Filmmakers, composers, and playwrights carefully author the time dimension of their work. The feeling of a pregnant pause and an accelerando comes from viewers' experience of passing time. Those mediums express a few hours’ evolving experience—what about days, months, years? 👇
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Cultural institutions often author experiences that stretch over longer time scales (e.g. multi-year religious coming-of-age rituals). But mass mediums rarely do.
That’s an unfortunate limitation: mass mediums give authors enormous reach!
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Books have a longer time dimension, but it’s generally unauthored.
Books often take months to read. But they almost never have an *authored* time dimension like that of films or plays. The days and weeks are rarely specified by the author the way minutes are by a filmmaker.
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I think you undersell the authored time dimension of a novel. If it exists in the other media you mention, then it definitely exists in a book.
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Is there a particularly representative book in which you feel the author was strongly conducting the time dimension of the reader's experience over a long time period?
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I pointed to the Odyssey. Beyond this, I think I’m having trouble understanding what you mean by strong conducting the time dimension. Can you help to understand better? My thinking is that a plot necessarily manipulates the reader along some time dimension to tell the story.
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I think the Odyssey is a great example, but its interesting properties arise because it wasn't authored as a book!
In general, book plots do manipulate the reader along time dimensions, but I think few intentionally design multi-month time scales as e.g. social institutions do.
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The about the Decameron or the Canterbury tales? Both authored as books, similar properties as the Odyssey.
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The Decameron seems like a particularly great example!
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I see your point about multi month timelines. What about religious books?
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My rough sense here is that the books themselves don't really encode a lengthy authored time dimension, but the social institutions around them absolutely do.
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I don't think playwrights generally do. Hard to think of a good example.