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[kvarko]

I have a question. With films, you can talk about pacing: a movie can be edited to an appropriate length; you can talk about the amount of time spent on this scene or that scene. With a novel, I assume that you can also talk about pacing: a story could be written in 50 pages, but instead it's 400; and the events are distributed in a particular

Comments

[goulo]

To me, the pacing of a novel is a different thing from the reading speed of a reader. There may be some interaction between the two that affects the reader's experience while reading the book, but they are definitely different things.

There was a massively long SF novel (In Conquest Born) that I recall had about 100 pages about a character crossing a frozen wasteland. No other characters, no dialog, just a long hard trek (which at the time reminded me favorably of Jack London's stories about people struggling in snow). Another novel could have reasonably written that scene as a single sentence or paragraph, if the author felt so inclined, which would of course be quite different pacing. Regardless of your reading speed, you would experience the two versions as quite different indeed. :) And the experience of you reading the 100 page version is quite different from the experience of a very very very slow reader (1000 times slower than you) who reads a single-paragraph version, even if they take the same amount of time.

[vfish]

Your point about descriptive text is key. The length of a book is not necessarily a deterrent to reading it provided that the length is commensurate with the plot content, but I'm likely to give up on a book when the author indulges himself too much in irrelevant descriptive details. I don't know whether such authors think they're being paid by the word or they just have a richly detail-oriented imagination, but it's hard to get into a book when you realize you've read tens of pages and nothing has happened.

[elgrande]

I've had similar thought. To me, reading a novel feels like watching a movie in slow motion all the way through.

Well...

[crankyotter]

As someone who reads fiction novels, often 3-5 a week of them... There is definitely as much or more thought given to pacing in good novels as there is to good movies. A good author will have pacing independent of your reading speed. My favorite author Suz Brockmann tends to have longer, scenes up front and shorter scenes at the back end. Just the shift of 4-10 page scenes going to 4-10 paragraph scenes over the course of the book changes the pacing significantly