On to the writing stuff. Today I thought I’d take a shot at a problem that caught my eye in an enormously fat, complicated novel I read recently: handling subplots. The book was engaging and competently done, overall, but halfway through I started feeling a little odd. At first, I thought it was a subtle problem with the pace, but the scenes all seemed to be moving along just fine. I finally realized that the trouble was with the subplots.

As I said, this was a fat, complicated novel. Meaning, lots of subplots. There were several romances, two or three different political plots, a bad guy converting to the good guys, two sets of long-lost relatives, a secret birthright, and a whole raft of interrelated action plots helping the build-up to the climax. The book started with the background and the first action-plot, and just as the action was passing its first big peak, the author introduced the romantic interest. We then had a couple of chapters of the romance, at which point the first big political plot showed up. Politics occupied the next few chapters, and just as the big political problem was solved, the action moved into its next phase. And so on.

Each subplot or plot arc would be almost finished when the author started dropping hints about the next, completely different, subplot or arc. By the time the current arc was disposed of, the next one was bubbling along nicely and ready to take off without giving Our Heroes more than a few minutes of down time.

It should have been gripping. It wasn’t. And the reason for it was threefold: first, the pattern quickly became predictable; second, the author was so locked in to the pattern that she/he kept it up right to the end of the book (yes, that means that in the last two chapters, right before the villain was defeated for good and all, the author introduced a new plot…which of course was never wrapped up. I wanted to spit nails; that scene would have been the perfect opener for a sequel, but as something dropped on the reader at the end of a book, coming out of nowhere, it really didn’t work for me); and finally, I couldn’t believe that all these subplots would come along in quite such tidy duckling fashion, one after another, with just enough overlap that they didn’t look like a bunch of short stories strung together.

Basically, the author was focusing on one thing at a time: first the setup, then an action arc, then the first romance, etc. Now, some things really had to happen in order; the villain had no particular reason to kidnap the heroine until after the hero fell in love with her, for instance. But I just couldn’t buy that both the villain and the evil politicians were going to hunker down and do nothing for two weeks while the hero and heroine fell in love, or that the sidekick and his love interest would go through several hair-raising adventures showing no interest whatsoever in each other, then have their two-week romance while everything else was suddenly on hold.

In real life, everything is happening all the time. National politics didn’t get put on hold for four days while I got my computer back up and running; neither did my exercise program or the people coming to install my new water heater. And in fact, my computer got fixed as fast as it did thanks in large part to some timely tips from my walking buddy.

Subplots need to weave around each other in the same way. Some things have to happen in order or in totally different and unrelated places, but there are an awful lot of things that can overlap for more than one scene or ten minutes. The politicians and villains and evil corporations will be plotting and making moves all the time, separately or together, whether the hero is taking a well-earned vacation or not.

Once the writer grasps this, the problem becomes keeping track of what everyone is doing and then figuring out how to bring it into the story so that one doesn’t have subplot lumps. I’ll try to talk more about that on Sunday.

The terminology has bled over from acting and visual media into prose writing, but it means the same thing. The difference comes in how a writer indicates the pause. An actor hesitates; a writer has to actually say “he hesitated.” A director has the camera cut away from the fight for just a second to show the horrified look on a bystander’s face; the exact same interruption for a writer runs into all sorts of viewpoint and pacing considerations (Would the first-person narrator actually notice a bystander’s reaction when he’s dodging punches? Would it distract him if he did? Is it too flat and generic to say “The bystander looked on in horror”? Is it going to be too much of an interruption to give a couple of sentences or paragraphs of description of the bystander?)

On the other hand, writers have a couple of useful tools that actors don’t. Punctuation, for instance. Standard punctuation is meant to indicate differences in tone and timing; there’s a reason that the period is also called a “full stop.” Commas are shorter pauses – just enough for a breath – while semi-colons and colons indicate longer breaks, dashes more of an interruption, and ellipses a hesitation or fading out.

Punctuation gets even more useful for indicating beats when writers use it in non-standard ways. This has to be done with a light hand, or it looks as if the writer is simply ignorant of standard punctuation rather than doing it on purpose. Still, the ability to write “‘Put. It. Down.’ He scowled – she lifted it higher – a flurry of motion; a crash; a fading cry…then silence, and curtains blowing through the broken fourth-story window.” makes it all but impossible for a fiction writer to stick strictly to correctly punctuated sentences. It’s hard to pull off effectively, though, if one doesn’t know the standard rules and usages to begin with. For those who are doubtful, or who want an engaging refresher course, I recommend Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The New Well-Tempered Sentence.

