The Rhythm of Reading
Pacing goes beyond the speed at which a story unfolds or a plot advances. It is the deliberate orchestration of time, rhythm, and movement within text. It is how an author decides the duration of a feeling in a scene, accumulates and releases tension, and transforms the narrative sequence into a lived atmosphere. As Mikhail Bakhtin writes, every literary work “creates its own chronotope,” a unique organisation of time and space, through which experience acquires weight and meaning. In the hands of a conscious writer, pacing is the central device by which time shapes the fabric of the landscape, not a neutral flow but a palpable presence that is pressed into the body of the text and the memory of the reader.
Great prose is often considered as such for doing something greater than delivering events. It arranges them, delays them, stretches or compresses them so that the reader’s journey through the text is never even or passive; rather, it is charged with anticipation, anxiety, reflection, and release. The movement from one setnece to the next or from one scene to the next is not uniform: it is constructed through expansions, contradictions, interruptions and pauses that serve as a foundation for effect. Gérard Genette, mapping the intricacies of narrative time, distinguishes between “story time” (the order and duration of events as they would unfold in life) and “narrative time” (how those events are rendered, delayed, or accelerated for the reader). The ratio of these two, duration, is not a mere detail: it is the source of tension, immersion, and memory.
Micro-pacing
The smallest units, sentences and paragraphs, are where pacing is the most immediate. At such a close frame, the writer has control over every decision regarding the length, syntax, and pauses that shape the landscape of reading, altering how a moment is experienced and how sensations accumulate.
In Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, the narrator’s voice surges and stalls, alternating between explosive self-accusation and abrupt, hesitant qualification:
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.”
Genette’s analysis of duration is embodied here: a moment of self-description, which could be passed over in an instant, is stretched and thickened. The reader is forced to linger, to inhabit the narrator’s psychic turbulence—the pace is fractured, urgent, and compulsive. The climate is one of tension and discomfort: every staccato sentence is a new wave of feeling, every hesitation a pause in which anxiety pools. The reader is not an observer, but a participant in the unstable pulse of the narrator’s mind.
Had Dostoyevsky written these lines in a smooth, uninterrupted fashion—compressing the confessions into one efficient sentence—the reader would simply register information, perhaps with mild curiosity, but never enter the narrator’s lived discomfort. The psychic tension, the unstable climate, and the sense of compulsive self-interrogation would all vanish. Instead of feeling the turbulence of the mind, we would only receive a summary; the effect would flatten, leaving the passage forgettable and its mood lifeless.
Camus’ The Stranger offers the opposite effect through a flat, suspended micro-pacing:
“Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”
Here, as Roland Barthes would argue, the power of pacing lies in delay and deferral: “what the story unfolds is not simply a content, but the expectation, the deferral, the pleasure of delay.” Camus’ prose slows the reader with its refusal of certainty, its refusal of narrative propulsion. The effect is existential drift; the reader feels the inertia, the climate of stasis and alienation. Nothing resolves, but time is suspended, and the reader’s anticipation is made to ache.
It can be seen that micro-pacing is not merely stylistic. It is how the temperature and pressure of the prose are set by the author and felt by the reader. It is through micro-pacing that we see how the writer decides line by line whether time is to be sped up or slowed down, whether the air is light or damp and heavy, and whether feeling is stretched or snapped.
Macro-pacing
Separate from the layout of sentences themselves, pacing includes the set-up of scenes, pauses, and narrative moments. It is a means of regulating suspense by that author and allows them to build cycles of tension and relief and sculpt the reader’s journey through the weather of the work.
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment demonstrates a macro-pacing that oscillates between feverish introspection and sudden action:
“He knelt down and began searching the dead woman’s pockets, trying to avoid getting the blood on his hands… Suddenly, he jumped up, snatched the axe, and ran to the door.”
Here, Peter Brooks’ theory in Reading for the Plot comes to life: narrative energy is “always curbed by postponement, by the resistance of closure, by the slow pacing of revelation.” Dostoyevsky’s chapters linger in dread and debate and become bursts of violence. The reader is made to feel the weight of delay, the agonising stretch of guilt and fear, then the rush of consequence. The climate is tense, exhausting; time expands in waiting and contracts in terror, simulating the psychological reality of crime and remorse.
“The town had lost all sense of time; days passed in a haze of sameness, the only markers the ringing of ambulances and the setting of the sun.”
The narrative constructs a temporal world where progress is both desired and denied. The effect is collective suffocation, the monotony of quarantine, the relentless return of routine, the pressure of time that will not move. The reader inhabits a climate of anxious waiting, a narrative weather built from suspended anticipation and the ache of deferred release.
Macro-pacing is the set-up of tension and relief. The pulse of the narrative lies not only in what happens but also in the intervals, spaces, delays, and patterns of repetition that keep desire alive and experience thick.
Manipulation and Disruption
The most potent climates in literature are often shaped by manipulation and suspension: it is set when an author does not process as expected and causes a deliberate delay or sudden acceleration, a fragmentation or abrupt closure. The theory is not abstract: Barthes, Genette, and Brooks all argue that suspense, pleasure, and memory are generated by these very strategies: by the arrangement of presence and absence, and the control of what is withheld and what arrives without warning.
Camus’ The Fall is a study in narrative ellipsis and abruptness:
“I have only a few minutes left. Shall I begin my story now, or shall I wait until the light changes?”
Genette would call this a manipulation of order and duration; the narrative is constantly interrupted, revelations arrive out of sequence, and crucial moments are withheld. The result is existential disquiet: the reader is never stable, always chasing meaning that is just beyond reach. The climate is one of perpetual suspense and philosophical discomfort, the architecture of time fractured to match the uncertainty of the world.
If Camus had chosen a more linear, expository structure—recounting events chronologically, providing every detail as soon as it is relevant—the sense of disquiet and fragmentation would be lost. The reader would be grounded, perhaps even comforted by narrative clarity, and the unsettling, questioning mood of the novel would be destroyed. What remains with the reader is the feeling of instability and the impossibility of resolution; without this pacing, the philosophical weight and experiential atmosphere of the novel would disappear.
The Reader’s Experience: The Climate of Pacing
All theory returns, in the end, to the reader’s lived experience. Pacing is the mechanism by which literature governs attention, mood, sensation, and memory. The landscape created by pacing determines not only how quickly a story is read, but how deeply it is felt, how long its tension endures, and how its atmosphere persists.
The best prose does not let go at the end of a scene or chapter. Its pacing, slow, fast, disrupted, or suspended lingers, returning as pressure, longing, or even the transformation of the reader’s own pulse. In Dostoyevsky, the anxiety of waiting and the relief of revelation become part of the reader’s experience. In Camus, the climate of suspension, drift, and abruptness lingers as an existential aftertaste. In Coelho, the open, meditative pacing leaves the reader with a climate of hope, the quiet pressure of anticipation and possibility.
Pacing, as Brooks argues, is not ornament but the architecture of narrative desire, the machinery by which literature produces effect and memory. In the climate of reading, the arrangement of time and tension is the most lasting weather: it is how literature survives.
Therefore, to pace is to build the layout of experience, to shape not only what is told, but how it is endured, remembered, and carried forward. Theory shows us that the true work of literature is not only to recount events, but to govern the landscapes in which those events are lived. Through pacing, the writer transforms narrative from pot into atmosphere, from action into landscape, and from story into the lasting pressure of memory.
