21.28: Narrative Transitions

Network the Gathering announcement

0:00At Gen Con this year, Writing Excuses is doing a new thing. We're hosting something called Network the Gathering, along with the Ray Bradbury Center and Maurice Broadus. This is going to be on Thursday, July 30th at 8 o'clock in Ballroom 4 in the Marriott. Part of this is something you can participate in. I mean, besides networking, we're going to have something called Lightning Readings, which we do on our cruises. This is like a sampler pack of readers. Each person does a two-minute reading, just enough to get a nice taste. Come listen, network, and then stick around for prizes.

0:32You can get a ticket in the Gen Con scheduling system for Network the Gathering, Thursday, July 30th at 8 p.m. in Ballroom 4 at the Marriott. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. This is Writing Excuses.

Three modes of scene transitions

1:04Narrative transitions. Rules, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wan. I'm Aaron. I'm Howard. So, this week, after having dug into what makes a scene last week, we're going to start talking about transitions. How do you move from one scene to the next? How do you move across that shift in location, POV, energy, whatever it is? And, you know, that can be moving from scene to scene. It can be moving from chapter to chapter or section to section, right? And so, what are the elements that you think about when you are trying to figure out, how do I get from here to over there?

1:41So, I think about what kind of transition I'm planning on using. And I think of them as sort of coming in three modes. There's what I call a through scene. And then there's a break. And then there's an interruption. So, a through scene is where you use narration to transition us from one place to another. Like, we walked for many miles before arriving. And so, it is technically the, you're just summarizing all of the offstage stuff is what's happening there.

2:15And then a scene break is, you know, the hashtag and you jump in time and space. And an eruption is where we stay in the same time and space but interrupt the action in order to punctuate a moment. This is, you know, often the dun-dun-dun moment. The knock at the door. Yeah, the knock at the door. Yeah.

2:35I, years and years. Okay, great. Thank you, Al. Figured that out. That was easy. That was a little bit slow. Years and years and years ago, I wrote a movie review for the movie Blood Rain, which was not good. And which did not advance from scene to scene very cleanly. And I described them moving the plot forward. Instead of it, like, flowing like a river, the cast all ganged up behind this. It's bolder and manually pushed it down a dry riverbed.

3:09And it's the difference between something flowing smoothly and something looking like it's just too much work. It shouldn't look to the reader like you worked really hard to move between these scenes. It should feel, to my taste anyway, it should feel like running water. It should feel deliberate, right, first and foremost. And I think one of the big risks in transitions is if you have too much falling action at the end of a scene and then too much rising action at the start of the next scene, you end up in a valley where it's very easy for the reader to put the book down, right?

3:51Like, you can have a disjunction between the scenes, but this is a little bit just another way to talk about, you know, get in early, get in late, out early. In late, out early. Thank you. I think about it as do I want to underline what has just happened or do I want to launch to the next scene? And sometimes you do both.

The reaction shot and the stove on test

4:08Yeah. So an underline is like a reaction shot, which I describe reaction shots through what I've learned from Nathan Fillion. Have I done the Nathan Fillion? Okay. I couldn't remember if I had talked at length about this before. Is this the Nathan Fillion soap opera? Yeah. Thing? I love it. Remind us. All right. So he said that at the end of a scene in soaps, the camera is going to push in on you. And this older soap star said, you are out of things to do.

4:39So you do, there are three faces you make. Did I leave the stove on?

4:46Oh, I did leave the stove on. No. I turned the stove off. And basically what this says is, I have questions. Things are bad. Things are going to be okay. And it helps the reader understand what is, and contextualize what has happened before. So I sometimes will get to the end of a scene, like when it's not working, I'm like reading back through it and like, why is this not working? And I'll look at it and go, is the stove on or off right now?

5:16Or do we have questions about it? Is this, and sometimes just like adding a single line about that, it doesn't have to be like this entire big thing. It's just that single moment. Okay, I have a quick personal question to ask. Yes. When you reach that moment, do you make the face? Do you make the stove on, stove off? Sometimes. Because I have caught myself when I am writing, when I am drawing sometimes, I am stuck until I make the face my character would be making and feel what the character is feeling.