Sentence fragments and short paragraphs can also provide beats, especially when they are a) not overused and b) in sharp contrast to whatever is around them. That is, a sentence fragment in the middle of an action paragraph composed of relatively short sentences will provide a less strong beat than one that occurs in the middle of a long description. Compare:

He dodged left. The bear dodged right. He ran for the tree. The branch was just out of reach. He jumped. Missed. And the bear was on him.

A row of ornate picture frames lined the back of the mantelpiece. Most of the pictures were of a single person in dark, old-fashioned clothes, but two were of couples, and one showed a family grouping of three adults and five children. A white candle-stub stood in front of each picture, trailing cold wax and bits of blackened wick across the gray stone. Except for one. At the far end, half-hidden behind the portrait of a stern-faced matron in black, stood the picture of a ten-year-old boy in a baseball uniform, glaring at the unseen photographer…and at the empty space in front of the picture where his candle should have been.

In dialog, the speech tag can act as a beat, especially if it is longer than “he said” and/or comes at the beginning or in the middle of a line. “You insist that I say it? All right, then,” he said doesn’t have a beat in it (this is what people really mean when they claim that “said” is invisible as a speech tag). But “You insist that I say it?” he said. “All right. then.” has a very short beat in the middle, because the dialog is interrupted just a little, even if it’s only by “he said.” And “You insist that I say it?” He looked down. “All right, then.” has a longer beat, because the reader has to switch from dialog to the character’s actions and back.

Beats in dialog can come at the beginning or the end of a line, too, to indicate the pacing and the rhythm of the conversation. There are a couple of things to watch out for here: one is to not get carried away and put a beat somewhere in each and every line. Another is to vary your placement. Even if it’s the sort of conversation where there’s a dramatic pause between several lines in a row, you can make it look varied by putting the first beat at the end of the first line and the second beat at the beginning of the third line: “I’m coming with you,” she said firmly, and waited.//”You’re not going to give up on this, are you?”//She smiled. “Do I ever?” reads more smoothly, in most cases, than “I’m coming with you,” she said firmly.//”You’re not giving up on this, are you?” He sighed and shook his head.//”Do I ever?” she said with a smile.

The definition assumes a couple of things, not least that the viewer (or reader) actually cares about what happens when the bomb goes off. Note that it doesn’t actually matter much whether the reader cares because the hero is playing poker and the reader doesn’t want him blown up, or because the villain is supposed to be in the game but hasn’t arrived yet and the reader/viewer is hoping that the bomb won’t go off until he gets there.

It’s a great definition, and it illustrates one of the basic techniques for creating tension or suspense: let the reader know more than any one character knows, so that the reader can see trouble coming a long way off. But it’s not quite as simple as that, and trying to apply this technique without some level of understanding often results in false suspense.

For instance, take a slightly different situation: the heroine has discovered a plan to kidnap her son; she calls his cell phone, but there’s no answer. The kid frequently forgets to charge the phone, though, so he might still be fine. She jumps in the car and tears across town to his last known location -

- and halfway there, she gets stopped for ten minutes by one of those hundred-car freight trains going by.

That’s false suspense. The train doesn’t just stop the heroine; it stops the story, because the story doesn’t progress until the heroine gets where she’s going and a) finds her son, b) doesn’t find her son, but finds a clue as to where he’s gone, or c) arrives just in time to foil (or not foil) the kidnap attempt. Yes, waiting for the train makes it more likely that she won’t get there in time, but dragging out the trip for no story-related reason annoys most readers. So you don’t want to do that.

The basic elements of suspense are the same as for any story: a protagonist we care about and something important at stake. What creates the suspense is the reader’s awareness of some reason why the protagonist is very likely to fail. It can be something the protagonist doesn’t know about, like the bomb under the table, or it can be something the protagonist does know about, like his own fear of heights or alcoholism. One can get a tremendous amount of tension and suspense out of a scene in which a former alcoholic, pushed almost to the edge, hesitates in front of the door to a bar, or studies the cocktail tray at a big party.

