What is the Difference Between Chronological and POV Pacing?
Pacing is key to making sure a reader’s experience is an enjoyable one. If you’ve never heard the term before, pacing is the speed at which your story is told. Not only does it influence your reader’s enjoyment of your book, but it can also help raise or decrease tension in a moment.
In film, think about the pacing of a fight scene. The action comes on quickly, and depending on the number of people involved in the fight, things can move so fast that it can be hard to see who is doing what. The pacing of those scenes is fast, as they are meant to speed up the action and speed up the tension and excitement in the audience. The pacing of the storytelling—both the dialogue and the visual elements—is key to making those emotional or thrilling moments have the maximum impact on readers.
Pacing is just as important in literature–if not more–because books don’t have the added help of a visual element to keep readers moving along in the story. Typically, there are two main ways that an author might decide to pace their novel: chronological pacing or POV pacing. Of course, neither is better than the other, but let’s talk about both styles so you can make an informed decision about how to structure your book.
Chronological
Pacing your book via chronology means that the events of your book move forward as time passes. It’s the style most readers have experience reading, and it’s a great way to tell your story. Not only do events pass as time passes, but authors can use the passage of time as a storytelling device to either crank up or slow down the tension of the narrative.
For instance, if an author wants to hyperfocus on a moment, they might depict time slowing down. In this period, the characters might notice a wealth of minor details they’d normally ignore, or the world around them might seem to freeze around them. Romance books do this often when the romantic leads share a moment together. The world around them either freezes, ceases to be, or becomes unimportant as the two characters focus on every minor detail of the other person. Even though time seems to be slowing, bringing down the narrative tension, the romantic tension is cranked up by slowing the passage of time to allow the characters more time to fall deeper in love.
On the flip side, if an author wants to crank up the tension, they might depict events happening in quick succession. The narrator likely would stop noticing the world around them, and the events would happen so quickly that the narrator might even miss a few things. For instance, if a book is depicting an accident or natural disaster, they might show the protagonist running, trying to get to safety and maybe collect supplies. If a building collapses, the pacing of the book would speed up as the character ran to collect their things and get to safety, but then instead of something slowly crumbling, the author might depict a wall suddenly disappearing. When events happen that quickly, and they’re paired with a character’s own speed and concern, the pacing speeds up, and the narrative tension cranks up as well.
Authors can also use the passage of time as a plot device. For instance, in Stephanie Meyer’s novel New Moon, book two of the Twilight franchise, the main character, Bella, is despondent after her boyfriend, Edward, breaks up with her. To show that life loses all meaning and purpose for Bella as well as to show the deep depression she’s fallen into, the narrative stops and the next three pages have one word on each page, October, November, and December (this is how they show this in the movie). It slows the pacing of the novel to a screeching halt so the reader can feel the way Bella’s depression and brokenheartedness seem to have brought her life to a screeching halt.
As effective and natural as chronological pacing can be, however, there are pitfalls. As effective as time jumps can be when used properly, if a narrative stops enough time to bring the reader forward or backward in time, it can create a jumpy or disjointed read. So when using chronological pacing, it’s important to remember the narrative tension and the flow of the read, so you can be sure anytime you speed up time, slow time down, or travel forward or back in time, it adds to the story rather than detracts from it.
Point-of-View (POV)
Books with multiple points of view can be really exciting, offering readers a look into events through the eyes of at least two different characters. Not only can multiple points of view make a book confusing, however, they can often cut off narrative tension.
So when you pace your book with varying points of view, it’s important to swap the POV of the narrator intentionally. A great example of this is Ian McEwan’s book Atonement. This book paces itself around changing POVs in a truly unusual way, as readers are constantly pulled between events as they actually happened and the perspective of Briony Tallis as both a child, and the life she imagined for her sister and her sister’s boyfriend, Robbie. The book’s major conflict comes from the truth and Briony’s childhood lies and misunderstandings of events. The book’s biggest twist comes when readers learn that adult Briony has told the reader even more lies to make amends for the tragic real-life events that her lies as a child caused.
Because the tension of the narrative is found in those conflicting stories and the reader’s struggling to suss out the truth, every time the point of view changes, it raises the tension of the read. And that’s a tough thing to do because sometimes events are depicted twice, one right after the other, only with one side showing Briony’s childhood understanding of an event, and one depicting the events as they actually happened. (This clip shows how they do this in the Atonement movie, using sounds—a bee in this instance, but sometimes a typewriter—a closeup of Briony’s face, and then showing events from the third person perspective to indicate Briony’s POV compared to the first person perspective of the actual events).
The challenge in using POV to pace your book is making sure when you swap perspectives, you swap perspectives at a moment that doesn’t cut off the narrative tension. It might feel like you’re leaving your reader on a cliffhanger when you switch POVs in a tense moment, but that typically only serves to make the reader invest less in the character to whom they’ve switched. You never want to unintentionally make a reader feel like they are forced to engage with a character. In the example from the video clip above of the fountain scene in Atonement (which is also in the book), we see the same event twice in a row, and the first version of the scene ends in a tense moment. However, switching from Briony’s perspective to the real events helps to increase the tension of the story because it shows how a moment that was really a moment of two young people having a bit of a romantic moment was interpreted as something very sinister by Briony.
Both chronological pacing and POV pacing have their own setbacks and advantages. The key is making sure you understand the choices you’re making when building your book, and use the unfolding of events as a way to bolster and strengthen the story, not unintentionally draw from it. And we can help! Our expert editors are always here to help you craft an amazing book, so book a free consultation today!