KEEPING IT SEXY – WRITING TRANSITIONS

Writing Round Up and a Place to Submit

Apr 24, 2023

In life and in story, you have these things called transitions. Places where things change. You go from one place to another, one scene to another, one chapter to another, one husband to another, one president to another.

A really good transition is really just a bridge that helps the reader go logically from one section, scene, chapter to another without it being awkward like a bad date or making their brain hitch where they say things like “We were just in space and now we’re at Wal-Mart? What the heck?”

Some people are amazing at transitions.

Some people have awkward transitions.

Some refuse to acknowledge there even is a transition.

But in the writing world, you want them to be smooth and there are a bunch of transitional phrases and words that authors fall back on to help them do that like:

A week later (or whenever)
At the same time
Afterwards
For two weeks/days/minutes
Meanwhile
At night
The next day
The next night
For a month, I cried into the phone
In the morning
When the sun rose
When the sun set
The following Monday/night/morning
Months passed
Weeks passed
When we got back to the office
When they got back home
As the neared the date site

Then there are the phrases that show us a change in location:

They boarded the train
Down the street
Up on the third floor of the office
Over by the water cooler
Back in my living room
The motorcycle was situated
She ran fast through the dark alley
In the hall of the hospital
Outside on my front lawn

And so on. There are a lot more examples of both of these, but we just wanted to give you a quick look at them.

Sometimes though, us writers tell our readers TOO much and it ends up sounding like script or stage directions. Those are things that slow the narrative down and just read a bit awkward or stilted.

It would be a sentence like:

When I arrived at the elevator to go up to the office on the fourth floor, I pushed the button to close the door and rode it to the floor.

Or:

They drove to the restaurant and waited in line for their table and she hummed a little bit.

Instead, you just want the transition to get us there into the juicy part of the scene:

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting at their table, playing footsie under the fancy white linen tablecloth when the giant hedgehog with a man bun stormed through the wooden doors.

Places like the bad examples are not really needed because:

1. It doesn’t really add to the story.

2. It doesn’t really add to the character.

3. It’s unnecessary information.

You really only want things in your story that:

1. Show your character’s inner state/characterization/choices

2. Move the plot forward.

3. Set the reader in the moment.

Story is all about characters making choices, being proactive and moving things forward and showing us who they are by those choices and their dialogue. So, you want to focus on getting the reader to those scenes where people interact and the character has to make a choice that either goes towards or against their main wants. Effective transitions help get us there but also ground the reader in the moment and time of the story in a logical, cool way.

NowNovel has some great examples of different uses of transitions.

They can be used to introduce backstory. Their example is Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000)

And those breaks between scenes or chapters are great moments to shift into a different point-of-view.

And they can also signal to the reader that there has been a change in setting or time!

THE DINKUS

It's a mark that indicates a scene break. When submitting a book for traditional publishing, you don't want these because the formatter has to strip them out and it's annoying, but in self and independent publishing they are chill. They can also help your own brain organize things in the drafting process.

It’s a way to delineate a section break from a page break, a way to cue the reader that a transition is coming, a movement into something else. A string of three asterisks together is called a dinkus, and they are commonly used in fiction and in nonfiction to carve up larger sections into smaller still sections. They’re a kind of organizational tool that, in print media, is especially useful when dealing with fragmented texts.

That's from Brandon Taylor, ‘I Reject Your Asterisks, and Your Dinkus, Too’ (2018), via Literary Hub

What do those dinkuses and scene breaks do?

They signal to the reader that:

Things are shifting (scene/setting/point of view)
Pull the reader out of a scene
Allow the readers to pause.
Emphasize important things.

NowNovel has a great example of this from a Barbara Kingsolver novel.

Pretty cool, right? I’m going to try to remember to talk more about transitions this week. And delve a bit deeper into chapter transitions because I just talked to one of my classes about that.

WRITING EXERCISE FOR PLOTTING A NOVEL

This bad boy comes from Chuck Wendig, you ready?

“Write A Script

“For those of you writing scripts, this sounds absurd. “He wants me to outline my script by writing a script? Has this guy been licking colorful toads?” Sorry, screenwriters — this one ain’t for you. Novelists, however, will find use in writing a script to get them through the plotting. Scripts are lean and mean: description, dialogue, description, dialogue. It’ll get you through the story fast — then you translate into prose.” - Wendig

A video with Anne Lamott’s favorite ways to get all creative on the page