Usually, a suspenseful scene has some sort of time constraint – the bomb under the poker table wouldn’t be very suspenseful if it was just sitting there, unprimed, with no timer. It doesn’t have to be a short, specific time constraint, either; “…before the plane runs out of fuel” or “…before the virus mutates into its deadly form” work just as well as “…before the bomb goes off at 12:23 p.m.

But time constraints aren’t always necessary; the recovering alcoholic who is resisting that moment of temptation doesn’t have any particular deadline. The lack of deadline is, in fact, part of the point – resisting temptation is something that he’s going to be facing for the rest of his life.

One can also create tension by limiting the amount of information the reader and/or protagonist has, doling out important details with agonizing slowness. The trouble with this technique is that it is very easy to limit the information too much, and end up with mere surprise, rather than suspense. In other words, if you’re going to create suspense by limiting what you tell the reader and only revealing it slowly, the reader needs to know that there are important things you’re not telling him/her. You also have to get the timing right; if the revelations come along at too slow a pace, eventually the reader is likely to give up.

One thing you absolutely do not want to do (except possibly in a totally over-the-top parody piece, and even then I’d advise caution) is a deliberate false-tension fake-out – the sort where the protagonist screams, blood spurts, and after two pages of backstory (his life flashing before his eyes?) the writer reveals that the protagonist has just cut himself shaving. This kind of thing destroys the reader’s trust in the author (apart from obvious parody), and generally leads to instant wall-flinging.

The temptation is always to take advantage of a slow moment in the main plot to advance a subplot, and it’s frequently a good idea in many respects, but it can lead to a too-even pace as the intense high points of one subplot cancel out the lows of another. So what does one do?

Well, the first thing is to look for places where you can do two things at once. You have a super-fast fight scene that relates to the main plotline; maybe you can drop some background information about a secondary character’s skills that will be relevant to his subplot later on. You have a planning scene that works as a pause in your tense political subplot; maybe you can work in some character development that will be relevant to a couple of other things that are going on.

Everything in a story affects everything else, even (or especially) when there are multiple viewpoints. Even if your secondary viewpoint character is two hundred miles away from your main character, or you have an ensemble cast scattered across multiple star systems, they’re all in the same book for a reason. A character who’s hundreds of miles from the main plot focus can run across a piece of information that’s irrelevant to him, but that the reader can see is going to up the stakes for those other characters. This serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, it ties things together across plotlines; on the other hand, the inclusion of more information makes the subplot scene more dense, which slows the scene down a little. The fact that the additional information isn’t directly relevant to the subplot slows it down even more.

If pacing in a complex novel is a really serious problem, you may have to resort to charting out your scenes, so that you can see what the problem is. There are a bunch of different ways to do this; the simplest is to use letters for the various plotlines and upper and lower case for fast or slower paced scenes. So if you have scenes that go A – B – A – C – b – A, you probably have a too-fast pacing problem (and if A isn’t your central plot, you may have an emphasis problem). An A – a – B – b – C – c  pattern moves like a rocking chair; it’s not bad, but maybe a little more variation would help. If you’re doing two-fers, an Ab – B – aC – Ac has some nice variation in terms of which subplots each scene is looking at, but the low spots and the high spots may be smoothing each other out too much.

If you want a more visual representation, you can go with Post-It Notes – one color for each plotline, bright shades for fast-paced scenes and pale shades for slower ones. Or you can list your scenes in an Excel spreadsheet and assign each one a value for each subplot and then use the graphing function…the possibilities for cat-vacuuming are endless. Nevertheless, you can’t fix a problem until you know what and where the problem is, and charts and graphs of various sorts are a good way of doing that.

Once you have some idea where your pacing problems are, you can look at ways of correcting them. If you have too many intense scenes in a row, but they’re all from different plotlines (A – B – C – D), you may be able to move some slower scenes from later on to provide some breaks: A – Bc – d – Cb – a – D. If you can’t move slower scenes from later in the story, you may be able to write something new to insert to provide a breathing space. Similarly, if you have a string of slow scenes from different subplots, you can move higher-intensity scenes from later to intersperse with the slower ones, or write some new high-intensity scenes to break up the slow section, or speed up one or more of the slow bits.