5:53And then I can put the thing on the page. And that probably has no bearing on the conversation, but it fascinates me. No, but I do, I think it does to a degree, because I think for me, it is like, I talk about these mechanical things, but it really is about chasing the vibes. Yeah. And like the, for me, the stove on or stove off is like, this is kind of the underline, it's the, but it is the stove on or off is often the launch to the next scene, because you're raising this new question. Which was one of the problems that I ran into when I was starting to shift from short stories to novels is that I kept ending everything with a solid sort of, ah, everything is fine now or everything is terrible.

6:35And, and it, it's one of the reasons that you, um, you sometimes use a through scene or you want to end with a question because otherwise, uh, you are giving the reader a chance to, to leave in, in theater terms. One of the problems with the blackout is that it's an opportunity for an audience member to escape. Wow. And you don't want that. You do not want it. You keep them. I think I'm thinking a little bit about songs again, uh, which is that if you've ever been listening to a song, I don't know why, but the wobble is coming into my head.

7:07The wobble is a song where you think that song has ended because they go into a long repetition as many songs do where things get quieter and you're like, wow, that was great. I had a lot of fun doing the wobble dance. And then they're like, just kidding. There's still three more minutes of song. They just like come back and you're like, wait, there was no, why? I don't understand. You like prepped me like, you know, to exit the song. And I'm thinking like scenes are similar. Like what you said, Dongwon, about not wanting a falling action and then too much rising action is like a fade out in a song, which telling people like, this is the end.

7:44And then weirdly a fade in into the next verse. And you're like, wait, that's an odd thing. In songs, a lot of times where you go from one scene or one part of a song to the next, it's after a strong moment. It is a long belt. It is like the moment of emotion in the song. And then you're like, okay, quiet down. Let me tell you the next part of this story, you know? And so it carries the listener through. And I think similarly, like having an ending that's really strong allows you to then start in another place because that strong thing that the audience is still thinking about during the blackout.

8:19Oh my gosh, there was a gunshot and then it went to a blackout. Who could have shot it? By the time they think, oh, and also maybe I have to pee, you're already in the next scene and they don't have a chance to escape.

Match cuts and common tone modulations

8:29The movie Corpse Bride, the song Remains of the Day by Danny Elfman, has a crazy key change between the verse and the chorus. And there is what we call a common tone modulation between it. He sings, you know, our jubiliciously lovely corpse bride. And the note that he's holding on bride is the same note that he begins the lyrics, you know, die, die, we all pass away. But the whole key change has modulated around that one note.

9:00It's what we call a common tone key change. In cinema, there's a similar technique where very similar actions or very similar colors or whatever are cut between. It's called a match cut. And in prose, the technique is, I don't know what to call it. I would call it a match cut or a common tone modulation. I mean, reaction shot comes out of... Reaction, yeah.

9:27She cried into her cupped hands at the end of a scene. And the next scene begins with, he sipped his cup of noodles. And that transition to me is so, it's such a useful trick because I can have two scenes with completely different moods, completely different rising, falling action, completely different settings, completely different characters. But that one common tone, that one match in the cut is enough to stitch them together so that it feels like the river is flowing instead of I'm scissificing a rock down the dry riverbed.

10:06I think what a lot of this comes down to is, you know, going back once again to the idea of macrocosm and microcosm, which I think about a lot when it comes to books, clearly, like the fractal structure of things, is a scene needs to have a beginning and an ending, right? And when you move from your ending to the beginning of the next one, whether you're looking for an interruption, whether you're looking for the match cut, building a bridge for the reader across that break, what you need to be communicating is intention. I meant to end the scene here. I mean to start the next scene here.

10:38And I'm going to grab you by the collar and move you from one to the other in a way that I think feels very deliberate and, you know, communicates something to the reader of, A, how am I supposed to feel about the thing that just happened? And B, how should I feel about the scene that's about to happen? Yeah. And this is one of the things that makes ending a scene so hard is because you often don't really know the next scene, especially if you are discovery writing. Sometimes you end it because you're like, oh, I've got the, you know, it's a good vibe for ending here,

11:10but I actually don't know what I'm aiming people towards. Yeah. So one of the, the hacks that I have learned in the last two or three years, and I'm pretty deep into my career at this point, is that when you've accomplished everything that you need to accomplish in a scene, you can actually just stop writing it. Yeah. And then come back and fix the transition later. Yeah. So don't, like, don't let all of our, like, you have to do these things and, or this is very useful to do. Like, don't let that make you feel like you can't end a scene. If you're having trouble, it's probably just, you don't know what the next one is yet.

