One of my characters has a sudden shock. The way I wanted to represent it was that her thoughts slow down as she tries to process what she's seeing, then repeat at full speed with a sort of thud as she realizes the implications. I wrote it like this: - He gathers up the shards in a sack, cautious not to damage them. Then his friend makes a gesture, and a p o r t a l o p e n s u p. A portal opens up. A portal opens up. - The first person to read it thought the w r i t i n g l i k e t h i s didn't work. Is there a better way to convey that sort of mental slowdown?
It's useful to know about the genre and format and some more context like whether this is about a main character and a pov character. In a comic book, effects like changing the kerning on the text might be useful, but it's not usually an option in a novel. Nor is bold. I'll try and make suggestions for novels. The first thing is: why does the reader care how slowly the character is thinking? The main technique for controlling the reader's speed of thought is pacing - and this is mainly so that we can get enough words in front of them to compensate for the scene's being fictional, and them not being in it with all their senses working. As well as the possibility that our "life flashes in front of our eyes" when something exciting happens, and that adrenaline or some other brain chemistry really might take in information faster when we're excited, in storytelling there is also the effect of hindsight. We're allowed to relate what was important in an explosion, even if the character only experienced it momentarily. (And we're also allowed to do the opposite - it can be pleasing to readers when the pace of the words emulates the pace of events.) It's worth emphasizing all of this is trickery. The words in a novel (or any other written artform) stay where they're put:- Jane Eyre's bedroom in Thornfield is permanently smouldering; Willy Loman's noggin is permanently bouncing off the dashboard; and Odysseus' arrow is always about to fly through the twelve axe-rings. But the illusion of pace is played on the reader, which might make a technique for slowing down a character's thoughts complicated, or it might obviate the need for it. Looking at the passage again after thinking about it, it might be okay to remove the distracting formatting and leave it as it is. The line break shows the character's train of thought has broken off, and that it has dwelled on the event from one paragraph to another (and then two paragraphs). The italics emphasize the thought. And probably that's as much as we can do and as much as we should do. But the purpose is always to make the scene as effective as possible for the reader, rather than to produce a particular effect. So there could be infinite suggestions for adding more text:- perhaps above and below to make the pagination seem like the character's attention narrowing. Or to bring the character's attention to extreme focus and labour certain of their concerns:- Then his friend makes a gesture, and a portal opens up. A big portal. A round portal. A spooky portal. Why the hell did Bob open a portal? Doesn't he know what always happens whenever there's portals? There was going to metatexts. Sure as eggs is eggs. Any second, tentacled quotations from the pulpiest and most formless sorts of fiction will be reaching into the narrative and we'll all find ourselves walking in circles round Maya Deren's house, chased by David Lynch with a kitchen knife.
I recently ran across the idea that we can speed up time or slow it down in a story by controlling the flow of words. I think @Seven Crowns talked about it, but I also saw an article or something, don't remember where. Or maybe it was just what Seven Crowns wrote? Anyway, it has to do with how long it takes to read the words and how long the actual events depicted would take in real time. This is also something @evild4ve was talking about, I just want to go into it in a somewhat different way. Example: Last year there was a monsoon in Thailand, a massive forest fire in Russia, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Obviously each of those events would last a lot longer than it took to read about them. And combining all three into one brief sentence compresses the events of a lot of time into one little nugget. Or you can go the other way, make the reading take longer than the events. Example: There was less than 5 seconds left on the clock before the bell would ring and we all had to put down our No. 2 pencils. I furiously filled in little ovals. Didn't bother to read the questions, there wasn't time for that. My strategy was simnply to finish the damn thing. Get it turned in at least complete, even if I got a bad score on it. That little brain-freeze I experienced because I finished my Slurpee so fast really screwed me, didn't it? Bad strategy McGee—note to self—next time put the damn beverage down. Outside the sun was shining, the 3rd period PE class was kicking a soccer ball around the field, and soft fluffy white clouds were drifting across the sky. In the classroom the second hand was ticking ever closer to my doom, the teacher was reaching for the little bell on her desk, I could hear frantic scribbling all around, and drops of sweat were trickling down foreheads. I managed to fill in that last infernal oval just before the fatal ding. The way you did it was sort of a hybrid of both of these methods. You didn't extend the moment by writing a stream-of-consciousness, you originally said it in about as much time as I assume it would take for a portal to open up. But as D4ve said, you repeated it across 3 paragraphs, which accomplishes the same thing as writing an extended stream of consciosuness. You don't need anything else to enhance the effect.
One thing I like to do is use contrast. A few choppy sentences conveying fast-paced action placed before a paragraph focused on the character's inner thoughts that race through his/her mind in a matter of seconds could do the trick. It's also good to take some time and learn what things people focus on when "slow-mo thinking". Most people I know suddenly put a thing that's happening in perspective. So, a sentence like "Only now did he realize that his weekend was spent building a rocket ship from junkyard scraps to find out if the moon really was made out of cheese" could give the reader a subconscious hint that the thinking is done in slow motion.
There's a historical literature device used to convey this feeling / effect, although it's largely unknown outside the German linguistic world - Naturalism's Sekundenstil, I use it extensively in my own writing as I love it. In short, you slow down diction to the point every second or moment the reader spends on the page feels longer than it is in the narrative, with precise details of motion and diction described. Here's a more detail description in English. EG, instead of the repeat, go into minute detail about the gestures, what happens in the meanwhile, then the very detailed way the portal opens up. First a miniscule bead of coalescing arcane energies that distort the air like a hot ember raised from a forge, slowly expanding into a tear- You get it.