And if none of that seems appropriate, you can use various tricks and techniques to “slow down” and de-intensify one of your fast scenes, so that you still have some pacing variation. As I said in the last post, each of the aspects of storytelling has more intense, faster-reading forms and less intense, slower-reading forms. For instance: Shorter sentences read fast. Short fragments, faster. Longer sentences tend to slow thing down, even if there’s a lot of activity happening; complex sentences that have multiple clauses tend to slow thing down even more. The same is true for viewpoint: a close-in camera tends to read faster than a more distant view, even if less of the overall scene is visible close up. Dialog and dramatization tend to read faster than narrative summary. Short, simple word choices read faster than polysyllabic ones. Cramming lots of important information into a single paragraph or line tends to make it dense and therefore slower reading. By adding a few longer, more complex sentences and moving the viewpoint camera a little farther out, you can slow down a too-fast action scene without actually changing much of what happens. And of course, it works the same in the other direction.

You also have to keep an eye on the rhythm of the subplots. You may have a perfectly acceptable overall pace that comes out as A – b – C – b – A – a – b – C, but your subplot B is composed of nothing but slow scenes. Sometimes, that’s all right; sometimes, it means some of the subplot scenes need to be intensified; sometimes, it means the subplot really needs to be given less emphasis and combined with other scenes because it doesn’t have the oomph to stand on its own; and sometimes, it means the subplot needs to be cut.

And as with the original “Big Three,” you can advance more than one subplot in a single scene, which tends to make it more intense and important even if both of the subplots are at a low-intensity point in their rhythm.

But there’s more to rhythm than noise-silence-noise-silence. Rhythm has a beat, and that means emphasis in some places and not in others. The marching cadence isn’t one, two, three, four; it’s Hup, two, three, four; the heartbeat is a steady lub-dub, lub-dub. Rhythm can also change the length of each beat, like the shave-and-a-haircut door-knocking rhythm: dum-da-da-dum-dum…dum dum.

And all of that applies to pacing in a story. In addition, you have the increase in tension to play with, until it all comes unwound at the climax. You can climb your plot-hill in a steady upward heartbeat, lub-dub, lub-dub, a tense action scene followed by a lower-key relief/reaction scene,  like the “scene and sequel” model most recently promulgated by Jack Bickham. You can have a series of  quick action scenes of varying length and importance, rat-a-tat-tat. Or you can go for something more complicated, like the door-knocking rhythm, where the long and short beats and the emphasis on each is irregular, but still pleasing.

The tools a writer has to work with are not sound and silence, but action, reaction, relevance, length, description, tension, density, word choice, and viewpoint. Each of those tools can be used in a way that’s “fast” or “intense,” or in ways that are slower and less emphatic; the writer mixes and matches them in each scene to manipulate the reader’s impression of speed or pace. The story gets told one word at a time, regardless.

The place most people start is with action. It’s a writing truism that action scenes “read faster” than contemplative scenes around the campfire…but even so, some action scenes read faster than other action scenes. Using longer sentences and paragraphs, providing more detailed description of the setting in which the action is occurring, stretching out the blow-by-blow description of the action itself (like a slow-motion scene in a martial arts movie)…all that can slow down an action scene. Doing the whole scene as a two-paragraph summary instead of a fully developed and dramatized scene can change the emphasis on a major battle scene, making it the “a” in the rat-a-tat-tat  instead of the rat. Providing more of the viewpoint character’s immediate reactions in-scene, similar to stream-of-consciousness, can speed things up or slow them down, depending on where and how you place the reactions.

The denser the prose, the more slowly it tends to read. This is why one of the paradoxical fixes for a slow scene is often to make it longer – the lagging pace is the result of too much information coming at the reader too fast, so making the information less dense by spreading it out over another page or two is one way of solving that problem (the other being to take some of the information from the paragraph or scene out completely, and either dispense with it entirely or move it to another scene that needs slowing down some).

The key to all this is variation. Each of the elements of storytelling can vary independently, but they all come together to build the pace of the story. Yes, it sounds horribly complicated – which is one of the reasons why pacing problems are a horrible bear to fix – but it’s not something most writers do consciously and deliberately. It’s like riding a bicycle – you can tell when your balance is off and correct it without consciously controlling each and every muscle in your legs. The trick is to step back occasionally and look at the whole story, not just whatever scene you’re working on. Too many folks have had it drummed into their heads that a slow scene is “bad,” so they make all their scenes fast, action-packed, snappy, and tense…and end up with an overall story pace that is as even and unmemorable as a freeway ride through a desert at 90 miles an hour.

