LA
Author
LATRAME
@latrame
Two clocks run in every story, and they're never in sync.
There's story time : ten years, one night, three generations. And there's narrative time : the number of pages you, the author, decide to spend on it.
A text's whole breathing lives in the gap between the two. "Twenty years passed", five words for two decades. Then three full pages to describe the four seconds his hand hesitates above the phone.
The reader doesn't notice it consciously, but the body feels it : when you slow down, they hold their breath ; when you speed up, they understand those years didn't count. You don't narrate time. You decide which of its seconds deserve to weigh a page, and which evaporate into a comma.
There's story time : ten years, one night, three generations. And there's narrative time : the number of pages you, the author, decide to spend on it.
A text's whole breathing lives in the gap between the two. "Twenty years passed", five words for two decades. Then three full pages to describe the four seconds his hand hesitates above the phone.
The reader doesn't notice it consciously, but the body feels it : when you slow down, they hold their breath ; when you speed up, they understand those years didn't count. You don't narrate time. You decide which of its seconds deserve to weigh a page, and which evaporate into a comma.