Writing Transitions! Transitions!
Transitions! Transitions . . . Are cool
This Sunday, I have a three-hour session with the cool human writers I teach at the Writing Barn and I’m going to be discussing transitions—by request of one of the writers.
So, I thought that maybe I’d share this here with you all, too.
Transitions seem appropriate as we head toward the solstice, as the days are in their last days of lengthening up here in the Northern Hemisphere, which is a location that feels like it should be in all caps.
I tend to focus on life transitions in December as we head toward a new calendar year. How about you?
Also, I made a simmer pot. It was my first one ever and I have fallen in love with the entire concept. Is it hygge? Maybe.
KEEPING IT SEXY – WRITING TRANSITIONS
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 going on.
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 I just wanted to give you a quick look at them.
WHAT NOT TO DO AT THESE MOMENTS
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 ABOUT MAKING CHOICES. TRANSITIONS ARE ONE OF THOSE CHOICES YOU WILL MAKE
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.
THE USES OF TRANSITIONS
NowNovel has some great examples of different uses of transitions.
USE #1 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, which is use # 2.
And they can also signal to the reader that there has been a change in setting or time, which is use #3.
PAUSE FOR THE DINKUS
What is a dinkus? Other than a word my older brother used to call me?
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 can also help a formatting program.
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.
MOVING ON TO CHAPTER TRANSITIONS
Chapter Transitions are just one kind of the transitions in a story, right?
You transition from paragraph to paragraph.
You transition from scene to scene.
You transition from chapter to chapter.
Chapters often end with something that wants the reader to keep reader.
Let’s talk about chapters themselves for a hot second.
Chapters Aren’t Tricky Beasts
Some writers are magically lucky and just intuitively know when a chapter ends and when a chapter begins and how they work in a novel.
If you aren’t one of those magically lucky writers, this blog post is for you.
A chapter has a couple roles.
1. They let the reader have a hot moment to themselves.
Seriously a lot of stuff has just gone done in your novel and the reader needs a moment to pause, to inhale, to process everything that just happened.
2. They tell the reader that there is a change coming.
The fancy name for change is a transition. It just means, “Hey. We’re going to a new place or meeting someone new. Or maybe it’s act two now. Let’s have a moment together.”
Chapter Length
A lot of people get super hung up on how long a chapter should be. Chapters are key elements in creating the pace of the story.
The general rule: Short chapters increase the pace. Long chapters tend to decrease the pace.
How does this happen? Short chapters tend to be about action scenes. Longer chapters tend to be about big transitions and emotional and plot developments. That’s not always true, but it usually is.
The chapter should be as long as it’s meant to be. The shorter the chapter the more resonance it becomes and that’s because the pause in between the chapters makes the reader’s brain go, “Ah. Wow. This one thing just happened. Whoa. I am pausing and thinking about that one thing.” Rather than pausing and thinking about a ton of things.
Some people think that chapters should all have a consistent length. Those people are wrong. I know! I know! I rarely say that. But they are.
Consistent lengths is a lovely thing if your reader likes consistency and the calming expectation of knowing every chapter is going to be twelve pages.
But consistent chapter lengths means that you, the author, are restricting yourself. You can’t use chapters to play with pace or emotional resonance. You are tying yourself up in a non-sexy way. We need all the tools we can have. Don’t limit yourself.
Chapter Titles Help Your Readers
Grab attention.
You put these bad boys at the top of the chapter. And the reader thinks, “Ah! Look at that! I am paying attention.”
Tell readers who they are focusing on now.
If you have a story with multiple point of views, you can put who this chapter is focused on here.
Show location or time changes.
You can give the reader some help. If you have a time jumping, place jumping novel. You can use this space to say, “Hey, we are in sexy Scotland in 2021.” Or you can say, “Look, we’re in Zambia in August.”
Show theme or the future.
It’s like a happy little spoiler where the reader goes, “Oh, that’s what this chapter is about.” This can be about theme, too.
Show Echoes.
A chapter title can be a first sentence.
How Do You Begin a Chapter?
You want to start in a way that makes your reader want to read the story.
You want there to be continuity from the last chapter so it doesn’t feel jerky and episodic.
You want to have a good first line to pull the reader along for the whole length of the chapter. It is the Oreo cookie or potato chip of the writing world. You want to make it so delicious that the reader just can’t eat/read just one sentence, but send them on a gobbling frenzy.
Usually, you want to:
1. Show where they are.
2. Have some action.
3. Have a character
You can start:
1. With setting the scene.
2. Dialogue, but this isn’t a big hot thing to do right now. If you do this, make it exciting.
3. In the middle of the action. If you want to be fancy say, in medias res.
You want to make sure it’s:
1. Not boring.
2. That it makes sense with the rest of the story.
3. That we know where the characters are. You don’t want them just floating out in the ether (usually). That’s the who, what, when, where, why of the story, too.
4. That the chapter has a point. If you took this chapter out, would you still have a story?
That’s really such an important question that I’m going to repeat it:
1. If you took the chapter out, would the story still make sense?
If it does, then you want to take that chapter out.
Along those lines, your chapter should do a couple things:
1. Help the character transform.
2. Give the character a goal and show movement or loss towards that goal.
3. Be part of the novel’s cause and effect that creates the novel’s plot.
4. Have an ending that compels the reader to keep reading after the pause.
Chapter Endings.
These little babies are what worry a lot of writers. How do you end things? You’ve been in a relationship with this chapter for a long few pages, hammering out the words on the keyboard, spending time together.
It’s so hard to let go!
But seriously, when should your time together end?
Good times to end your chapter are:
1. After a big turning point in your story. If you’re following a beat sheet or outline, those turning points are great places to pause.
2. Right before a big turning point in your story.
3. Right after something scary happened.
4. Right before something scary happens.
5. Right after something emotionally resonating happened.
6. Right after something is figured out.
Look at your favorite books and the last three paragraphs of each chapter. What just happened? A lot of times you’ll see that they are:
1. Moments of suspense. Something big is about to happen.
2. Moments of reflection. The character is thinking about something big that just happened.
3. Moments of questioning. The what do I do or what did I do times.
BACK TO THOSE TRANSITIONS
As Janice Hardy wrote on her blog,
“Chapter transitions work in one of two ways. The next chapter picks up right where the previous one ended, or it jumps ahead in time (or back if it's that kind of story).”
Hardy also has some lovely advice on scene transitions that I’ve screenshot below.
LINK TO THAT AND TO LEARN MORE
http://blog.janicehardy.com/2018/06/tips-on-writing-scene-and-chapter.html