Transitions

September 4, 2009

 

Mary Rosenblum:  I wanted to talk about transitions today, because I see a lot of awkward ones or nonexistent ones in novice manuscripts.  And there really is no one way to make transitions.  Transitions are the 'getting from here to there' that you have to do in a story that is more than a single scene.  You may have to make a time transition...from today to next week, for example.  You may need to do a location transition...your characters go from the dinner table to the high school dance.  You may have to do what I call a boredom transition....you need to get through a boring working day to the hot date afterward.
A lot of writers use the skipped line.  You skip a line (marking it with a single centered * so that the editor and typesetter both know that this is not a printer hiccough, you DID mean that skipped line). That's good, but it is abrupt. And it does require that you set the 'when/where/who' on the other side of that skipped line transition. You need to instantly establish 'when' this is, relative to the previous scene. 'Where' we are now. 'Who' is the POV character in this scene. If you are moving from short scene to short scene, using a * and skipped line can give the story a very choppy/chopped up feeling.  You can use that on purpose to create the effect of flipping through snapshots, getting glimpse, glimpse, glimpse, glimpse....  But if you don't want that effect, that's a problem!
With a lot of brief scenes, you might be better off to use a verbal transition. Three days later, Ariel found herself knocking on Dr. Adam's back door.  Notice that the transition itself covers the three Ws...who/where/when?  Ariel is the who, when is three days later, where is Dr. Adam's back door.  You are going to need those important three W's no matter how you make the transition.
Often, they're obvious.  Jeanelle spent the rest of the day shelving the new shipment of shoes and watching the clock. The moment the hands pointed to five, she was out the door, jacket in hand, running for Dottie's house as fast as she could go.  Jeanelle was at work in a shoe store, the day passes, and now she's running to Dottie's house.  That's a transition through boredom by the way.  Nothing much happens during Jeanelle's working day.
So the question is...when do you use a transition and when do you write out the scene? Mostly it's a matter of 'does anything important happen?' and 'can I use reader expectations?'  If nothing important to the plot happens in a stretch of time, by all means, transition through it.  If nothing that needs explanation takes place, then you can transition through that time and place and readers won't get lost.  If we know that Jeanelle works in this particular shoe store and we know her town pretty well, that transition gives us all the information we need.  If things happen that arouse our curiosity, then don't skim over them with a transition.  Say our character, Dobie, just got hired by a strange man he met on the street. He's supposed to start work on Monday morning at 9:05 sharp. He's given an address that is nothing but a blue painted door in a brick warehouse with boarded up windows. Dobie arrived at the blue door precisely at Nine-oh-four and it opened at precisely nine-oh-five. "Punctual," Mr. Goodyear said, nodding like a bobble-head doll. "Punctual is important." Then he ushered Dobie inside, where Dobie spent the rest of the day doing very strange things to rabbits.  So here, the readers will be really ticked off!
Doing what to rabbits?
Why do these things?
What's the inside like?
We want to see!
That is NOT a place for a transition.  You only use a transition if we're not going to miss anything as we make that leap.  But if you give us three pages of Mama making toast and eggs and Lorrie eating them and only then going outside to have that dramatic confrontation with the bully down the block, that breakfast scene is going to bog down the entire story.
That's usually true for sex scenes, and action, especially...should be on-stage, wouldn't you say?
Mary Rosenblum: Actually, for sex scenes, what I call a 'pull back' transition often is your best choice. If you are not writing porn, where specific graphic details are the main raison d’être, every reader is going to have his or her one idea about what 'good sex' is.  If you 'pull back' and kind of blur through the scene, you allow each reader to fill in the visual details that he/she wants to imagine there.  One person's turn on is another person's oh yuck!
I guess I'm thinking of the sex scene that the reader has been waiting for, that everything has been leading up to.
Mary Rosenblum: Oh, I see what you mean.  Yes, that's kind of cheating. :-)  You build to the big sex scene and then the author slams the door before they even kiss. Not fair.  Transitioning from 'they gazed into each other's eyes' to 'he kissed her goodbye as he left for the office' is not going to work well.
  Could you give an example of a pull back?
Mary Rosenblum: Well, firefly, you can bring the lovers together, they kiss, caress, maybe undress with more or less description depending on your audience, and then you can do into your POV's head and give us that person's feelings about what is going on, leaving the specifics, visual and tactile, to the readers' imagination, ending with specifics again, afterward.
Okay, I see.
Mary Rosenblum: Saying something like they made love slowly and sweetly or something of that nature allows the readers to decide what that specifically means. Transitions like that... pull back transitions...are a pretty good idea for most sex scenes for that 'yuck factor' reason and because you don't offend the readers who don't want to know, while giving enough details that those who DO want to know can easily imagine it. What does not work, as Jane mentioned, is to lead up to the sex scene and literally slam the door in the readers'  faces. If you ain't gonna deliver, don't promise it!
The hardest transitions to make are the ones that span years.  I get a lot of novices in the novel writing class who want to do stories that cover decades.  We're going to be intensely involved with this character, then she's going to spend ten years working on a farm, then we're going to be intensely involved with her again, then she's going to spend nine years raising her daughter, then she's going to go save the kingdom.  About this time, as I'm reading the plot summary, I'm holding my head and reaching for an aspirin!