And next I’ll finally get to the complex-multiple-viewpoint pacing problems folks were asking about.

Because something was wrong with that book. The characters were amusing, the writing style was fine, and there were plenty of subplots (as one would expect in a book of that length). It was, in some respects, a kitchen-sink book – there were elves, and people from the “real” world sent to an alternate magical world, a quest, a fated romance, a kidnapping, betrayal by a friend, a reformed enemy, discovery of new powers and abilities, rescues, a corrupt government, an Evil Overlord maneuvering behind the scenes for the throne, a ninja-like assassin’s guild, dragons, telepathic bonds to animals, shape-changing…it’s actually pretty impressive that the author got all that in, even with so very many words to work with. It should have been an interesting, even compelling, read…but it wasn’t.

This morning, I woke up and realized why. Actually, it wasn’t quite that fast – I woke up thinking about my workout for today, which is interval training. For those of you who don’t know, interval training means you alternate periods of running hard with shorter periods of walking in which you barely get your breath back before you have to start running hard again. I hate it, but it’s extremely effective in building cardiovascular fitness, much better than just jogging along at a steady pace for the same amount of time and distance.

So there I was, contemplating my upcoming workout, and this odd thought flashes across my mind – that’s what was wrong with that book I finished yesterday. The pacing was too even.

Now, a 250,000 word book is in many ways the equivalent of running a marathon. You have to pace yourself, or you’ll never make it to the finish line. If you run too hard, too early, you won’t have anything left at the end. But pacing yourself doesn’t necessarily mean settling into the same comfortable jog for the whole race. At the very least, most people slow down a little at the water stations, and nearly everyone makes a push when the finish line comes in sight.

The problem with this novel was that the author didn’t vary the pace. Once the story got up to speed, it settled into a comfortable jog. I didn’t notice at first because things kept happening – kidnapping, rescue, escape, discovery of new information, developing romance, and so on. But they happened at the same rate, with the same amount of endless hashing-over-after-the-fact. It became as predictable as a rocking chair; I may not have known exactly what plot twist was coming next, but I knew for sure when it was going to arrive. The author was pacing things so carefully that there wasn’t even a build-up at the end of the story; beating the Evil Overlord and claiming the throne felt like the same level of importance as every other plot line in the preceding 200K words.

Part of the reason for that was that the author was actually very, very good at balancing all the subplots. Too good. Whenever the characters were having a break from the main plot, one or another of the subplots popped up with a mini-crisis. It made the subplots and the main plotline flow along smoothly, but it also meant that there weren’t really any intense peaks of activity or tension, and there weren’t really any spots where the reader and the characters could slow down and catch their collective breath. After a while, you got used to being at a set level of tension; the assassins breaking in didn’t feel much more important than rescuing the dragon or finding and comforting the runaway child.

I suspect that the author was aiming for a more character-centered book than I’m making this sound. The plot had, obviously, plenty enough material for a slam-bang-action-adventure, and if the author had wanted that kind of book, a few tweaks would have done the trick. Slam-bang-action-adventure is usually paced like interval training – intense activity followed by not-quite-enough-time to catch your breath, then more intense activity. You don’t want that pattern for everything, but even a marathon-length contemplative character study needs some ebb and flow to be memorable.

The first thing is that not all trilogies or series are the same. Some are accidental – the writer wrote a book that was supposed to be a stand-alone, and then everyone wanted more, more, more. Some are episodic – monster/murder/McGuffin-of-the-week (like the one Michelle is working on). Some are closed (or potentially closed) – there is one central story, and when that’s finished, the series is theoretically over (like “The Fugitive,” if anyone besides me still remembers that show). Some are completely open-ended.

Escalation is a problem for nearly any series that goes on long enough - the characters save the world (or whatever) and get stronger and better during the process, so saving the world again would be not only repetetive but too easy to be interesting. The writer has to come up with a new and bigger challenge – saving the universe, maybe. And that can get ridiculous pretty fast.

The escalation problem occurs most often and most obvioiusly when a writer does an accidental series. If the problem the characters faced in the original “standalone” book or trilogy was too large, it can be hard to find a new threat that doesn’t seem anticlimactic. If you know you’re doing a series, you can plan your challenges so that the characters aren’t saving the kingdom in Book 1 and saving the universe by Book 4.

