Hi Josiah, thanks for agreeing to a written conversation like this.
For those who don’t know, Josiah, as a wordsmith, will be discussing how timing in story-telling works. I’ll be adding thoughts on how his points are relevant for visual storytelling. We hope to come to a place where we can all learn something and hopefully better glorify the Author who wrote us into being.
Introduction
Timing and pace, it seems, is a big deal in the story of Creation. There’s the slow buildup of heat in summer, the sudden surprise of a rain shower, the methodical creaking of oaks stretching leaves heavenward, and the song of hummingbird wings as they search for nectar, and yet all of it is glorifying its maker and each comes in its own season as Earth slides smoothly round her sun. Jesus, on a hill with three crosses, was crucified on exactly Passover weekend, and, on his thirty-third year, rose on the third day to prove that he was part of the triune God. Timing and pace, evidently, are important to our maker and they filter down into how we use words and thoughts, and how we live.
I’m looking forward to this conversation and discovering the significance of timing in word choice, storytelling, and our own lives.
Seasons in Story
Josiah, how does timing in story work? What are the seasons of a plot and when do you (as the author) want specific events to happen? How do you balance the length of these seasons?
Just like the earth goes through four predictable seasons each year, you can absolutely find a standard cycle in each novel as well. First, there’s a season of preparation where, as an author, I’m setting up all the pieces I need for the larger story I’m telling. I’m introducing readers to the characters, unveiling the main plot of the novel, and allowing readers to situate them in the setting. This often runs for about 20-25% of the novel.
After the season of preparation, the novel unfolds into a season of development where we have the chance to follow all of the story strands introduced. The protagonist is given a chance to pursue his goals, adapt, and change in light of the obstacles he faces. The stakes get higher and more personal. The plot unexpectedly shifts course at different points to keep the story fresh. And throughout this season, the protagonist’s options begin to narrow. This will be the largest section of the book, perhaps 50-60% of it.
Finally, that brings us to the final season: resolution. The protagonist needs to make the right choice at a key juncture if he’s going to succeed in the plot goal he’s pursued the whole story. And we get to see all of these disparate plot threads we’ve been following—that may have seemed disconnected at points—finally come together to deliver a stirring conclusion.
Nature can be a guide for authors in how they execute this timing. There are general principles for when to stage each season—just like Winter can’t come in August in the northern
hemisphere, we don’t want the character still going back-and-forth on whether they’re committing to the story goals at the 50% mark. But within that general framework, there’s a lot of room for artistry and variance. The weather doesn’t drop consistently on the same day each year, and there’s a beauty in being able to play within the general framework of story structure.
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Josiah, comics share storytelling with novels and so all these elements apply there as well. I would only like to add that within the seasons we have phases of tension build and release. Anticipation grows like the readying of a whip and comes through with a crack of surprise as the character finds himself launched into a new phase of the story. He is living along oblivious to the reality that he’s under the author’s special attention, and WHAM! he’s teleported out into the woods, or finds the dragon, or mixes the wrong chemicals. And the buildup starts again. With each season, clouds build on the horizon, the air thickens, birds fly for cover, and the little queues make us nervous with anticipation: something big is coming down. And it does. Slow buildup, drawing out anticipation; fast backlash cashing in on that anticipation.
With comics, because you can read an entire page of pictures at a glance, this type of plot effect also happens on smaller scale: with each page turn. We aim to build of two pages—miniature plot change, surprise! Next page … build expectation—and so on. The flow of the greater story gets timed around the breaker-like coming and going of page turns.
Pacing in Language
The idea of seasons is scalable. They can stretch the entire plot, go down into chapters, and even nestle into paragraphs. How does the idea of seasons—or pacing—within language work? How do you create changes in tempo, and why is this important?
Like with story, why can’t we just have a uniform pace? What unique properties do speed and slowness possess in language and why are both important?
It’s boring to repeat sentence structure. It’s often a sign of poor writing. It’s not something that displays beauty. It’s less likely to evoke emotions. It’s a good way to turn readers off.
See what I did there? :)
Beauty—in whatever form it takes—needs freedom and variation in order to delight readers. That absolutely applies to sentence structure. Great authors look for ways to avoid mistakes like starting too many sentences with the same word, re-using sentence structures repeatedly, or following strict templates for how many sentences are in each paragraph. They let their words sing. And that means playing with a variety of different word choices.
Reading poetry or taking a stab at writing it can often help. Poets are forced to cultivate artistry in their words even more than novelists or short story writers are. As a result, poems become a great way for authors to study this in miniature.
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Wonderful examples, Josiah: the back-and forth between slow swell and sudden break make for more interest. In comics, we look at panel length and composition. We can have a wide, spacious panel, with sparce areas of interest, which creates a sense of space, and gives the reading tempo pause. Narrower panels make more new information come by in the same amount of space and the action speeds up.
We see something similar in our own lives. Busy days blur by, while on the ones less happens, the sun turtles across the sky. My dad loves telling about the holiday they attempted to lengthen into forever. On the first day, he plopped onto the hay barrels of an old barn with his brothers and they stared at their watches, for weeks it seemed. They stared and stared and got wonderful payback for their time. That first half hour lasted about as long as the rest of the holiday when they abandoned their boredom and tumbled through the fields instead.
Timing in Life
How can we apply storytelling thinking to our own lives? Each of us are miniature authors reflecting the Great Author. How should we be thinking about his seasons and the timing of events he puts in our lives? What if we don’t like it? Does that make God a bad author?
One of the biggest challenges we face in life is that we rarely see the whole story. We’re hit by an unexpected hard event and are tempted to view it as a tragic ending—when in reality, it’s just an obstacle that’s popped up a quarter of the way into the larger story. In the moment, we can’t always see that. But how many times have you been able to look back at a hard event years later and see how it fit into a greater story God was telling in your life?
One of the things I appreciate the most about storytelling is how it can help us gain perspective on this process. If you had the chance to talk with the protagonist of your favorite novel right after her lowest point, what would you say to her? My guess is that you’d want to encourage her that the story isn’t over yet and so she need not be overcome by doubt and despair. Often, that’s the reminder we need as well. Like a character in a story, we aren’t able to know the ending yet. But we do know who the Author is—and we can trust him a lot more than we can trust any human author!
Conclusion
I was planning to write a fancy conclusion, but there’s hardly anything better that what you’ve ended with, Josiah. So I’ll just rephrase the takeaways and sum up.
Realise your story isn’t over. It has an Author who writes good stories (and not tragedies). Trust him with your life and throw everything you have at it, and realise that the up and the down, the crashing of the waves—the coming and going of the winters—is exactly how adventures are made to be: startlingly wonderful when all is said and done, not a dull flatline with no texture (like repeat-structure sentences or same-length panels).
More From Josiah
Josiah has a superhero-fantasy story collection which I recommend looking at (for which I have had the joy of making illustrations). The series is thought provoking and has unique characters and places.
Cosmic Chaos Sample
If comics are your thing, or meaningful stories, I have set up a sample of my upcoming comic Cosmic Chaos for you to view.
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