Pausing

A couple of weeks back, I watched Ikiru (1952), an Akira Kurosawa drama about a Japanese bureaucrat who discovers he’s terminally ill. After futile attempts to breathe some life into what remains of his dull, empty existence, he finds and accomplishes a last goal, shepherding a new children’s park for a poor neighborhood through the resistant bureaucracy.
It’s an excellent film (Kurosawa is just as good making modern drama as samurai epics), but what stuck in mind (okay, one of several things) was a scene early on where he winds up chatting with a dissolute young man at a bar table for several minutes. Longer, I think, than most films would attempt. Just sitting and talking, without a fairly low-key conversation.
Scenes where nothing much is happening are risky in any medium: The risk that the reader will skim over it, or put the book down, or stop paying attention to the film (and if it’s DVD, once I start doing other stuff, it’s hard to win me back). It’s why the scenes where people try it and it works—this, or the long conversation between John Travolta and Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction—stand out.
Constantly when I write I find myself wondering if my conversations are too long, if my descriptive passages are interesting, if the day-to-day activities of the characters are boring. If anything I have to batten down the impulse to throw some sort of dramatic moment in for fear I’m boring people silly without them. One of my stories just came back with the comment that there was too much talk and nothing happening.
But a story that’s all pure action without a pause is difficult to do well too (not that I’ve tried). So I have to make myself pause. Even when I feel my readers will be bored if someone doesn’t come through the door with a gun.