Carol Rose
Basic
SCENE TRANSITIONS
In past CRAFT CHAT posts, we’ve discussed exposition, point of view, show versus tell, how to introduce a romantic subplot, story plotting, world building and description, dialogue, basic writing mechanics, genre reader expectations, foreshadowing, backstory, and character development. But how do you take all this and keep moving the story along smoothly? How do you get your readers from point A to point B, without jarring them so much they think they’ve jumped into a different book? Or worse yet, forcing them to read every single second of your protagonist’s life, because you aren’t comfortable making a scene transition?
It’s okay to let your readers fill in the blanks.
In other words, it’s okay to give them a time jump of hours, days, weeks, and even months when appropriate. Some writers seem afraid to do this, as if it’s somehow taboo to skip time in a story. It’s not. We’re used to this. It happens all the time in books. The thing is, when an author knows how to do this the right way, it’s also invisible. Which is why you probably don’t even realize you already know how to write scene transitions.
Why do you need scene transitions? Because even when we’re writing a linear story that covers a short amount of time, without them, that book would be ridiculously long and filled with unnecessary fluff.
We don’t need to give our readers every tiny detail of every single day in the protagonist’s life.
For one thing, that would be boring as hell. We’d end up with a lot of fluff and filler. What we want to give them are the moments that specifically point toward resolution of the conflict. Remember in the Character Development post when we discussed GMC? This is another thing GMC will help you with. Choosing which scenes drive the story forward, and are related to the main character’s goal. Even if using GMC to keep you on track isn’t your thing, it’s important to make every scene count.
Each scene in your story needs a purpose for being there. And that purpose is the same big three we’ve talked about for Dialogue and Backstory: give the reader new and important information, move the story forward, show characterization. If the scene doesn’t accomplish at least one of those, it isn’t needed. Cut it.
Okay, so HOW do I decide what goes in and what does not?
I’ll start with a word of caution: be very careful with scenes that are nothing more than internal monologue. Why? Because they can easily veer off into “who gives a crap?” land if you’re not careful, and they tend to go on way too long. A scene like this still needs to accomplish something other than giving us a trip through the character’s mindless wanderings.
Consider The Shining by Stephen King. Danny is performing an ordinary, everyday activity - brushing his teeth - when he convinces Tony, his imaginary friend extraordinaire, to show him something about The Overlook Hotel. Something which makes Danny realize he doesn’t want them to move into the place.
This scene is more internal monologue than anything else because, even though Tony is in it, too, Tony isn’t a live human being. He’s part of Danny’s mind. King didn’t use this scene only to show Danny's premonitions to the reader. He also used it to foreshadow what will happen to them at the hotel.
The scene creates tension, which of course is essential in a horror novel, but which is also needed to some extent in any genre. King is a master at taking ordinary events and enhancing them to show us characterization and give us new information, all while moving the story forward.
What about a story that takes place over twenty-four hours?
You have room there to include more detail, but you still want each scene to be meaningful. To be substantive. Otherwise it’s still fluff and filler. The time period over which your story takes place isn’t the issue. It’s each individual scene needing a specific reason to be in there.
We need to be comfortable with scene transitions so we can get readers from one important scene to the next one, without a boring or confusing break between the two. So let’s talk about ways to do that.
Chapter Breaks
This is one way, but unless you’re really, really skilled at structuring your chapters so each one is a meaningful, mini story of its own, you’re going to end up with a ragged mess of long and short chapters. Or, several that should have ended earlier, but didn’t because you felt obligated to keep writing so the chapter wasn’t only a few pages long.
Nothing wrong with varying chapter lengths, unless you’re writing for a specific imprint which has strict guidelines on that type of thing. But if you get locked into this way as the only way to transition from one scene to the next, you will never learn to write those transitions without using this method.
Those asterisks
Yes, that’s another way. You will sometimes see other symbols used instead of asterisks, or even blank lines between paragraphs. I use asterisks as breaks when I’m switching POV inside a chapter. Actually, the publishers use them. It’s their house style. Using them for scene transitions gives the reader a clear visual cue that there is a time, place, or POV jump coming up next.
Again, nothing wrong with this method. The only time I can see this getting in the way of the reading and potentially pulling your reader out of the story (which you do NOT want to do!) is if there are several of these breaks on one page, or one on almost all the pages. It’s as jarring as miles and miles of italics.
The simple truth is that you should end a chapter or a scene where it needs to end. Period. Not where it’s convenient for you. And if you must use asterisks to mark things, use them sparingly, just as you would uncommon punctuation like em dashes, ellipses, or brackets. We aren’t used to reading these things in large quantities, so when they’re all over the page, we’re distracted from the story.
One of the things I noticed while reading Twilight was all the em dashes. There were tons of them, littering the pages. And that’s the key right there. I noticed them. Bad news. You don’t want your readers to see behind the curtain, so to speak. Your writing techniques should be invisible. You want them focused on the characters and the story. Not counting em dashes, ellipses, or scene breaks marked with asterisks.
So how do you write scene transitions without making it obvious that’s what you’re doing?
Several ways. You could use a simply introductory sentence such as:
Two weeks after the letter came in the mail…
A few days later…
One week after the phone call from the attorney…
In the middle of Chapter 4 in The Great Gatsby, there’s one of those spaces between paragraphs I talked about up there, and the first sentence of the scene change reads:
At nine o’clock, one morning late in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three-noted horn.
