How do you slow down time in your prose?

Y'day, Scott talked about his new strategy to slow down time at critical points in his story. I got home from work, excited to slow down my own fiction, when I realized that I only had a few tricks for doing it.

Here's an excerpt from my fictional fictional story, The Cyberlama Cannibal. Spoiler alert, we're in the penultimate chapter and we are reaching the climax of the story.

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. The lama picked him up and began to gnaw.

(Dear Pulitzer Committee, you can reach me at dmalasarn (at) gmail (dot) com or call me at 555-Word.)

Now, let's say I wanted to slow this down. I have decided that this scene is important, and I want to make sure that's clear to my readers. What can I do?

One approach that I'm embarrassed to admit I do fairly often is what I call "the window approach." It would go something like this:

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. Outside, the sun was setting, and the fragrance of jasmine came in through the high window. The lama stopped just long enough to take in the sweetness in the air before he picked his victim up and began to gnaw.

As stupid as this example is, I do think it serves to slow down the scene like I had intended. It gives CL a bit of humanity, perhaps some emotion (albeit not much) before he gets to his task.

Another approach I use, which is slightly better in my opinion, is "the stopped and looked approach".

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. The cyberlama turned and looked across the way at the dingy gray walls that surrounded him. He stared at the walls for a long time. He listened to the noise in the street as a bus full of rowdy children drove by. Then, he picked his victim up and began to gnaw.

Again, I think this manages to slow the scene down and assign the character a moment of contemplation, perhaps regret or some other emotion. It works, but at the same time it's limited in what it can convey. A character staring out at nothing can only give you so much information.

When I'm feeling the most energetic and the most imaginative, I'll do a sort of expansion, like looking at the scene under a confocal microscope (which is similar to other microscopes except that it's optimized for thick sample visualization):

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head. He saw the pale part in the man's hair, the goosebumps and beads of sweat that formed there. He noticed that the man was whimpering, a sound that reminded the lama of a young yak that had once fallen through the ice in a frozen pond in U-tsang. The whimpering started softly and slowed down to almost nothing. The man did not look up, but instead kept his head lowered, his forehead touching the cyberlama's feet. He fired. The man was dead. He slumped over. His departiculated brains drifted upward like a thin trail of cigarette smoke. The lama picked him up and began to gnaw. The taste of the flesh was sweet. He chewed several times until the flesh formed a mush in his mouth, and then he swallowed it down to his electronic stomach and turned on the digestive valve.

What I like about this method is that it stays focused on the matter at hand, while the other two approaches I mentioned above have more of an escapist feel to them. I'm not sure how much emotion can come through using the microscopic approach, unless one decides to do some telling or perhaps bring back some symbols that had been set up earlier. Still, it's an approach I try to do more of.

In general, these are the three ways I have of slowing down fiction. I'd be curious to see what other people do. Feel free to use the cyberlama example or one of your own...as long as it also has cyberlamas in it.

What techniques do you use to slow down time in your prose?