Pace Anticipation, Event, and Reflection

Book 22 of the Iliad, in Samuel Butler’s prose translation as Project Gutenberg prints it, runs about 5,400 words. Roughly 2,800 come before Achilles throws the first spear, about 600 cover the fight through Hector’s fall, and roughly 2,050 follow. The Greek, 515 lines, splits the same way: 272 lines before the first throw, 58 for the fight, 185 after. (Counted by whitespace, dividing at the first throw and at the fall. Where to draw those lines is a judgment; the chase counts here as waiting.)

The waiting is Hector’s, alone outside the gates of Troy while Achilles crosses the plain toward him. His father begs him from the wall to come in; his mother bares her breast. Hector stays and argues with himself that he could lay down his shield and offer Helen and half the city’s treasure, then stops himself: “why argue with myself in this way?” Achilles would kill him “as easily as though I were a woman.” Hector runs, and they circle the city while the gods deliberate and Athena, in the shape of his brother Deiphobus, talks him into standing. The length seems meant to make the reader dread the event, through parents, argument, and a chase in which, as Butler renders it, “the one cannot escape nor the other overtake.” The fatal stroke fits in one sentence: the point goes through the neck but “did not sever his windpipe so that he could still speak.” He says his last words and dies. Achilles drags the body behind his chariot, and the book turns to the people who were not there, Priam grovelling in the mire, Hecuba, and Andromache, who is at her loom with a bath heating for Hector until the crying from the wall reaches her. Her lament, the last, runs past the death to what it will do to her son at other people’s tables.

Anticipation is pressure not yet released, a character preparing, a threat approaching, a question held open. Event is the release. Reflection is meaning absorbed, whether as aftermath, as interpretation, or as a character or narrator working out what happened. Pacing is the order and weight of the three. As we reason it, anticipation raises the value of an event and reflection lets it register, so a release nobody was waiting for tends to pass quickly and a result with no room after it tends not to land. A book of constant action grows monotonous, because the reader cannot feel an event as an event without waiting for it or absorbing it. A book of reflection without pressure goes inert, since thought has nothing to push against.

The Hector count is one poem’s ratio, and what carries over to other pages is the choice. Thrillers often compress reflection, and for them the compression is part of the form. Drama and screenwriting usually give characters less room to reflect aloud, though a soliloquy can be exactly that room, so reflection there is more often performed in a silence, a held look, a person who sits down. Reporting hands the writer events in the order they happened, and what is left to decide is how long to make the approach, how little to say of the event, and how much room to give what it did to people who were not there. In memoir the pull is often toward reflecting too soon, narrating the lesson before the reader has felt the event.

Practice. In forty minutes, take a chapter or a run of twenty scenes. Label each unit in the margin: A for anticipation, E for event, R for aftermath or reflection, T for transition, a short bridge between units. Chart the sequence and look for runs: five events with no aftermath, three aftermaths in a row with nothing about to happen, an event that arrives with no anticipation at all. Change one run by cutting, adding, or reordering, and read the result aloud. If the pace feels different, you have found a lever.