involved in that moment as deeply as possible and for as long as possible, so pace slows down. Scene employs vivid description and dialogue, all of which the reader moves through eagerly, driven by the tension. Description and dialogue in moments of low tension would seem superfluous to most readers and tend to break the "vivid and continuous dream."
Of course it's possible that you wouldn't have picked moments that meet with either of these general tendencies, and it would not mean you had somehow done the assignment wrong. A great deal of contemporary fiction does not operate according to traditional models. Some stories omit summary all together and separate scenes by ellipses only. Some stories take other approaches. It is largely true however that contemporary fiction is either written with traditional techniques or is written in reaction or opposition to traditional techniques. Either case requires an understanding of the traditional usages of pacing and other fictional elements to develop a critical understanding of the story.
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