In Which I Suffer Through New Moon: Chapter 20 -- Volterra · 1:16pm Apr 9th, 2018
Bella and Alice arrive in Volterra to find the streets packed with people for St. Marcus’s Day. After driving as close to Edward as possible (which isn’t that close), Alice tells Bella to just get out of the car and run to him. Bella runs for three pages straight to get to Edward, reaching him right before he steps into the sun.
It was really him, no hallucination this time. And I realized that my delusions were more flawed than I’d realized; they’d never done him justice.
CM + 1
Also, he’s shirtless. He wasn’t just going to commit suicide by cop via sparkling; he was going to commit suicide by cop via sparkly striptease.
Edward, upon seeing Bella, thinks he’s dead already and the Volturi were quick about it. He quietly says, “Carlisle was right.” It takes a while before Bella’s able to convince him that, no, he’s not dead, she’s not either, and they need to move before the Volturi find them. Edward moves, but some of the Volturi’s guards arrive. They’re not here to kill Edward, though; he hasn’t broken any rules, so Aro wants to speak to him again, to confirm that he’s changed his mind about dying. However, he has to bring Bella with him. Bella realizes, with dread, that since she caused Edward to reveal himself to her, if only her, then she might have to die.
At least I could be with him again before I died. That was better than a long life.
CM + 1
Alice joins them as they leave and the guards take them through a secret passage into the sewers. There’s a lot of walking. Eventually, they walk through a door and… the chapter ends.
That’s the cliffhanger. They walk through a door.
Clinginess Meter: 66 x 4
This chapter is fifteen pages long. Four of those are about Alice and Bella trying to drive through the crowds in Volterra. Three more are dedicated to Bella running. Another four are the guards leading them to the Volturi. That’s eleven pages total out of fifteen. Almost three-quarters of this chapter where Bella saves Edward, what’s supposed to be the emotional climax of the book, is about traveling.
I’m sorry this is so short, but how am I supposed to commentate on stuff like that? I’ll just rant about differences between media instead.
This isn’t a movie. You have a harder time drawing out tension by time limits when a reader makes their own sense of time passing. This potentially could’ve been made suspenseful; Alice knows that Edward’s waiting until noon to sparkle himself to death, so why not add the current time in between every few paragraphs? Like:
We raced along winding roads, over rolling hills.
11:37.
Town after town flashed by us, but Volterra was still nowhere in sight.
11:38.
Matthew Reilly is an author who basically writes cheesy eighties action movies as books. Naturally, time bombs frequently pop up. How does he keep the tension up during time limits? By frequently reminding us of how much time is left. If there’s a timer counting down, he’ll show the amount of time remaining. If something’s going to happen at a specific time, he’ll show the current time. And that’s not getting into all the little complications he throws in along the way. His time limits are tense. This is not.
Part of this might be the setup: Bella just has to run to Edward before he steps into the sun. There aren’t a lot of ways to mix that up. It takes place during a festival, so there’s lots of crowds, but none of them ever significantly hinder Bella. Here’s a way to raise the tension: Alice and Bella get there with plenty of time to spare. But there are crowds Bella can’t force her way through, so she has to take a different route. She gets lost, panics, reorients herself based on the clock tower Edward’s near, uses that as a guiding marker to get through Volterra, and then reaches Edward almost too late. It’s something more than just “running through crowds, running through crowds, running through crowds…”
This is the ending. The big moment, the big finish. Don’t pad it out. It needs to be tight as a drum. “But it’s hard!” Well, yeah. Of course it is. Work. Your story will be all the better for it.
So... what exactly is on those three pages of running? It doesn't even register on the Clinginess Meter, so it's not some grand soliloquy on Edward's perfection. The crap is Bella doing for all that soace?
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Making Kristen Stewart mouth noises?
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Long descriptions of the crowds, mostly, and how they're getting in her way. Mentions of almost everything Bella encounters. Her own fears on not getting to Edward in time. It's hard to get across in a summary like this, but the lack of content in those pages is staggering. We get the idea after the first few paragraphs, but then they just keep getting repeated over and over and over.
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I prefer your ideas for the mixing up and adding of tension over that.