Scribes & Archers

I recently got a question from a newsletter subscriber about how much is needed when transitioning between scenes–especially when there is a jump in time and/or space involved. For example, if your characters are traveling, how much do you actually need to show and how can you transition smoothly if you skip over the details? Today’s post is expanding on some potential answers to this question, to answer it for others who might be wondering.

There are a number of ways to transition through travel sequences and the like, depending on the needs of your story and the particular transition you’re addressing.

The Quick Summary

For example, “After several hours of trekking through what seemed like an endless desert, he finally arrived at the outskirts of Sha’nil.”

The quick summary is a good choice if you want to give a general idea of how much time has passed and maybe a quick outline of the weather/terrain, but don’t need any more detail than that in order for the story to make sense and the transition to have meaning. It’s useful if you want to keep up the pace of your story and/or keep from losing your reader in excessive description of your setting. (Even if you love your setting and want to show it off, you still need to ask yourself whether it’s actually relevant to the story right now or if you may need to kill your darlings and keep the description to yourself.)

If a summary feels insufficient but longer description isn’t necessary, it may simply be enough to make sure that the details you are sharing have some relevance to the plot/characters; maybe the description of their traveling environment sets up a character getting sick shortly after their arrival, or maybe the brief description of the terrain they’ve been covering can be contrasted by a longer description of their destination and how it might seem refreshing in comparison (or discouraging, if it seems like more of the same). Maybe one of the characters who’s been traveling to Sha’nil collapses at the gate from dehydration because they didn’t adequately prepare for their long desert trek, or they rush to the well as soon as they arrive to quench their thirst. You can use your brief transition summary to set up the next bit of movement in your story.

The Scene Divider

In some cases, even a transitional summary is more than you really need and you can get away with just a scene divider. With this approach, the most important thing is to promptly reestablish time and setting in the following scene. Maybe your transition looks something like this:

Hoisting the heavy waterskin higher on his back, Fior took his first step onto the sprawling dunes, toward Sha’nil and the rising sun.

***

An evening breeze cooled the sweat on Fior’s brow as he approached the gate of Sha’nil, stars already beginning to peek out from the twilight beyond.

That’s extra heavy on description to make the point, but something like this can eliminate needless travel time without disorienting the reader. Note, this will create a different pace than a summary transition; a summary maintains motion and keeps up an active pace, while a scene divider creates a mental pause for the reader and teleports them from one scene (and time/setting) to the next. Think of it like the difference in a movie between showing a travel montage vs. cutting directly from one scene to another.

The Timestamp

If you want to do a scene break that has a built-in mechanism for reestablishing timing and/or setting, you can go the timestamp route and accompany your scene divider with, “four hours later…”

Variations on this would include full dates, setting identifiers, etc. “January 1 – Sha’nil,” “Sha’nil, four hours later,” etc. How much you include will depend on what’s necessary to the story, what you want to establish in the timestamp vs. through description, etc.

I would say that this route is the most likely to impact and/or be dependent on the tone of your story. It’s particularly suited to narrators who are more interested in the facts than the story, narrators who are in a hurry, narrators who just don’t think this transition is all that important, or stories in which time is a critical component (whether for the entire story, like Nadine Brandes’ A Time to Die*, or for a portion of the story where there’s some sort of “ticking time bomb” that you want your reader to be aware of and able to keep time with). The less detail you rely on the time stamp to communicate, the more tone-neutral it is (e.g. “Four hours later…” gives a less analytical tone to the timestamp than something like, “Grantech Headquarters – 0700, January 1.” Again, exaggerated for emphasis.)

*This is a Bookshop affiliate link, which means that I earn a small commission off of purchases made through it at no extra cost to you, and purchases from this site support local bookstores in the U.S.!

The Montage

Some transitions actually need to be fleshed out because the travel time (or whatever the scenario may be) involves events important to the story/characters. Even in this case, however, you may not need to convey the entire travel sequence, merely to focus on the scene or two that are crucial to the story. (Sometimes you may need the entire travel sequence, but then it’s not a transition like this post is discussing.)

Maybe the first two hours of Fior’s desert trek is uneventful, but it’s important for the reader to know that he ran into a sand snake after that and was bitten, or he killed it and brought it with him for its venom, or both. And maybe an hour after that he ran out of water, despite having filled a large waterskin before he left, so he spends the last hour carrying a dead snake around his neck as dehydration begins to weaken him and slow his progress.

In this case, you want to focus on these two events, but you can still cut out the two hours beforehand, the hour between, and the vast majority of the final hour. This will basically require separate transitions between his departure and the snake encounter, the snake encounter and emptying the waterskin, and emptying the waterskin and his arrival in Sha’nil. You could use the same kind of transition for all of them, or mix and match. Maybe you want to show the long delay between his departure and the snake by using a scene transition, but you want to make it seem like he’s just dealt with the snake when he runs out of water so you use a summary to keep up the pace, and you want to share a bit of detail around his growing tired and weak in that last hour so you use a summary there as well. Or maybe you decide that if you’re going to summarize twice, you might as well summarize the first transition, too, to make the pacing more consistent. It all depends on your goal for the montage and the pacing you’re going for within the larger transition from Point A to Point B.

For more on writing montage sequences, check out this post.

The POV Shift

If you have multiple storylines being told from different perspectives, the beginning of a travel sequence may be a good time to cut over to your second POV; this allows you to come back to the first POV after their transition is complete and merely establish that they’ve completed their journey before moving on with the next part of the story (much like the “scene divider” approach; you’re just using the secondary POV as that scene divider).

While this approach is very similar to the scene divider route, it does less to slow the pace of the story because you’re cutting to another active POV instead of offering a pause within the same POV, and the first POV gets to keep moving along as soon as you come back to it. It shifts focus instead of pace. While this can still distract your reader (especially if they strongly prefer the first POV to the second, which can often happen), it doesn’t offer the same kind of pause.

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When you’re transitioning a scene, sometimes you don’t need more words, just to make those few words do more; and sometimes it’s less distracting to cut past the summary altogether. It’s all going to depend on the context and how much information you feel like the reader needs about a given transition.

Comment below with your favorite transition style! Bonus: What do you like about that style? How many of these styles have you used? I’d love to hear from you!

Not sure how to keep your story active, or what your characters should be doing next? Sign up to get my list of “plotting prompts”—character-driven prompts for plot movement that can be applied when outlining, drafting, or editing!