On Timing and Tension

Fiction, like time, contracts and expands in surprising and unexpected ways. The relationship your story has to time reveals something crucial about your characters and the conflicts they navigate. By manipulating time, fiction writers can heighten the tension that makes a reader keep reading. 

Storytellers have two useful tools for playing with time: scene and summary. Let’s look at how to use those tools in fiction writing. 

Close Study: “The Party” by Katya Apekina

Read it here, in Alaska Quarterly Review.

“The Party” is one of my favorite pieces of fiction I’ve read in 2023. It’s strange, it’s exhilarating, it’s earnest, it’s funny, and somehow, despite the entire story taking place in a refurbished-office-kink-party, it’s real. 

A few craft elements make this story particularly compelling, including:

• The tension between the narrator and the setting.
• The author’s attention to language and detail.
• The story’s narrative pacing.

Most obvious to the reader is how out of place the nameless narrator is. What is she doing in a refurbished office that caters to men’s various kinks, many of them feet related? The narrator is open-minded yet clueless, searching for real connection, yet socially clumsy and lost in her head. Tillie, her roommate, is much more comfortable in spaces like this.

That tension results in some fantastic storytelling and attention to detail. By being so out of place, the narrator is aware of and documents every strange thing about the party, from its institutional artwork to the rows of cubicles and offices. Her descriptions of the other party goers also borders on the absurd, from a girl who looks like a gourd with hair, to Carpet, a man who likes to be stepped on.

This set up—the narrator out of place in a strange but necessary setting—is both simple and structurally sound, creating the space where a story is bound to be told. It also gives us access to the narrator’s character and way of thinking. We don’t learn her name, but we know the way she attends to certain details. For example, the paragraph about Tillie’s laughter is gorgeously written. The visual of “psychic wallpaper” peeling, juxtaposed to the phrase “tickled raw,” is both visceral and imaginative, and is also the kind of description that comes from someone lost in the setting, rather than active participant of the setting. Again, the story’s set up works wonders for us readers.

Of course, we learn the most about the narrator when, briefly, she tells us about “Buster.” Buster is an imaginary person, whom the narrator made up so that she’d have a legitimate reason for moving to her new city. She does have a legitimate reason, but Buster is just the human representation for what that reason is: her own loneliness. How she describes it is an empty space left by other people, Tillie and the Tall Man (whom she falls in love with) and everyone else. If she can surround herself with people, or be deeply connected to someone who opens her world, then maybe she can outrun Buster, or Loneliness, or whatever it is that seems to follow her everywhere she goes.

This character development wouldn’t exist without good narrative pacing. Most of the story is told in the present moment, but it’s interrupted by brief flashbacks: the narrator meeting Tillie, making up the story about Buster, needing money, and discovering this party. This alternation between the present and past, which is also an alternation between scene and summary, allows this story to be more richly told, examining every crucial detail about the narrator that has led to this present, lonely moment.

Despite the gravity of this theme, the story is told brilliantly and hilariously. Tillie saying “Thank you” to “Gesundheit” when she didn’t sneeze, the character Carpet, and the tickling scene with Giorgio all had me laughing out loud.

Craft Perspective: “Managing Time in Fiction” by Rachel Beanland

Read it here, in LitHub.

A good piece of fiction has a careful balance of “scene” and “summary.”

Scene refers to a moment in the story where everything is happening in real time. We, the reader, receive as much detail as though we were really there in person. Scenes are slow, crucial moments: they are the points of the story with the most important actions and reactions.

Alternating with scene is summary. Summary refers to time condensed: it is periods of time crunched into the most essential details, allowing us to fast forward to the next important scene. Backstory is often (but not always) summary; so, too, are periods of transition, whether a couple of years have elapsed or a couple of minutes.

A good fiction writer knows how to alternate between the two with ease. A good balance of scene and summary will accomplish the following:

• It keeps the reader engaged, as summary allows the reader to take a breather before the scene throws them back in the action.
• It spotlights the importance of what happens during the scenes. Too much scene will overcrowd the reader with important details, some of which are bound to be lost.
• It mimics how we perceive real life. When we experience intense emotions or occurrences, time itself seems to slow down. The everyday parts of life, the quotidian and mundane, often passes by much faster (unless we experience it with intensity).

Beanland puts it best: “The slower the action, the more important it must be to the story.”

Take “The Party,” for example. The slowest, most important scenes are the ones involving Tillie or the Tall Man. In these scenes, we get close descriptions of what’s happening, we get important dialogue, and we get unfettered access to the narrator’s own internal world. These scenes help us understand the narrator and her loneliness much better. Other parts of the story, such as backstory or transitional moments, get summarized so that we can understand what’s happening in the scenes with as much clarity as possible.

In your own fiction writing, don’t be afraid to experiment with time. Let time slow down to its natural pace during your most important scenes. Perhaps make time even slower. Can you extend the events of single second into an entire page? Can you condense 5 years into a single sentence? This play with time, pacing, and tension in your writing is sure to pay off for the reader.