The closed-ended series is subject to a slightly different kind of escalation problem. If you know that your characters are supposed to end the series by saving the world, you have to make sure that when they finally get to the climax of the series, it doesn’t turn out to be anti-climax. You have to either make sure that the characters don’t get too powerful over the course of their previous adventures, or else make sure that every time the characters get more powerful, the difficulty of saving the world (or whatever) increases, too. (Of course, in the series, one makes it look as if it was really going to be this difficult all along, only the characters didn’t know it yet.) And there’s always the danger of getting off-track and never actually completing whatever the original master-plot-arc was supposed to be, because one or more of the sub-arcs turns out to be more interesting (to the writer, at least).

Even the McGuffin-of-the-week type of series is vulnerable to the escalation problem. This is most obvious with TV series, because for just one full year of shows, the writers have to come up with about 30 plots, each with its own McGuffin…and beating the monster, catching the murderer, or finding the McGuffin can’t be too easy, or people get bored. So you start with the heroes beating random strange monsters, and by the end of a season or two, they’re fighting in the war between Darkness and Light, with the fate of the universe on the line, or they’re stopping Ragnarok at least once a season.

The open-ended series probably has the least trouble with escalation, because the author can and does switch to a new batch of characters if and when the first set gets too powerful. Worlds and universes are very large places; it isn’t that hard to find new characters who are far enough away that the overpowered folks from the first story aren’t going to find out about their problem in time to deal with it. And there’s always the next generation.

Avoiding escalation completely is really hard, if not impossible. The author is caught between a rock and a hard place:  if the characters have become stronger as a result of their adventures, the threats and obstacles they face must also become stronger, or the stories get boring pretty quickly. But if the characters have adventures and do not change, do not become stronger and wiser (or do so only at the proverbial snail’s pace)…readers also get frustrated after a while. About all you can do is pay attention and think ahead, and try to hit a pace of development for both your characters and your threats that is neither too fast nor too slow. (What?  Who said writing was going to be easy?)

Pacing is how fast it feels like things happen.  Not how fast they actually do happen; what it feels like to the reader-this is why sometimes the cure for a too-slow pace is to add more material, and the cure for a too-fast one is to cut something.  It has to do, frequently, with how much story-stuff is coming at the reader how rapidly.  So for a too-slow pace, you sometimes cut material because the reader isn’t finding out anything new about plot, characters, theme, background, etc. and so the scene/chapter/whatever is dragging…but sometimes, you add material so that the reader does find out new stuff, and that solves the problem.

And sometimes for a too-fast pace, you add in material to slow down just how fast the reader has to cope with these six important things, but sometimes you just cut out two of them that aren’t as important as you thought, or that can be dealt with better elsewhere.  Either way, the effect is the same — the read feels slower because the reader has less story-stuff (not facts or factoids-stuff involving plot, characters, etc.) coming at them over the course of three pages (because now the same amount of stuff is spread over four pages, or because now there’s less stuff on the same three pages).

Structure is the pattern of events; where in the story (e.g., beginning, middle, end) things happen.  “Beginning-middle-end” is a story structure; so is “beginning of beginning, middle of beginning, end of beginning; beginning of middle…etc.”  Structure is independent of pacing-you can have a fast-paced beginning or a slow-paced beginning, for instance.  And you can look at lots more complicated patterns than beginning-middle-end; the standard sawtooth plot-skeleton, for instance, or spiral structures, and so on.

The trouble is that people often talk about pacing using the same kinds of up-and-down metaphors they use for structure.  Because it is rare for a story to work if it’s all cruising along at exactly the same speed.  Cruise control is not a good idea for stories; you normally want variation.  Fast bits, and then a slower bit so the reader can catch his/her breath.  Not only does this sound a lot like the sawtooth plot-skeleton pattern, one of the easy ways to manipulate how fast something feels is to change the tension.  Which means that  the  peaks of the sawtooth-plot-structure (“We are going to solve the problem this time, for sure!”) quite often feel faster-paced (because they tend to be more tense), and the valleys (“Oh, darn; that didn’t work; now what do we do?  Let’s sit here for a while and eat worms”) quite often feel slower.

So the two things can hum along pretty much in parallel a lot of the time, but they’re not actually the same, and you can get into trouble if you start trying to fix the one when the real problem is with the other.