There is no denying that writing changes over time. Compare Dan Brown to Edgar Allen Poe, J.K. Rowling to C.S. Lewis, E.L. James to Jane Austen. Of course, society has changed so much in the past 100, 200 years that stories and settings and characters are radically different also. But when comparing then and now, there is a style to the ‘then’ novel that I think perhaps modern writers are too quick to dismiss: the slower pace; the more measured speed of the storytelling.

The modern world moves at a dizzying speed. Just go to your nearest city, stand on a corner in rush hour, and watch the world dash past you. Everyone is in a hurry. We text a friend rather than write a letter. We multitask eating, drinking, travelling and reading. We don’t walk, we run.

There is a trend in modern writing to reflect the modern pace of the times in the pace of the book. The reader is thrown straight into action, and from that point on the plot gallops along – little time for reflection or detail or grounding. The expectation is that readers are impatient by nature, and will give up on a book if not constantly led along; that readers have poor attention spans and will skip long paragraphs of prose, racing on to the next paragraph of dialogue. A book that bears any resemblance to the tradition of storytelling is deemed ‘slow’, and the inference is very much that ‘slow’ is a bad thing, because everything in life should be fast.

And yet, when you read the classic works of literature, they are most certainly slow, and I would not agree that is a bad thing at all. Look at Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Certainly, it is hard to get through the 2,783 pages of the book, and no critic would revere such a lengthy, digression-rich novel today. And yet Les Misérables is considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and even 150 years after its first publication, still the book is beloved worldwide and it has been the inspiration for the most popular musical in the world, plus a recent multi-award-winning film.

When considering the change in pace in novel-writing, the question becomes:

When you speed up a story, what element suffers?

The answer is depth. Detail. When you’re galloping along in narration, you’ve no time to describe carefully a room or a person or a sentiment. You’ve no time to explore how the character thinks and feels about an event, because you’re too busy ploughing on with narrating the next event. You leave so many who, what, where, when and how questions unanswered, unexplored. You give a reader a snapshot of a story, not the full story.

Read any of your favourite authors from yesteryear and you’ll see what I mean: then, a slower pace is evident than that of most books today. But is that a bad thing? Are you bored? Impatient to get to the end? Or in fact is the reading process all the more pleasurable for the fact that you are really immersed in the story, that you are taking time to consider ideas, that reading the book is a true escape for you? Do you find the reward of reading better when racing through a story at a surface level, or when really experiencing that story? Is slow always a bad thing, or was the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu right when he said, ‘The slow overcomes the fast’?