11:41Figure that out and come back. Exactly. And speaking of abruptly stopping a scene, we're going to transition into our break.

11:50I love fried chicken, and I thought I was pretty good at making it, but sometimes it just didn't come out right. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. The solution was a thermometer. It sounds obvious, I know, but starting the frying at the correct temperature is not the secret. The secret is understanding how the oil changes temperature when the chicken goes into it and how long it takes to come back up. The more chicken, the more shocked the oil is, and the longer it'll take to reheat. And you can't really see that without a thermometer. And even then, you can't really use the thermometer's numbers until you know what they mean.

12:24Thomas Keller explained all that to me in Cooking Techniques 2, Meats, Stocks, and Sauces, Episode 5, exclusively available on Masterclass. There were a dozen different things in there I didn't know but needed to, but the big one was what the numbers mean and why they're so important to the home chef. See, in a commercial kitchen, the massive fryer pots don't get shocked much, and there are fancy computer controls keeping the oil in the right temperature range. At home, well, you have to ride your little fryer with a steady hand and a weather eye on the thermometer.

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Applying the eight types of fun

14:02So I have a theory, now that we're back, about, I don't know if you all have ever heard of the eight types of fun. I've heard of some types of fun. I've only heard of two. What two have you heard of? All right, whee, this is fun. And okay, no shit, there I was.

14:22So this is the thing that comes out of games. And they said, like, why do people play games? And there are eight types of fun that you can actually be having when you're playing a game. And the reason, you might be like, what does this have to do? This transition is real rough. But the reason is that when you were talking about the match cut, I was thinking, what is it that people like about that, especially in prose? And part of it is I actually think it allows you to come outside of the story with a small part of your brain and be clever. Because you see the, like, even on some subconscious level, you're like, oh, cup and cup.

14:55I get it. And it's not anything that's happening in the story on the page. But it allows you to make a bridge yourself. And I was thinking, well, what is that exactly? It's a meta participation in the story. Exactly. And a lot of times games think about how you meta participate in the play. So the eight types of fun. I'm wondering if some of these are things that could carry you from one scene to the next. And I'm making it up in real time. I am so excited by this. Yeah, I love this idea. But they are sensation, so the engagement of your senses, fantasy, just like escapism, narrative, drama and story, challenge, which is an obstacle to overcome, fellowship, which is feeling sort of a social framework or feeling like you're with these characters or with this thing, discovery, expression, and comfort and repetition.

15:48I love this so much. I love this, like, when I think— I play games for all those reasons. Yeah, I'm like, also— I eat food for all those reasons. I just exist for all of those reasons. This is, like, and this is literally one of the things that I love about games and about writing is that the reason it works is that it mirrors stuff that we do in the real world. Yes. And I'm sitting here thinking about the way, you know, I talked in the previous chapter—previous chapter? Sure. Sure. The previous episode about my little to-do list, my prompts and purpose of scene, like, I love the idea of adding that in as like, okay, but what is this—is this scene—

16:29What kind of fun? What kind of fun is this scene promising? And then using that as a kind of framing tool to pull you in, to suck you into the scene a little bit faster, and then probably lie to them if we tell them it's comfort. In the interest of meta—in the interest of meta-taxonomy, I think your eight types of fun are almost all type one fun, except maybe challenge will sometimes fall into the type two category. Narrative can be type two, challenge can be type two, fantasy, even if you're playing Resident Evil 4, you know what I mean?

17:01Like, you know, I think type one, type two is a really useful concept that I use constantly. And again, type one fun, it's fun while you do it, it's fun when you think about it later. Type two fun, which comes up a lot in backpacking and hiking and other outdoor sports, is it was not fun while I was doing it. I was cold and wet and miserable, but it's fun when I think back on it, and I'm glad that I did it. Well, one of the things, like the comfort one type of fun, is partly what they used to describe when people are grinding in a game, when you're repeating something over and over again in order to get the item, and it is like the hiking.

