The Stranger by Albert Camus, Mocking Jay by Suzanne Collins, and Why Pacing is so Important

"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face." Image source*

So here's something that I never really hear about: Pacing. When you learn how to write in school, when you listen to lectures in your university English class, when you read a blog with "top ten tips on how to write fiction," it never seems to come up, and I don't really know why. It can make or break a story. It's what moves it along or halts it in its tracks. It's what tells us, as the reader, what matters, because it makes us pay attention to what the author wants us to pay attention to. It's just as important as character development or story composition. And yet pacing just gets lost in the ether of the elements of fiction writing, and I feel like the only one who cares about it (did that sound pretentious..? Oh well).

The author controls the story and at what pace it moves forward. If they want a certain scene to hold more importance than another, they will write multiple pages about it while other scenes get only a paragraph. First a writer must ask him/herself why one scene is more important than others. For example, every year that Harry Potter and the gang went to Hogwarts, the journey on the Hogwarts Express got its own chapter. That's because something vital to the story happened during the train ride. In contrast, only a couple times did the journey from the platform up to the school get any real attention-in The Sorcerer's Stone because it was all shiny and new to the students (character and setting development), and in The Order of the Phoenix because Harry needed to realize that he could suddenly see thestrals after witnessing the death of Cedric Diggery (sorry, spoilers, but hey, you should have read it by now). The books are really long, but it works because JK Rowling paced her novels, giving adequate time to certain parts of the story, and speeding through other parts by using transitions like, "before they knew it, Christmas was upon them," or the like. Mind, that's not a direct quote, just an example of what one might say.

Throughout the whole of the HP series, there were countless scenes where nothing really happened, but rather there was some essential character or setting development. During their first journey from the platform up to the castle, the first year students meet Hagrid, the Hogwarts scene is set as the enormous and mysterious and unfathomable castle that it is, and Draco Malfoy establishes himself as a jerkface. None of these things are vital for the plot to make sense, but they certainly add a lot to the story. If the events are not necessary to move the story along, and there is no character or inter-character relationship development happening, whatever it is needs to be cut.

Pacing is one of those things that, if done well, you probably won't notice it. As I said before, it can make or break a novel. If a book is too short, it'll leave readers wanting or disappointed. If it's too long, it's excessive and readers will be annoyed and wonder why they have to wade through chapters of text in order to find the meaning. For me, it's why the third Hunger Games book (Mocking Jay) was so terrible. (Warning: Spoilers through the rest of this paragraph) Catching Fire was so great; it was tense and suspenseful, and I couldn't put it down. Then I read Mocking Jay and it felt really rushed. It read as though Suzanne Collins' publisher had caught on to the success of the series, and wanted to get the third installment out on the shelves as quickly as possible, and they accepted her first draft as a result. The story dragged on, emphasizing Katniss' mood swings and rushing through seemingly important events. I hated the emphasis on her finally kissing Gale, and her ensuing fight with Peeta. But then after all the love triangle stuff (that got a lot more focus in the third book than the other two books combined), the epilogue felt like an "Oh, by the way, I'm with Peeta now. We have kids together." Oh...Okay. It was just an afterthought, after being built up so much, and I know epilogues are meant to be afterthoughts, but it deserved more detail, even-dare I say-a whole chapter. And the death of her sister Prim received less than a page's worth of attention, which was just dreadful. Don't even get me started.


  OKAY YOU CAN COME BACK NOW SPOILERS ARE OVER

Alright, my disappointment in the ending of The Hunger Games aside, let's get to the topic at hand: The Stranger, and how Camus paces his story. It opens with the main character, Meursault, learning of his mother's death (stick with me, no spoilers, I promise). The actual reception of the knowledge is curt: "Mother died today," he says. And not much else. In the first chapter, Meursault goes to the old folks' home where his mother spent her last years. He spends the night with her body, alongside many of her friends with whom he is not familiar. The next morning, they head to the burial in a long and arduous procession in the hot sun. Meursault complains about the heat and the length of the walk, and keeps noticing his mother's "special friend" (Pérez, her boyfriend, probably) falling out of step with the rest of the group and having to catch up. You reach chapter two before ever realizing that, despite the mentions of "the look of the church, the villagers in the street, the red geraniums on the grave, and more people...waiting outside a café for the bus," you didn't really hear about the burial itself.

