Suspense [imaginarycircus]

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What makes you unable to put a book down? What causes you to stay up reading even though you have to go to school/work in the morning and you know you're going to be exhausted? Any examples of books you have not been able to put down would be wonderful too...

I think it must be a combination of pacing, plot, and character. I don't know. I seem to have a pacing issue and I'm going a little bit bonkers.

Heard from agent. Pacing is still an issue. I feel like I am never going to get this right--except of course I will. It's OK if it takes me ten drafts. It's OK. Shower. Coffee. Work. Repeat.

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There are 20 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Yeah, I think it's definitely a combination of pacing, plot and character most of the time. Well. Sometimes I'm so annoyed by a book but I still want to know what happens, so I'll read it all in one sitting just to get it over with. There tends to be more skimming than reading involved in those scenarios, though...

Pacing is hard. You'll work it out, though. *hugs*

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I will if only by trial and error. :/

I so know what you mean. Sometimes I just want the answer to the puzzle even though the characters are annoying. That was pretty much why I couldn't put Twilight down.

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The last book I stayed up all night reading was HP:DH. :)) But that was because I couldn't sleep (I don't suffer from insomnia very often but when I do it's terrible) rather than anything else. I think I have a hard time putting a book down when the characters are interesting to me and they're involved in a plotline that draws me in and makes me forget my surroundings; oftentimes I don't even realize that it's so late, so it's not a conscious "must stay up and finish this!" thing so much as a "huh, I didn't realize it was so late!" thing. :)) Which is probably not helpful.

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It is actually. And I have been thinking about HP. I remember going out to my car at lunchtime and reading PoA and how wrenching it was to put the book down and go back into that stupid job.

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I don't know if I can describe it in a way that makes it understandable, but for me it's that feeling that if you just keep reading a little bit more then you'll get that piece of info that reveals the meaning of X, except that in getting that reveal two more things (Y and Z) show up and then you need to read further to find out about those...and so on.

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Right. I think some books do that so well. HP does. It gives you hints and enough solid info to keep you making educated guesses that evolve with the story.

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Pacing is the one thing I am an absolute stickler for, and more than anything else it's what causes me to stay up late reading.

Edith Wharton wrote languid stories -- except for the latter 2/3 of Ethan Frome, where the words race across the page like sled runners on icy snow. That's one I read all in one sitting -- as an 11th grader, when we were supposed to take two weeks of class to study it. By contrast, The Age of Innocence moves as slow as heavily corseted matrons on a sweltering August afternoon.

I wish I could remember the title, but I read a YA military novel with exceptional pacing once -- Revolutionary War era. The marching was rhythmic and drawn out, exhausting and difficult, and the battle scenes were full of short bursts of language, lots of one and two syllable words, sharp consonants.

Do you want me to take a look at a couple of pages where you think the pacing is not flowing as you want? I don't know that I will be in any way helpful, but I'm happy to read a bit and give you my impression.

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I think I'm going to take a bunch of YA novels with me on vacation this week. The Hunger Games, and The Arm of the Starfish, and maybe some new ones--to look at the pacing.

I think my scenes in the last draft were still too smooth, too balanced or something. There wasn't enough textural difference as you described overall. It was better than the last draft, but I think I'm to the sort of writer who builds up texture and subtext over the course of many rewrites (I don't know. Maybe smarter people can do this more easily?)

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For me, it tends to be characters, but it could be plot. Most often, the books that keep me up at night are character driven, with a side note of suspense plot. I like them, I identify with them, and I want to know what happens to them (more often than not, whether or not something imminent and bad happens to them). Plots can occasionally do that; I read Stroud's Gates of Ptolemy, HP7 and Atonement quickly for plot rather than character. But usually it's a character that I find compelling (The Hunger Games and Fire, for example). Alternately, I've read lots of books with compelling characters, but I don't often stay up to find out what happens to them if they aren't in danger of something bad happening.

Conversely, craft I love, but it doesn't keep me up at night.

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I think my characters are OK. My plot is OK. Pacing needs work to make those two things work, well to use a music metaphor, both harmonically and melodically. :D This is really helpful to think about.

Yeah, The Hunger Games was a page turner because of the plot and pacing. I actually found myself unsympathetic to Katniss here and there--but also rooting for her so hard. That is a great example of a complex heroine done well. I'm going to take it on vacation and read it again this week.

I found Stroud's main character 100% unsympathetic and never read past the first book. Should I make an effort and read the other two books?

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She felt pacing was an issue with the previous draft, but that's going to change completely with the split pov (which I'm starting to read today, by the way). I'll read with an eye to the pacing, if that will help.

