Pacing, Tempo, and the Dangers of Critique Groups

I’ve been reading director Sidney Lumet’s fine book Making Movies. He’s always been one of the most meticulous, hands-on directors, involved in every stage of the cinematic process. And he keeps on going: at age 83, he just released Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead to considerable acclaim.

Making Movies details every step of the moviemaking process, from rehearsal to lighting to camerawork on down to editing, sound mixing, and adding a score. This is a great book for novelists for two reasons. First, it makes you grateful you aren’t making movies (and Lumet himself wonders why anyone who wrote decent novels would ever move into a collaborative medium like theatre or film). Second, many of Lumet’s thoughts on process and technique are directly applicable to writing. Here’s some of what he says in his chapter discussing editing:

The more cuts, the faster the tempo will seem. That’s why melodramas and chase sequences use so many cuts. Just as in music, fast tempo usually means energy and excitement.

However, an interesting thing happens. In music, everything from a sonata to a symphony uses changes in tempo as basic part of its form. Typically, a four-movement sonata will change not only its musical themes in each movement, but also its tempo in each movement and sometimes even within each movement. Similarly, if a picture is edited in the same tempo for its entire length, it will feel much longer. It doesn’t matter if five cuts per minute or five cuts every ten minutes are being used. If the same pace is maintained throughout, it will start to feel slower and slower. In other words, it’s the change in tempo that we feel, not the tempo.

Physics people talk about motion and time in terms of calculus. The first derivative with respect to time is velocity; the second derivative is acceleration (or deceleration)—the rate of change in the rate of change. A story that moves forward at only one pace begins to seem as if it isn’t moving at all; it's acceleration and deceleration that the reader feels.

I think good critique groups can be useful to the beginning writer. They can give feedback on many important basics; above all, they allow the writer to establish whether he or she is able to hold the interest of readers for the length of a chapter.

Once you can write a killer chapter, however, I think critique groups become less useful, and sometimes dangerous. Since they tend to move chapter by chapter, each new submission is viewed in the light of previous submissions, but not in the context of a book. Often the comments are that this new chapter isn’t as fast-paced (or conflict-filled, or exciting, or sad, or lyrical, or sardonic, or whatever) as a previous submission. The group process tends to push for homogenization of your book. As Lumet notes, an unchanging element, even if initially exciting, gradually becomes a drone.