This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Transitions are the parts of your novel in which you jump from one scene to another. This usually means moving time, place, or POV, and they can be jarring or confusing if not handled well.
Working out how to create effective and concise transitions is essential for maintaining the pace and flow of your book.
For example, if a scene ends with a character in their home and the next important event begins in a bar the following evening, you don’t need to write several pointless paragraphs (or scenes!) detailing the intervening action: character goes to bed, character has a funny dream, character gets up, showers, takes phone call from friend in which nothing happens, eats breakfast, has lunch, gets ready, drives to bar…
If you’ve already mentioned that your character is going to the bar the next evening, you could simply open the scene with: ‘Joe’s Bar and Grill was packed and Mark waited twenty minutes to get a lukewarm beer.’
If it hasn’t been ‘flagged’ in this way, you may need a little more detail. For example: “The next evening, Mark wanted a beer so badly that he was willing to walk into Joe’s Bar and Grill at nine o’clock on a Friday.”
The idea is to orientate the reader, so that they know where they are (time, place, character), and to leave out all the boring ‘in-between’ stuff. Don’t be afraid to skip chunks of time in the service of your narrative, and trust your reader to be able to fill in blanks.
Handling transitions definitely gets easier with practice, but it can be helpful to study how others do it. Grab one of your favourite novels and look at the endings and beginnings of chapters and scenes.
When you’re changing POV, it’s important to make it clear straight away (using the character’s name is simplest); you don’t want your reader to feel cheated or confused when they realise they’re inside a new head.
Finally, don’t worry about making transitions complicated or poetic (unless you want to, of course). Novels aren’t films and you don’t need a montage of calendar pages flipping past or a little cartoon aeroplane flying across a map – you can span decades and cross continents with just a few words.
Consider:
The following summer…
Across the ocean…
Later that week…
It was almost sixty years before I saw her again…
Isn’t language brilliant?