Short Story Writing Techniques

Pacing in a story is what gives us a sense of time and how much has passed. It is a tricky device to use and writers that do indeed use it well create some of the best stories ever written. Unlike novels, short stories have an innate difficulty when it comes to a sense of time. It is difficult for writers to pace a short story and still make it feel as if time has passed. This is especially true in the short story Emergency by Denis Johnson. The time elapsed in this story is roughly 24 hours and throughout the story you can feel that sense of time passing, even though the story is only a few pages long. Moreover, the Johnson does an amazing job of pacing this story through the narrator who is also stoned out of his mind. This is an incredibly difficult and well executed task seeing as how throughout the story, the reader felt a sense of time passing the way someone stoned would feel time passing. Because Johnson paced the story so well, the reader also got a better feeling of how the narrator was perceiving the world. Johnson used different ways to do this. One example is that he would transition things calmly, something you would expect, and then out of nowhere, a very abrupt transition. This gives the readers a feeling like the narrator was completely zoned out, and out of nowhere noticed that something else was going on. Johnson also paces the story well in that he combines exact times with general phrases. For example, he says "Around 3:30 am a guy with a knife in his eye came in, led by Georgie." Since the setting of this story is a hospital, the exact time of 3;30 makes sense, but since the narrator is rapidly losing track of reality, the word "around" really gets that point across. He also paces the story rapidly by saying "We drove for hours, literally hours." In doing so, Johnson is able to take this story in a completely different direction. Johnson paces this story well, and it works very well to his advantage.