17:37So it's like, in some ways, you're doing it, it's not fun at the time, but actually the ritual of doing it over and over again becomes a weird kind of comfort. It's a thing you know you have to do. Like, if you could, like, fast forward through all the hiking and just be at the spot, maybe you would do it. But you might feel like, I missed something, because in some ways the, like, struggling to get there is what makes the reward. It's that contrast between, like, oh, the slog, and oh my gosh, like, I got the item, or I got to the place I wanted to be. And comfort, oh, go ahead.

18:08Well, when you're hiking, there's a whole bunch of those micro moments on the way to the place. It's like, this is pretty, that's pretty. So a whole bunch of small rewards on the way there. Because if you were having to do that same slog through, like, the same length and the same ups and downs through a featureless concrete obstacle course, none of that, that would not be fun to look back on. Yeah, well, this is why people talk about, you know, a road walk or desert hiking as some of the toughest hiking, because it's very repetitive with very little distinction from moment to moment.

18:39But yeah. Yeah, and so I think one of the things for the transition of it all is that, like, you can maybe use these feelings or these things to figure out how to bridge the gap. So you can be like, I'm going to bridge the gap with sensation, with, like, a sensory detail that will focus. I'm going to bridge the gap with discovery. Oh, my gosh, something new is here. And then you can change everything else, the people, the vibe, the et cetera. But something about that type of fun or that type of emotion that's happening from the reader is actually carrying you across.

I was rereading the final books of Schlock Mercenary in preparation for putting them into print and realized, I actually realized it just now from the memory of having reread it, that I used the match cuts, the common tone modulations, much more commonly in act three when I am making scene changes while everything is more intense.

19:37Because the way the way the match cuts worked there, it was a pacing tool. And I hadn't thought about that until right now, but the kind of transition you use can be a throttle for accelerating the pace or for pulling back on the pace. That is exactly why I use the difference between a through scene and a scene break. Like, the thing about it, so if you think about, if you've ever gone to see a musical or a stage show, Hamilton does this a number of times where they don't do a blackout as they move from one scene to another.

20:17The dancers and the actors are still on stage. They are the ones moving the scenery. There's still an action that is happening. And so you keep this sense of forward movement, even though it actually takes longer, it doesn't provide you with an exit point. And so it's one of those things that you can use when you do a through scene like We Traveled for Many Miles. It is both slower and also keeps you more engaged than if you do a scene break and come back.

20:49Well, one thing I think about, too, along those lines and kind of connecting back to this idea of eight types of fun is you need that difference from beat to beat for your reader to also process what just happened, right? Not to continue too much of my risotto hitting, but when one bite is exactly the same as the bite before, at some point, that repetition becomes hard to bear and it's hard to process what makes each individual bite exciting and wonderful, right? So if you go from an action scene directly into another action scene into another action scene, and I see people trying to do this, it's like, oh, I'm writing an action book.

21:26This is a thriller. It needs to be fight, fight, fight. When you do that, I can't enjoy any of the fights because I need that moment, that sort of transition moment of the actors are on stage moving things around. It gives me a breather to process the emotional thing I just experienced. And that's the principle we talked about at the very beginning of the previous episode, the conflation of the word scene in scene sequel format, where sometimes we are transitioning between action and action, and sometimes we're transitioning between action and, hey, let's take a breath and process the action that just took place.

22:00Yeah, and this is also the thing for me, like when we were talking in the last episode about flashbacks, and if that was a scene witch, or if those were different scenes. And for me, the reason that they're a scene witch is because you're using these through scenes to transition these small, very small micro transitions to move in and out of those. But it is, it's the same idea as when you are, I'm in this place, and then we travel, and then we're in this other place.

22:37Those are two different scenes, but we stitch them together with this through scene text.

22:45Yeah, that makes sense. I think, I was actually thinking about like, because I love like scenes where there's a slight memory, or we move a little bit in time, but we're still in the same scene. And I think like, what's interesting is thinking about how the difference, what the difference is in the transition technique between the two of them. And I feel like it's like same technique, softer hand. You know what I mean? Like if you like land, like, if every single memory overwhelms the scene that it's in, then it feels more like a flashback. Because it's like that, that memory is like punching you in the face.

