Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Transitions and Foreshadowing

Sometimes when I am first writing a scene, especially one that's got a lot of dialogue, I jump from one conversational thread to another with no warning. That is, the characters are all talking about dogs, for example, when one of them will change the subject, suddenly asking about paramecia. This can jar the reader, which is usually a bad thing.

I know that some writers want to write a scene where one character surprises another, and that's fine. "Hey, what the--?" the surprised character says. But you don't want to surprise your reader the same way. You don't want them to question the internal reality of the story. If character X is concealing something, and character Y is going to spring the news that she suspects this, your reader should be aware of this in advance. You need to prepare the change in the dialogue. The reader should be able to see it coming. Not necessarily the answer to the question, but the question itself.

Most of the jarring transitions in dialogue or other scene elements are not attempts to spring a surprise; it's just clumsiness on the part of the writer. For example, one of the passages in a MS of mine read like this:

[Prince Hamlet has given Horatio an astrolabe found in an abandoned observatory]

The astrolabe was heavy. I had never touched it before but I had seen it every day that I served as Tycho’s assistant, over the desk where I performed my slow calculations after a night spent observing the heavens.

"Thank you, my lord. I will treasure this."

"You should sell it," he said. "There are men who would pay handsomely for such trinkets."

"How long have you been hiding here?"

"I do not hide, Horatio..."


The transition from talk of the astrolabe to Horatio's question ("How long have you been hiding?") was too abrupt, and not prepared for the reader. So I added a transitional statement to bridge the ideas:

The astrolabe was heavy. I had never touched it before but I had seen it every day that I served as Tycho’s assistant, over the desk where I performed my slow calculations after a night spent observing the heavens.

"Thank you, my lord. I will treasure this."

"You should sell it," he said. "There are men who would pay handsomely for such trinkets."

"I shall keep it, for it has been hiding here awaiting my return," I said. "And how long, my lord, have you been hiding here?"

"I do not hide, Horatio..."


This transitional passage works by taking an element from the current conversation (the astrolabe) and an element from what's to come (hiding) and combining them into a single idea (the astrolabe was hiding). This makes it appear as if Horatio's question ("How long have you been hiding?") flows naturally out of the conversation and smooths over the transition between subject matter.

Which is essentially my entire technique for transitions, whether I'm working on a short dialogue or a large-scale plot device. If you are going to introduce something new into the story, you should prepare the reader for it. We call this "foreshadowing," which is a term I really like. The "shadow" of what's to come falls on the narrative before we see the thing itself.

Anyway, suppose you are writing a book and you want to introduce vampires (really, Scott? Vampires?) into the story. What are the elements of vampirism that you'll be using? Maybe blood, sharp teeth, cemeteries, etc. So I'd have some of those elements in the narrative well before the actual vampires show up. Yes, maybe you think it's way more cooler to have the vampires explode onto the scene as a Big Damn Surprise, but you need to drop subtle clues for your reader ahead of time. It will make the vampires seem natural and inevitable. (Also I add this general comment: Don't confuse surprising your characters with surprising your readers. It is not the same thing.)

So the basic model for any sort of transition becomes this:

Past story elements --> transition <-- Future story elements

You just drag elements from where you are and from where you want to go together into a single scene. The cool thing about this is that you can pretty much use whatever elements you want. The less obvious the elements the better, and it still works most of the time.

13 comments:

  1. Inevitability applies well here. Surprise vampires in real life might happen (shut up they might) but in fiction things have to make a kind of sense. Transitions are easy things to forget about. Thanks for the reminder and observations.

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  2. Good example, Scott, because I read the version as though they were talking about hiding the astrolabe anyway. So it was clearly too abrupt for me. The second way worked much more smoothly for my brain.

    The only time that those abrupt jumps work is for humor. Douglas Adams was good at this:

    "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."

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  3. Taryn: I was at a vampire surprise party just this weekend. Yes, I was. Most fiction is not as random as real life seems to be.

    Tara: I remember that Adams line!

    I'm always surprised when people point out transitions of mine that don't quite work, becuase I always know where the story is going and I sometimes forget to give the reader clues.

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  4. This is something I've had to learn about writing suspense. It's not suspenseful when the reader is surprised. It's suspenseful when there is sufficient foreshadowing that the reader anticipates tautly the character's being surprised.

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  5. Nevets: Yeah, it's scary when a character opens a door and out pops something nasty, but it's suspenseful when the reader knows (or at least has been given hints) that something nasty is behind the door the character is about to open. As the character reaches for the door, the reader's level of tension increases even though the character's doesn't. And the scary thing remains just as scary, I think.

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  6. Organic writing can help with this - for me - because if I don't have something planned I naturally have to write in a bridge to lead to my next thought. That's just me, though, and I can see how it would go the other way around. Leaving clues is very important. I often fix all that up in my revisions. We love revisions... :)

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  7. Scott, what I like about your example is that even though it's the writer's way of trying to be un-clunky, it comes off as the speaker being quite witty. I've always wanted my characters to be witty, but they never are. Corny, perhaps, but not witty.

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  8. Michelle: I always have a plan for conversations in my novels. The trick is writing them as if they don't look planned. Which is, you know, tricky.

    Domey: You know how much I like my characters to play with words. I stole the whole thing from Shakespeare, whose characters are witty!

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  9. Good example. With plot elements, there's nothing wrong with surprising a reader so long as you gave them a fair chance to figure it out! The only trouble is where you deliberately mis-lead the reader so that they could never have seen those vampires coming. Six chapters of ordinary romantic comedy, for example, without a whiff of the strange.

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  10. Foreshadowing can be a lot of fun, I like taking an element from one chapter and crating a plot twist in another. Usually, it's something that even I wasn't anticipating but works well in the story line; on more than one occasion I dug myself out of a 'plot' hole.

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  11. I agree that transitions are very important.

    Were you a fit child?

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  12. Justus: I suppose, though I hated team sports.

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  13. Great tip, thanks. My critique partners pulled me up on this a couple of months ago :)

    "The "shadow" of what's to come falls on the narrative before we see the thing itself." - Love your description :)

    Rach

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