I started a new job last week—my first new job in thirty-four years. The biggest change in this transition among many other changes is the drastic increase in my commute. I am now traveling just under two hours each way.
Most of the journey, except for the first mile from my house and the last three miles towards my workplace, is on three interstates. I travel through two major metropolitan areas, Birmingham and Montgomery, while doing so.
The thing that has fascinated me so far is the way traffic flows on the interstates. Most of my travel time is outside of rush hour, so in a perfect world, me and my fellow travelers would roll along at a pleasant, steady clip of seventy miles an hour until we reached our exit, at which point we would cheerfully tootle onto the secondary road of our choice. Nope.
As a group, we just can’t pull that off. We’ll all be rollicking along at a fair clip, and suddenly, traffic slows. Sometimes it slows to a crawl; sometimes it slows only twenty miles an hour below the speed limit. Occasionally, a police car or accident or construction will explain the slowdown, but more often than not, just as suddenly, traffic opens back up with no explanation.
So, rather than the fast, steady clip I hope for, my drive breaks itself into a different pace: the beginning is quick, then, when I transition onto the interstate that circles Birmingham, things slow because of the unexpected—a piece of trash in the middle of the road, a police car watching us on the side of the road, a car pulled to the shoulder with its hazard lights blinking, a group of five tractor-trailers limited to speeds of fifty-five miles an hour in both the right and left-hand lane, or some poor soul who hasn’t figured out that driving forty-five miles an hour on a seventy mile an hour interstate just should not be done. When I transition back to the north/south interstate at the end of the bypass, we speed back up as a group, finally reaching the high point of our collective travel about ten miles from the office, after which we all slow down rapidly as we near downtown Montgomery and my office.
The traffic reminds me of the pace of the mystery novels that I enjoy. The beginning sets the scene, and the event that unsettles the fictional world I am in occurs quickly. Then I travel through a series of unexpected twists and turns with my protagonist sleuth as we investigate the crime. Following these twists and turns, we reach the climax of the novel, where the criminal is unmasked and the mystery solved. After the climax comes the denouement, the tying up of loose ends that brings the novel to a satisfying close.
And those days when traffic comes to a complete halt or stays a snarled mess from the beginning to the end of my drive? Those drives are the rough draft of something I’ve written before I take it in hand and wrestle it into a pace and flow that meets readers’ expectations.
What suggestions do you have about the pace and flow mystery novels should follow?
Talk about making lemonade from lemons! Great post, Nancy. Congrats on the new job.
ReplyDeleteBest of luck with your new job, Nancy. Although we never know what causes those massive slowdowns, some of them are caused by one truck going 67 passing another truck going 66.8 -- both below the car speed limit, now taking up two lanes and requiring 4 minutes before they can resume in one lane.
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