Simple. Easy. We already knew from the previous chapters what time of year it was when the story began. We now know it’s late in July. Since this story takes place over a summer, and we know that up front, we’re easily grounded here, with one simply sentence, in the when and who.
Is it really that simple?
Well, yes. It is. You’re still writing in a linear fashion, assuming the scene before those sentences contains the event you referenced, or follows the previous scene in terms of time. But you’ve now clued your reader into the fact that this is a time jump. It’s two weeks later, a few days later, one week later, late in July.
The next two sentences in Chapter 4 of The Great Gatsby are these:
It was the first time he had called on me, though I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach.
“Good morning, old sport. You’re having lunch with me to-day and I thought we’d ride up together.”
Fitzgerald didn’t dwell on what happened from before the jump to late in July. He summarized it for the reader with one sentence, and then he moved on to why Gatsby is there on Nick’s lawn.
Once you make the transition, you simply write forward from there. You don’t need to tell them what the character did to fill in those two weeks, few days, one week. Not unless it’s important to the story. And if it’s that important to the story, it’s better you write a scene (even a short one) showing it, instead of having to fill it in as a flashback.
That one simple sentence up there about Nick going to parties, the hydroplane, and the beach isn’t a flashback. It’s a summary. A quick, easy one that lets readers know he’s been over to Gatsby’s house and doing stuff, but this is the first time Gatsby has come to see Nick. This is a turning point in the story, and that’s why he jumped to this scene. All the stuff that Fitzgerald summed up in one sentence is filler and fluff. Had he written all that out to show us instead of tell us, it might have slowed down the book, because it obviously wasn’t essential to the story.
Flashbacks, like backstory, should be sprinkled in, if used at all. And if they are used, they need to have a definite purpose. But I would discourage you from making a scene change where we’ve jumped time, and then going back to show your readers what they missed with a great amount of detail. If you need to do that, you should have simply written the scene before making the jump.
Truthfully, you don’t even need specific intro sentences.
Especially if your readers know your character’s habits. They go to work every day, and you’ve shown that, so you don’t have to say they brushed their teeth, washed their face, took a bath, and then went to bed and slept. It’s assumed your characters do this every night. Readers want to get to the next scene. The next event. The next step toward the conflict resolution. So you can simply open the next paragraph with them at work, on their lunch break, or wherever and whenever the next step in this story is taking place, even if it’s not the next day. As I said earlier, it’s okay to let readers fill in the blanks.
There are subtle ways of working into the conversation the fact that it’s a week later. Maybe you left your character at work the last scene with an important report that was due in a few days, but in this present scene, she’s still working on it. Her boss mentions that report was due five days ago. Readers can do simple math without being pulled out of the story. They will pick up on the fact that you’ve made a time jump, without you having to say so. The jump is invisible, because you worked it into a natural conversation that everyone can relate to.
It’s just as easy to work in place jumps. Suppose in the prior scene, or even a few scenes prior, your character mentioned he’s got an event to attend in three weeks. You can open a new scene with him at that event. As long as it’s not ten chapters earlier or something, your reader will remember he’s planning to attend that event, and will now realize it’s not only a time jump, but a place jump as well. Again, without you having to draw obvious attention to it.
This is what I mean by making the transitions invisible. I suppose subtle would be a better word. So subtle that they are worked into the conversation, narrative, or inner monologue without skipping a beat.
You can also make your scene change with a vague sentence that still conveys a sense of time and place. Consider the opening sentence of Chapter 4 of The Great Gatsby…
One Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.
We don’t know how much time has passed since the end of Chapter 3, but it doesn’t really matter. We know it’s Sunday morning and we know the narrator, Nick, is about to tell us more of the mysterious Jay Gatsby…
So what exactly is a scene?
Lots of definitions for this one, depending on how you Google it. In essence, it’s a unit of the entire story. You might want to think of it as having its own beginning, middle, and ending structure, the same way your overall story does.
THIS LINK gives some great tips and resources for structuring a scene in a novel. It’s been my experience that writing scenes with smooth transitions is right up there in terms of importance with character development.
It doesn’t matter how perfect your grammar is, how precise you are with where to put the semi-colons, or how many adjectives you can tag onto each noun. Without three-dimensional characters who evoke emotion in your reader, and without a story that flows effortlessly and makes sense to the reader, you will have lost them.
Readers will forgive misspelled words and even questionable plot devices if they’re so engrossed in a story, with characters they truly care about, that they can’t stop reading the book. Trust me on this one. I’ve had tiny things pointed out to me by loyal readers that both my editor and I missed, but that were of no consequence in their overall enjoyment of the story. And I’ve read books where I wondered if the editor fell asleep halfway through the book, but the story was so good and I loved the characters, so I kept reading.
Am I saying you should ignore the mechanics? Absolutely not. But don’t focus so much on them that you neglect the heart of the story: your characters, and how they move from scene to scene in that story.
Some additional links I found:
How to Plan a Story in Scenes: 5 Steps | Now Novel
Scene Writing Tips: 5 Ways to Avoid Filler | Now Novel
https://colony.litopia.com/threads/your-scrivener-tips.6325/
Writing The Perfect Scene: Advanced Fiction Writing Tips
That’s it for this CRAFT CHAT post!
One of the tips that helps me avoid fluff is "get in and get out."