Meursault returns home and the second chapter begins instantly with a swim in the harbor, where he runs into an old friend, Marie. He spends a few paragraphs courting her. They swim together. He helps her on her raft. He puts his arm around her. After a solid page of flirting, he asks her to the movies. She agrees, though the dialogue is notably choppy and incongruous. After the movie, Marie accompanies him to his apartment and they sleep together. We are given no more detail other than that by the time Meursault woke up, "Marie had gone."

Throughout this chapter (after Marie leaves, never to be mentioned again), we follow Meursault through his entire Sunday in what seems like unprecedented detail. He wakes up and decides to go back to sleep. He does not get up once he wakes again, and instead smokes a cigarette right there in bed. He wonders what to do for food, as he doesn't want to do lunch at his usual Sunday restaurant. He eats, and wanders around his apartment. He finds an old newspaper and rereads it "for want of anything better to do." His day drags on as he tries to busy himself. He goes out to his balcony, which overlooks the main street. He watches the many people who pass by: families on their afternoon walk and a group of young friends, among others. The street eventually empties and he wonders if the matinées haven't just begun and that's why there are no longer people about. He smokes cigarettes; eats some chocolate. A loud group of sports fanatics return from a football match, celebrating. He notices the sky is growing darker and the street lamps are coming on and decides he should sort out some dinner. He goes to the store to buy food, makes and eats his spaghetti dinner, mulls over the decision of whether to smoke a cigarette or whether the night has grown too cold, and just when you're beginning to wonder where all of this is going, and why the hell you're reading about all this banality, you realize, just as Meursault himself does, that somehow he'd "gotten through another Sunday, that mother now was buried and...Really, nothing in [his] life had changed."

Through all the mundane tasks and pointless musings, Camus paints an astonishingly accurate portrait of emotional trauma and the passage of time, and he does it by pacing his story. See, even though it seems strange that Meursault's day drags on by detailing every minute detail while his mother's burial gets hardly a sentence, it's all very intentional, and it's all brilliant.

In chapter one, we read much more about Meursault's physical discomfort in the heat, and his discomfort at Pérez's inability to keep pace with the group and not knowing the exact nature of Pérez's relationship with his mother. This effectively portrays him as self absorbed, though he does show some remorse for not having seen his mother for a long time, and moreover, he does show some emotion for her death in the beginning. However, by the time they reach the burial, his focus on just about everything other than his mother's death demonstrates the distance between them that grew steadily over the years.

With Marie he shows a similar self absorption paired with a more apparent lack of feeling. He wraps up the affair in no more than two sentences. (Only one more than his summary of the movie they saw, which, Meursault admits, "was downright stupid.") Now perhaps Camus is discreet on this for the sake of propriety, but I'd wager his inattention to what his audience would expect to be an important detail tells us a lot about Meursault's feelings toward Marie. She's forgettable. Dispensable. Not worth a second thought.

On paper, he doesn't sound like a great person that you have much in common with. He's not close with his mother, he sins, he has no interest in God, he's even a criminal. People are all very different, but Camus has a way of making you relate to Meursault the more you read about him. He is utterly, terrifyingly relatable. Camus puts his main character in situations that you yourself could find yourself in. He makes you question what you might be capable of by writing a character piece that reminds you that you can surprise even yourself. There is much more to learn about Meursault as he learns about himself. He's a wonderfully crafted, dynamic character. The Stranger is all perfectly paced and I promise you won't be able to put the book down.


Go anywhere; Be anything.



*This is not the original cover. In fact, I'm not even sure it was ever an actual cover for the book. I found it in a Google search and I just like it a lot more than the original. It's much more representative of the book.