What Sleeping With Jane Eyre Taught Me About Pacing

Today’s post is by Brevity blog editor Heidi Croot.

I’ve been sleeping with Jane Eyre, lately—courtesy of The Sleepy Bookshelf, a podcast designed to help me snooze.

Except it’s been keeping me awake.

I’ve loved this classic since childhood, every reread captivating me as if for the first time.

But it soon became clear that I was sharing my bed not so much with Jane, as with Charlotte Brontë herself. Listening to the novel has been showing me things I had missed on the page—the first-person narrative drawing me in so close I could almost believe it was memoir—and night after night I’ve been reveling in a writing-craft class led by the venerated author.

One such class addresses a storytelling weakness that shows up a lot in my writing and editing practice: high-tension scenes that rush to their finish with the speed of a bullet train.

Brontë’s talent for keeping readers on tenterhooks reminds me of Matthew Dicks and his hourglass technique, which he shares in Storyworthy (entire book, so good!).

Going too fast is one of the biggest mistakes storytellers make, Dicks says. When you arrive at the moment readers have been waiting for, “It’s time to slow things down. Grind them to a halt when possible.”

Consider the properties of an hourglass: the upper chamber containing story still to be told. No grain of sand before its time. All flowing inexorably to the same destination.

In one of my favorite scenes (spoilers ahead), Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield Hall after a year of yearning, desperate to clap eyes on her great love, Mr. Rochester, whom she fled upon learning at the altar that he was already married.

As she approaches the Hall, I itch to press fast-forward. Would he be there? Would they helplessly reunite, or would her moral restraint prevail? Had I been turning pages, I’d be reading very fast indeed—which is what readers do when narrative tension flames through the roof. How else to defend against an author’s merciless manipulation?

But because I was forced to listen and wait, I caught Brontë in the act of tipping the hourglass—again and again.

She sends Jane on four separate journeys to find Mr. Rochester, starting with a 36-hour coach ride from her home to Rochester Inn—ample time for reader anxiety to flare. Rather than simply asking the innkeeper for news of her lost love, Jane prolongs hope by walking the remaining two miles to the Hall.

It is a walk designed to drive the reader to the edge of endurance.

Fields, stiles, woods, trees, rookery.

We suffer through Jane’s inner debate on which vantage she should approach the Hall for maximum delight.

Will she glimpse her beloved standing at his window? Will she be so mad as to run to him?

We watch her principles waver as she asks herself, “Who would be hurt by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me?”

The orchard, the gate opening into the meadow, what the crows are thinking as they sail overhead.

“I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house,” she tells us at last. “I saw a blackened ruin.”

She asks the questions tormenting every reader: What has become of Mr. Rochester? Did he burn alive?

In horror, she hurries back to the Inn to question the innkeeper—an insufferable man who takes his sweet time getting to the point—and we sigh with relief when Jane commissions a chaise to take her 30 miles to Ferndean Manor, Rochester’s second home.

After all these interminable delays, we’re approaching the end of this torture. She’ll be there before nightfall!

And she is, but vexatiously disembarks a mile from the manor so Brontë can arrange for her to lose her way in the woods.

The gloomy wood, the close-ranked trees, the grass-grown track, the sylvan dusk.

A thousand grains of sand fall, possibly a million.

When we finally see the blind man outside his front door, groping for equilibrium in the rain, and then witness him with Jane in an ecstatic embrace, I’m a veritable wreck—and also a happy reader, replete and reverential.

Here’s what particularly interests me about the art of pacing, and it is basic mathematics. When we combine a writer’s misstep in hurtling through high-tension scenes, with a reader’s tendency to devour such scenes in frantic gulps—fast plus fast adds up to reader letdown and disengagement.

Writers need to go slow to go fast.

In her guest post First Pages Critique: Getting a Handle on Pace, book coach and editor Hattie Fletcher tells a true crime writer that her story needs to slow down.

What? True crime—a genre prized for its high-stakes tension and aerodynamic speed—should slow down?

But a more relaxed pace is precisely what this book doctor prescribed. “Get a head of narrative steam going,” Fletcher advises. “Stretch out a little into the storytelling and trust that if you keep doling out details, readers will stick with you for the bigger story you want to tell and the questions you want to explore.” 

Matthew Dicks would offer Hattie Fletcher a knuckle bump. A 36-time Moth StorySLAM champion, Dicks knows how to tell a tale. As he illustrates so enticingly in Storyworthy, choosing an hourglass tempo when the stakes are high—via journeys (physical and emotional), details, reflection, one step forward and two back—can quicken our readers’ pulse while keeping them emotionally invested. Literary tools as essential to writers of creative nonfiction as to those who spin fiction.

Savouring Jane Eyre on audio continues to feed my love of craft. Wide awake and smiling in the dark, I listen to Brontë flaunt her formidable delay tactics. Such a master class on how to control a story’s pace. Such a sorceress’s skill in dispensing sand.

And now I must go. It’s time to get some sleep.

Heidi Croot

Heidi Croot is a Brevity Blog editor and recovering corporate writer who is busy rassling with a memoir. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mud Season Review, and elsewhere. Connect with her on Facebook or X.