I’m sure that my 14 year old son would like to correct anyone who thinks it’s cool to have a writer for a mom. :)
I was reading through his research paper before he turned it in yesterday. I thought he did an overall great job on it, but there was one thing that grated on me. I tried to mention all the good things first.
“Great job putting the info in your own words!” I said. “You’ve got some really solid paragraphs, too—nice topic sentences and supporting details. And those footnotes! Wow!” I hesitated.
“Okay. So what’s wrong with it?” he asked. He’s a cutting-to the-chase kind of kid.
“It’s choppy. There really aren’t any transitions between your thoughts. You’re presenting the info, but it’s not connected. It’s just sort of jarring.”
Maybe it’s not the biggest problem for a research paper, but poor transitioning sure does make for a bumpy read in a novel. It’s not fun to be confused or to wonder what’s going on when I’m reading a book. Or to be bored by a transition that’s too long or not necessary.
Transitions (or lack of them) that pull me out of a story:
Rambling transitions that call attention to themselves (I’ll admit that this is an issue that might be just something that bothers me): The summer’s heat finally gave way to fall’s gentler temperatures. Trees shed their leaves and children packed their bookbags and headed back to class…blah, blah, blahhhhh.
Transitions that are too detailed and follow a character too closely (even when they’re being boring): Clara walked to the door. She opened it and strolled out to her car, thinking about what she’d just heard from her mother. She turned the key in the ignition and slowly backed out of her driveway, checking her mirror. She decided she would go to the grocery store and pick up a gallon of ice cream. At this point I’m really just thinking how boring Clara is and how much I want to escape her company. We could easily have Clara just show up at the store, if that’s where we need to have her: Clara searched the store’s freezer for her favorite flavor of ice cream. “Why haven’t you returned my phone calls, Clara?” asked a grim voice behind her…
Transitions that are too spaced out with no explanation: Two years later, John decided to finally apply for law school. Whaaa? Two years later is fine, but can we get a little hint as to what John was doing? After two years of working construction during the day and delivering pizzas at night, John decided that he’d give law school a try.
No transitions at all…just a jump from one thought to another with total disconnect. And I’m actually having a hard time writing this without transitions because I think it’s pretty difficult to leave them out! John and Clara engaged in desultory conversation at the punch bowl. Clara asked Tina about the Biology homework. Jim asked Clara whether she was going to the soccer game the next day. Bleh. It just feels like these characters are being tossed in there with no set up at all. A simple John and Clara joined Tina and Jim at the punch bowl would have easily set up any future conversation between these people with no choppiness.
Novels need tons of transitions. We need transitions between scenes and between chapters. Even paragraphs need transitions. To me, the more subtle they are, the better. And if we can transport our characters efficiently to their marks onstage, then we’re making our story more exciting in the process.
Interested in more posts on smooth transitions? Here are some of the most popular articles in the Writer’s Knowledge Base on the topic:
Are Your Characters Falling Through Gaps in Your Writing? (Plot to Punctuation)
Transitions: Linking Forward Through the Story (Talk to You Universe)
More on Transitions (Terry’s Place)
How to Work With the 4 Levels of Transition in a Book (How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book)
Transitions (Janice Hardy’s blog)
Do transitions trip you up, too? (Yes, my son fixed his…I think he could see how much they were bothering me!)
I remember some of the comments on my school papers. A common one was “choppy.”
My papers had no “choppy” remarks. My teachers equivalent was 3 or more bright red ????.
Elizabeth – What an important post! Most of us don’t think about transitions… unless they’re choppy or too overlong, etc.. I try to use “time-related” words or phrases to make my transitions. For example..
“Five minutes after X left for his meeting, Y went to…..”
I also use words like “Meanwhile,” or “Five minutes later…”
Hi Elizabeth .. poor chap with a mother as an author .. mind you he’ll appreciate it later in life.
Transitions and connections we can’t do a story without the storytelling .. cheers Hilary
Enjoyed your post and I’m going back to re-visit my manuscript with it in mind. Thanks.
