TECH: Make A Scene #25: Scene Transitions

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[oh, blast -- I seem to have skipped Chapter 25! Hey, sequence is highly overrated, isn't it?]

Chapter 25: Scene Transitions

Walking along through Make a Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld, almost the last chapter! And here Rosenfeld talks about how to put together individual scenes in a strong, vivid story. You want your scenes to work together. So what is this glue that you use to put them together? "The simplest and easiest way to link scenes is through transitions, passages of text at the beginning or ending of a scene, where you condense and shift time, space, point of view, and many other details to create a sense of flow and to bypass mundane or nondramatic moments in your characters lives."

It's important to remember that we aren't doing a moment by moment review of real-life. You want only meaningful, relevant, and dramatic parts.

The most noticeable transitions are at the beginning of a scene, helping the reader to see where this next setting is. You need to connect the scenes :-) "at the beginning of a scene you are, first and foremost, signaling that changes have taken place since the last scene."

Signaling the scene change. Orient the reader about where the protagonist and other characters are. What has changed? Where and when are the characters? How do you make it clear to the reader?

A common shift is in time. Often simple expository descriptions are enough. You can use narrative summary, a bit of dialogue, or setting. Normally you only condense relatively short periods of time, clearly to bypass mundane or irrelevant events.

Another scene break is to change location or setting. When the scene moves to a new location, make sure the reader knows it. Select engaging details, have the protagonist interact with the setting, let the protagonist express opinions about the setting, or have the setting reflect the protagonist mood, feelings, or inner world in some way (although beware the pathetic fallacy, where the setting always reflects the emotions of the main character.)

Ambience and atmosphere, mood, tone, weather changes and such can be useful to show the reader that something has changed, even if the location and time are still the same. Weather, sensory details, and unusual juxtapositions can all be used to signal changes.

Another shift between scenes or more often between chapters can be a shift in the point of view. If the main point of view character changes, make sure that the reader knows it because of the character's name or some obvious details.

At the beginning of each scene, you need to think about getting the reader involved, but also picking up from what happened before. Think about:

• if an important event happened in the prior scene, where are we now? What is the protagonist doing?
• after a cliffhanger or epiphany, you need to think about how to conclude that action. You don't have to pick it up immediately, but at some point you need to finish it off.
• does your character need to react, expressing feelings through interior monologue?

Thus spoke Rosenfeld.

I think this is one of the parts that sometimes we can put off for the revision. When we are first writing our story, we need to get the scenes set up and figured out. Then as we go through in revision, we can check to make sure that the transitions between scenes are clear. If one scene ends in the dark, we might want to make sure that people know the next scene is out in the sunshine the next day.

An exercise? Well, let's take a favorite story or novel again, and see what happened there. Go through and look at the ends and beginnings of scenes. How do the endings prepare the reader for the next scene coming? How do the beginnings make sure that the reader knows who is talking and when and where they are?

Then consider a stepping-stone chart of your own plot. That means having the first scene in a line at the top of a sheet of paper, and the climax at the bottom of a sheet of paper. In between, put bubbles for each scene, connected with lines. And annotate the transitions between scenes with some notes about what people need to know as they start a new scene -- and how you are going to tell them about it.

Go ahead. Write!