Lately, I've been re-reading my favorite books, trying to figure out how the authors make their seamless transitions from scene to scene. It seems so easy, but in my manuscript, these textual tangles are killing me!
In my frustration, I went to first-time novelist, Min Jin Lee looking for help with scene transitions.
She converted her experiences of rubbing elbows with money and power in the novel, Free Food for Millionaires. Lee has been our special guest all week, serving up practical life lessons from her writing career.
Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.
Jason Boog:
Lately I've been obsessed with transitions in my own writing. Your scenes seemed to begin and end effortlessly. How did you perfect your transitions between settings and scenes? How did you decide on where to end your scenes?
Min Jin Lee:
Thank you for your kind words about transitions. I have taken a great deal of time to study transitions which I think of as links within a chain. When a transition is weak, readers stop reading. Continue reading...
Readers often talk about hooks at the end of chapters. This device is used in all sorts of story telling (film, television, and genre fiction), and that’s all fine and good, but in more crafted fiction, I think transitions need to work very well from paragraph to paragraph. Almost from sentence to sentence.
Some time, consider the sentence to sentence transitions in any E.L. Doctorow, John Updike, or William Trevor story. Their words, sentences and paragraphs carry a strong energy and link beautifully. I am mixing metaphors here, forgive me, but each paragraph is like a brick in a wall, and the strength of the wall comes from the transitions.
I think the energy in transitions comes from two things: the continuing conflict, and the logic of the larger story.
How does each character’s desire (and conflict) transfer within a sentence, within a paragraph, within a scene, and then from sentence to sentence, then from paragraph to paragraph, then from scene to scene? I actually considered this flow as one of the most important things to mind when I was rewriting.
As for ending a scene and beginning a new one, I tried to be aware of the prior scene’s energy, and tried to balance the conflict. The continuing chapter carried the energy (conflict) of the prior chapter.
Caveat: I hope that these kinds of technical considerations will be interesting to you, and in no way should they hamper your story telling. These considerations are also best left for the second, third, nth drafts, and not the initial one which might be much more rough, dreamy, and less labored.
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» "Each paragraph is like a brick in a wall" : How To Build Stronger Transitions In Your Writing from ThePublishingSpot
Lately, I've been re-reading my favorite books, trying to figure out how the authors make their seamless transitions from scene to scene. It seems so easy, but in my manuscript, these textual tangles are killing me!In my frustration, I went... [Read More]
Tracked on: August 24, 2007 7:30 AM | Permalink to Trackback