Writing Technique I am Bad At
Jul. 19th, 2012 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretSomething I am not good at doing is communicating the passing of time within a scene when there is no dialogue. I've tried a number of methods, none of them particularly successfully. I think this is a consequence of the fact that I am reasonbly good at dilating the passage of time, so that the reader can't just interpret the flow of text as a guideline to how much time has passed.
For example, Mike Casper running through the warehouse in "Every Hero". He's alone with his thoughts, and I wanted to give him time for contemplation. I wanted to stretch out that run. I didn't just want "He runs for ten minutes." But I did want steady motion, so that one understood that as he contemplated his decision, he was continuing to run. I resorted to a clumsy technique where every so often I'd throw in a position marker ((Halfway through the warehouse now.") into his thoughts to indicate his progress. It's not the worst thing I could have done, and I'd already established earlier in the story that Casper's brain registers a constant stream of details like that, but it's awkward and not particularly immersive.
I've also done scenes where every so often someone glanced at a clock. Super-annoying. The problem is that time is subjective and all about feeling, and these numerical tricks I employ don't capture that. Meshing the two kinds of subjectivity is what's hard: the character's subjective experience of time in the scene and the reader's subjective experience of time as they read the scene.
Anybody have thoughts on how to do this better?
For example, Mike Casper running through the warehouse in "Every Hero". He's alone with his thoughts, and I wanted to give him time for contemplation. I wanted to stretch out that run. I didn't just want "He runs for ten minutes." But I did want steady motion, so that one understood that as he contemplated his decision, he was continuing to run. I resorted to a clumsy technique where every so often I'd throw in a position marker ((Halfway through the warehouse now.") into his thoughts to indicate his progress. It's not the worst thing I could have done, and I'd already established earlier in the story that Casper's brain registers a constant stream of details like that, but it's awkward and not particularly immersive.
I've also done scenes where every so often someone glanced at a clock. Super-annoying. The problem is that time is subjective and all about feeling, and these numerical tricks I employ don't capture that. Meshing the two kinds of subjectivity is what's hard: the character's subjective experience of time in the scene and the reader's subjective experience of time as they read the scene.
Anybody have thoughts on how to do this better?