The difficulty here is that you're not going to be the same person after ten years working or raising her kid for nine years as you were when you started.  So when you just plunk that chunk of time down on the table and then go on with the same character, it really makes your character look like a plot puppet. Which, of course, it is.
Isn't that where you jump into the action, drizzling in the back story and using transitions between the present and the past? What kind of transitions work in that instance?
Mary Rosenblum: Well, yes, you do have to do just that, Charie.  And of course, we now have to see how this character has changed, and find out what if any events have taken place in this past decade....so your main plot is rather diluted while we play catch up.  This can work if you're writing a family saga where you have a lot of vivid characters but we're not deeply engaged with any one of them.  But when you have a single POV that the readers are to engage with, this type of huge-time-lapse transition is murder to do well.  You really do have to keep the main story line moving while filling the readers in on what has changed in her life or his life in the past ten years.
It's not impossible. Nothing is impossible. It’s  simply quite hard to do it well. And this is really something that you need to consider when you plan a story.  What is the time frame? How big are your time transitions going to be, and how many will you need?  It's probably the most common reason I ask a student to rethink a novel proposal.  Think of any story as a necklace. Most of the time, the beads are spaced pretty close together.  If you have one or two small gaps in the necklace, it's still a necklace, still pretty.  If you have a few beads separated by a half hard of string each, you don't really have much of a necklace. You can wind the whole tangle around your neck a dozen times, but it's rather awkward.  If you're going to have to separate your story line with a gap of years, really try to make it a single gap of years. Yes, the story will go on hold a bit as we reacquaint ourselves with our warrior who has spent the ten years since he was 12 living in a monastery learning how to fight. But then we can move on.
If you do that three times in the course of the book, you have a serious problem.  Now if you're doing a family history, following four or five vivid characters but we're not really getting close to these people, then when one goes away for awhile, the others carry the story, and you can actually create a very positive 'aha' moment when the handsome stranger shows up, only to be revealed as cousin Olav, who had acne and was ugly when we saw him last at 13.
Why not just start when he's 22, and show his training and teen angst as backstory?
Mary Rosenblum:  Depends on what you need to include for the story, Jane.  If nothing critical to the story occurs before age 22, there's no reason to start any earlier than that. But if for some reason, an earlier segment of his life is critical to the story, it may not work well as backstory. Readers may need to share it. Most of the time, you really can avoid a gap of years if you're a skillful plotter. But sometimes you really do have reasons to include that gap.

Is it okay to change the POV character after a transition or does that cause more issues with continuity?
Mary Rosenblum:  Oh absolutely that's where to do it, Keith. That's why that third W is so important...WHO is the POV character?  If you're going to switch POV, a transition is the place to do it.
So, in general, remember the three Ws, every time you move to a new location or a new time in your story.
Where are we?
When is this, relative to the last scene?
Who is the POV?