Transitions are hard, like everything else. My stories don’t take place over years but a couple weeks so I don’t have to deal with those kind of transitions. Good narration is hard to do too.
Good pointers, Elizabeth. I am so with you on the detailed and long transitions. We have to know when enough is enough, and this can be a challenge sometimes.
Nice article. I’ve argued with myself on more than one occasion regarding the length of my transitions.
For example, I’m re-thinking the transition into the final scene in my novel. It weaves together many threads from different parts of the story. I’m really attached to it, because I think it’s creative and clever.
But, it’s lengthy. As the author, I tell myself it needs to be long to set the stage properly. But, as the editor, I think it’s be overdone.
Am I the only one who fights these inner battles?
Smooth transitions can be tricky. Thanks for the timely post, Elizabeth about something I don’t often think about.
Your son and my daughter need to get together for a gripe session about writer moms.
Thanks. Great post! This is one of the hardest things for me as a writer. I need to get through a tedious transition scene before writing that cool action scene. When I read back my writing, I almost always go at my transition scene with a machete because it sounds way too contrived. If it was tedious to write it, it’s probably tedious to read it!
Bob–And that’s one of those comments I remember seeing on mine in school, too–usually with no instruction on keeping it from being choppy!
GigglesandGuns–Oh, those red pens! Mine were all spelling errors at the time. :) I had creative spelling when I was a kid.
Hilary–And those transitions guide us into the next portion of the story–great part of the storytelling.
Diane–Thanks! Hope it helps. :)
Laura–Short periods of time get tricky, too, because we know we don’t want to relate the minutiae of the characters’ lives, but we don’t want to make the reader confused by jumping from location to location.
Margot–Those are great connecting words that don’t draw a lot of attention to themselves.
B.E.–They suffer! They really do. :)
An important lesson.
I am such an organized planner so of course I remember transitions; but now and then my beta-readers don´t seem to get what is going on ;)
I try not to write choppy transitions…
Maryann–It can be too much of a good thing, can’t it?
Newbie Author–No, it’s great to think of ways to tie up different parts of your story. And it sounds like maybe you’re writing literary fiction? Honestly, I have a lot more tolerance for long transitions in lit fic. I think where I’m really tripped up by it is in genre fiction.
The types of things I tie up in the end of my mystery novels tend to be the whodunit, any subplots, and little threads I left hanging when I laid my red herrings. I make this transition very quickly, in keeping with the pace of a traditional mystery wrap-up. But if you were tying up thematic elements or if one part of the book was wrapping up…but another was beginning, that would understandably need more transitioning.
Elspeth–Thanks for coming by!
Ella–I think transitions can be tough because they need to be subtle. And subtlety is an art!
Alex–I know you’ve got a handle on it!
Dorte–Those betas! :)
Thanks for the links. I haven’t been through them all, but I will be reading them.
Transitions mean a lot to me. I always feel that a story has to flow naturally. I’ve never been one for padding in unnecessary paragraphs (in school, I always came up a page short on my essays, no matter what the length required — but I always got a good grade). But I do feel there should always be a thread connecting two scenes.
Even if you have a jump — the passage of time, a radical change in point of view or location — you need to connect it with an idea, concept or image.
Like at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark — the movie begins with the Paramount mountain logo, which fades into a mountain in the scene.
Foreshadowing is a great way to connect. So is irony. One character says something about an absent character, and then we jump to that other character who is either in the act of proving or disproving what was said about her.
Always end on a note you can pick up in the next section.
Good post and resource list. I struggle with getting people in and out of cars, to people’s houses, and through doors. A friend at work who’s a writer suggested I think in terms of movie scenes. Notice the way those are cropped, how they get right to the chase.
That was very helpful. My writing style is very sparse, and so my problem isn’t flowery prose, but no transitions at all!
also- it’s cute to have my name used in examples. It’s kind of an old fashioned name, and you never hear it anymore…