You’ve written a bang-up opening scene. We’re hooked right into the ongoing action as Delia pulls aside the curtain and discovers…her aunt’s corpse!! Great start! She called the cops, met the handsome and aggressive Detective Rojas, gave us some backstory and has just been dropped off at her door by Detective Rojas. So what do we do now? Watch her brush her teeth, put on her nightie, sleep, get up, take a shower…? How boring. But the next scene that matters is tomorrow morning when Detective Rojas shows up with new information.

There are a couple of ways to handle this kind of situation. Clearly, we don’t want to plod through the boring details. So let’s just skip them. If you want to hop from here to there or from now to then, simply skip a line, center an * on the skipped line and open with your new scene. That *, which won’t show up in the published text most of the time, tells the editor that you are about to change place or time. In the published version, the reader will usually find a single blank line to indicate that scene change. If you do this be very careful to place the reader firmly in the new time and place. Let’s go back to Delia. She has done all the showering, sleeping, and coffeemaking, and we’ve hopped over it all with our *. We’re ready to start our new scene. Let’s try something like this: Nobody rang the doorbell at 8 AM! Abandoning her mug of morning coffee, Delia tugged her bathrobe tight and peeked suspiciously through the peephole in the apartment door. After last night, she would never open that door without looking again!

But what if we simply want to skip past a boring afternoon at the office, hopping from lunch to that after work drink with the cute new guy in Marketing? Well, we can use that centered *, but too many of those abrupt transitions give our story a choppy feel. Instead, just paraphrase the action. We don’t need to look over Delia’s shoulder as she files, types, and talks to buyers on the phone. Wrap it all up in a single sleek sentence: The afternoon spun slowly by in its usual rhythms. We don’t really need to know what she did. We know she works as an administrative assistant and we’ll leave the details to readers. But this smooth slide from lunch to: At 5 o’clock, Delia was first out the door, checking her makeup in her compact mirror as the taxi wove through sluggish Friday rush hour traffic. Then, as the taxi deposits her at the chic bar where she’s to meet Mr. Marketing, we can start adding more description and step back into the story.

Use the same technique to cover large spans of time. For seventeen years, Prince S’valid ruled in his father’s everpresent shadow, always under the Eagle eye, always waiting for the pronouncement of his doom. We have just hopped over seventeen years here! But before we sailed into that leap, the author set up a solid take off point. We know what S’valid hoped for, we know who he is, we know how he ruled under his father’s Eagle eye. So all we need is that brief summary. We’ll fill in all the details for ourselves.

A bit more of a landing space is needed for long jumps. Don’t forget, seventeen years have passed. You can mix a bit of ‘author voice’ with a more ‘show don’t tell’ voice when you land on the other side of that seventeen year gulf: It was an early evening in late fall when the Elders brought Prince S’valid news of his father’s death. He was lounging beside the Dolphin Pool, trying to ignore the attentions of Lady Elspeth’s seventh daughter, who seemed determined to bed him this night. Again, we have brought the reader in for a solid landing, next to the Dolphin Pool (which we showed the reader earlier) and have started out by telling the reader where and when we are. In the next paragraph, we go back to ‘showing’ the story:

"Gentlemen." S’valid got to his feet the instant he recognized them as they pushed their way through the protesting hareem. "Please be seated." He gestured at the rich cushions flanking the splashing fountain. "Dareek, wine!" He clapped his hands. That bit of telling brings us across the gap and lands us in this new scene. Now we see the action and we can go on with the scene.

Transitions are the magic carpet that carries us through those boring daily tasks. Don’t be afraid to sit down on that magic carpet. Just be sure to take your reader with you!