English 10 / Unit 2: Narrative Structure and Point of View
2.5 Pacing, Scene and Summary
Notes
Authors control pacing, the speed at which a story moves, by deciding how much time to spend on events.
- Scene shows events moment by moment, often with dialogue. It slows time.
- Summary covers a long time quickly: "The next three winters passed without news."
- A time skip (or gap) jumps over events entirely.
- Authors linger in scene on the moments that matter most and summarize the rest.
- Foreshadowing and suspense work with pacing to build tension.
Practice
"For the next ten years, she worked at the bakery, saving every coin." This sentence is an example of:
It covers a long period quickly.
An author spends four pages on a single minute when a character opens a letter. Why?
Authors linger in scene on key moments.
A chapter ends with a soldier boarding a train; the next begins, "When he returned, the war was over." This is:
The story jumps over the war years entirely.
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