23:17Whereas, as often happens in our own lives, if you're remembering something while still doing another action, that memory is a lot less like, it didn't stop you from doing what you're currently doing. It's just something you're noting, often because it informs what you are doing. Like, and I think the way, I was actually thinking about that going from one action scene to the next, to the next, to the next, to randomly transition in the middle of my thought, which is that one of the things I love about fight scenes is what you learn about the fighter.

23:47Yes. From the way that they fight and what happens. And having a second to process, I'm not as good a fighter as I thought I was. Oh no, the next fight is beginning, makes that next fight more resonant than if it's just like, I'm not even going to think about that. I'm just going and going and going. And I think that a lot of times when we use memory, it's to add that additional context without having to, you don't have to show the whole, my last fight showed me I was quite bad at this. You actually just do that with a small memory of being hit or a flinch that happens within the character and they're thinking, oh my gosh, like, this is just going to be like another, this is going to be like last time.

24:26This is adding extra depth and extra context to the current scene by having that small transition that brings the rest of the world of the story into the scene that you're in. If our listeners are anything like me, this episode contains a whole bunch of new and exciting thoughts about how to stitch scenes together. And I just want to present all of you, fair listeners, with the strategy that I'm giving myself, which is I'm going to apply these cool new transition between scenes techniques as edit pass techniques.

25:04I'm going to let myself write to the scenes first, and then I am going to go back and look at the order of them. And then I am going, once I know they're in the right order, then I'm going to worry about the prose that stitches the scenes together. I have, which I will put in the liner notes on the website, I have examples of what it looks like when you do the same scene with a through scene versus a break, because it is an edit pass thing that you can do later.

25:40Actually, to build on that, I am a big fan of using transitions, which I often struggle with because they're hard.

Drafting scene bridges in revision

25:48And, you know, that's why we're doing a whole episode about it by making myself fun bracket notes as I'm writing. Like, I'll be like, and then she goes to the bar to confront that woman in a much more interesting way than I've got right now. And I'll put it within brackets so that I can find it and it doesn't end up in the final version of the story. But what I love about that is it allows me when I'm going on my edit pass to, like, almost have transit, like, give myself a little note of fun and a little giggle that makes the transitions feel like something fun that I get to do, as opposed to something annoying that I have to do.

26:20I do this, too. I actually picked this up from C.L. Polk that they will write in brackets at the beginning of a scene or the end of a scene. Sometimes amazing closing line goes here that summarizes everything that's happened and sends us into makes us excited to go into the next thing. I'm like, so just leaving a placeholder for yourself. It's like, this is what I want to happen. I just don't know how it works. Wow. My brackets are all self-negging. My brackets are, tell better joke here. This was cool. Write it again.

26:53You're like, positive self-talk is super important. Well, and all this kind of points to, I mean, there's a thing that they say in film and TV, which is, and this is especially true in documentary work, which is you find the movie in the edit bed, right? The shooting process and the script process is kind of your intentions, but what actually emerges at the end is what happens in the editing process, right? And I don't think books are that extreme in that way, but I think everybody's really spot on here in terms of as you're writing your first draft, as you're drafting as a process, don't worry too much about these transitions.

27:31These transitions can be layered and layered. If you're somebody who does it as you go through, fantastic, right? We're not telling you not to do that. But if you're stressed out by hearing all of this, being like, I'm barely able to like write the scene that I'm in. I don't want to think about how do I get to the next scene yet. You can do that later. And on that note, I have a little bit of homework for you, which is to kind of do the thing that Mary Robinette was talking about. I want you to take two scenes from your current work in progress and think about different ways to transition them and then try them, right?

28:05I want you to transition from scene to scene as a through scene, as a break, and as an interruption. Try all three of these and deliberately go through, reread them, make some notes about what worked better, what didn't work as well. Why was that happening? Why does that work for this scene and not for this other scene? So that's your homework for now. Try some different transitions and see how it goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write. Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends.

28:40For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com. Because of ours are new at work in our rightiu-갈 Lead. For more information, visit 있으니까 there's theARS. For more information, visit pensarmos and information.

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