(c)

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I do think the split POV changes a lot about the story in a good way, but I have so much work left to do. I think I'm going to have to be OK with it taking longer than I'd hoped. There is no way I'm going to be done by the end of July.

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For me it's a combination of pacing and intensity, if I can call it that. Pacing is obvious, I think of PoA as a good example. It's like a heavy rock that starts rolling down a hill and picks up speed. Almost a 1/3 of the book, IIRC, is dedicated to that one early-evening-into-night sequence, which is then replayed from a different viewpoint.

When I say intensity, I mean a few things. One, I'm more likely to get really sucked into a book if it takes place in a noticeably different world from this one, which takes a little mental effort to get into and out of. That makes you want to go into that world and stay there. Two, I mean a sense that something important is at stake. I could never stay up late to read "Bridget Jones's Diary," no matter how exemplary a piece of chick lit it is. I'm not sure I can put my finger on what makes a story seem to revolve around something "important"--I think some authors get lazy and make the outside force sort of blandly genocidal, and I don't always buy into that. I think it helps to have a good mixture of small obstacles that might be solved satisfyingly in the next chapter or two, and really big challenges that drive my interest in the story as a whole.

The Name of the Wind is the last book that really made me stay up to read it, FWIW.

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Excellent points! Thank you. I'm attempting to write our world with a hole punched into it that let's ancient things through that should not be here. I'm totally playing fast and loose with the Ancient Greek Deus Ex Machina contrasted with modern free will. Medusa went and hid in a cave until Perseus cut her head off. Allie is going to find a cure for her victims or die trying, but she does have the luxury of morphing in and out of the Gorgon form.

About a third of the way through the major task for the novel becomes clear. And figuring that out involves lots of smaller puzzles. I don't know. All I can do is keep working.

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One of the things that keeps me glued to a book is something very naive and I am almost embarassed to admit it -- it is the idea that I am learning something about life, or about people, or about living well, that I had not yet figured out on my own. Or at least, that the book is serving in place of a really excellent conversation about one of those subjects.

Sometimes, of course, I like books even though the sensibility behind them doesn't impress me, so I guess there are other things I would rank highly as well. Style -- pleasure in language. An ability to make me laugh. (I think even grim books should be able to make me laugh; I lose patience with unrestrained emo srs bsnss.) Action bores me because I think I am retarded about purposeful behavior and I can never follow it properly. Same with overdeveloped plots. But mystery, atmospherics, a sense of liberating strangeness, yay, yay, and yay.

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I don't think that's naive at all. I feel something similar and I would add anything that feels like a window into a world I don't have access to--but wish I did, whether the world is real or completely imaginary.

I find any scene that is written with lots of movement and detail is usually just confusing--especially when you could just say, "Jim picked Robert up and threw him against the wall" vs. "Jim reached through Robert's legs and hoisted him onto his shoulders and spun, blah blah blah..."

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With imaginative or fantasy literature, I think it helps, for me, if there is at least some sort of symbolic analogy or link between the fantasy elements and what I can recognize as ordinary RL issues. I don't mean heavy-handed allegory, but just some kind of psychological correlation, however understated.

For instance, SRB's Demons' Lexicon fascinates in part because demonism seems to parallel the inner life of someone with Asperger's or mild Autism. On the other hand, I have always felt a little chilly about even such a classic fantasy novel as Lord of the Rings, because I think the fantasy elements there represent a lie -- an ideological allegory, a sentimental and snobbish Burne-Jones daydream about bygone virtues and all that sort of thing. It's not the alienness -- I love thinking my way into strange places when I'm reading history, or (sometimes) anthropology. But there's something thin and complacent about the things Tolkien wants to assert as true . . . and now I am off on a complete tangent, sorry. :)

The thing with description and movement -- I wonder if some authors mistake the clarity that's in their head for the potential muddle on the page. :) I totally agree with you about elaborate movement and detail. It's safer to just "throw Robert against the wall," because the details are likely to violate several laws of mechanics.

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If I get involved, I need to know what happens next. I will only stop at good spots for commercials & cogitation.

Funny you should mention this as I stayed up to 5 AM reading part of About A Boy again.

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But what gets you involved? I'm sure it's any number of things--character, writing, plot, etc. I know I'm asking people to herd cats here. :D

I hated High Fidelity so I never even dared to pick up About a Boy. I liked the movie version of HF. The book just felt incredibly self indulgent to me--but maybe it was just timing. I think I was in hate with the world that year.

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The one I definitely remember not being able to go to sleep until it was done was "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" because I didn't want to leave the little girl alone and lost in the woods.

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imaginarycircus

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