131 - Scene transitions

Today, Emily & Rachel talk about scene transitions.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• grounding readers with context
• making time and space clear to the reader
• don't overthink this

TRANSITIONS BLOG: https://goldenmayediting.com/how-to-set-a-scene/

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Transcript

Emily: 0:13

Hey, writers.

Rachel: 0:13

Welcome back to Story Magic, the podcast that will help you write a book you're damn proud of.

Emily: 0:18

I'm Emily.

Rachel: 0:19

And I'm Rachel.

Emily: 0:20

And today we are talking about scene transitions. So people often ask about this, and someone just asked me about this, one of my one on one clients the other day, where we were looking at her scenes for her Act 1 and her revisions, and she was like, I just don't know how to make it clear at the beginning of a scene, you know, where we're picking up to, like, root the reader. And as the two of us were talking, it became like very, very quickly clear that she was overthinking it. She was like, I don't know how to, like, do I just, like, dump a bunch of information? And I feel like that's such a common thing. Like, people assume. I feel like writers don't give the reader enough credit sometimes for how much they can pick up or how much, like, space they're willing to go before they understand where they are. But then they also. So you're either overthinking it or you're not thinking about it at all. And you're just like diving into a scene without any context. And so I think those two ends of the spectrum, it's like, no, there's actually a very simple answer, which is that you just need to establish who we are, where we are, and when we are in relation to the last scene. But it's just, it's a question that I get a lot from folks, and I thought we could bring it on and chat about it real quick.

Rachel: 1:34

Yeah, for sure. When I have a one on one client who will very often say, I don't know how to start this scene. And I'm like, just start it.

Emily: 1:42

Yeah, just. Just start it.

Rachel: 1:46

But when I'm. When I'm looking at starting my scenes, you know, I feel that need to be like, how do I begin? What is the right opener? What do I say? And. And in those early drafts, just start it, girl. Don't freak out about this. Just. Just start talking. I don't know. Yeah, but there is a storytelling term in media res, which means in the middle of things. And many of us have learned it in high school and in college. And truly, you just go. You just start in the middle of things. We don't need. We probably don't need a bunch. A bunch of context, but we do need to be oriented in who is speaking. Especially if you have like a different point of view, characters where they are, and passage of time, perhaps has any passage of time happened? And then I. When I really started to practice scene structure, this got way easier for me because you start the scene with a character's goal. So what are they doing and why are they doing it, and how does that further their goals? And I think when I incorporated scene structure more firmly into my scenes, that became easier to communicate because it was like, okay, time. Where are we in time? Well, I. It's been three hours. Several hours later, um, or the next day, like, that's fine. What. How much time has passed? We can do that. We can say, like, several hours later, I was sitting in my car outside the suspect's home.

Emily: 3:33

Yeah, cool.

Rachel: 3:34

Done. Okay. Okay. And then I needed to see. I was casing the house because I was trying to catch them in the act. That's a goal.

Emily: 3:43

Cool. Yeah. And if you say, you know, several hours later, I'm, you know, creeping around the house, trying to catch them in the act. Right. You don't even need to, like, you can just show that. Right? You can show that goal. You can show them doing that. We just need to be dropped into their skin. We need to drop. Be dropped into, like, where they. Are we in a car? Are we walking through the grass? Are we outside the house? Like, we just need. And it doesn't have to be a super long description. It can be very brief, but the reader needs that sort of visceral information so we can slide back into the character's skin and, like, put ourselves in their shoes, in their clothes, so to speak. And so we need that cue as to, like, who are we and where are we? And then when are we in relation to the previous scene? And sometimes it's really obvious. If you pick up immediately after the previous scene, you know, you can rely on your reader understanding, like, where they left off. If it's been a few hours later, you can just say it's been a few hours later. If it's. Or a few days or whatever. Or you can hint at it somehow. Right. You can imply it was daytime. Now it's nighttime. Right. And we just see that it's now nighttime in this setting. And we understand oftentimes, too, like, whatever choice the character made in the previous scene will set up what's gonna happen in the next scene. So the reader can kind of understand, okay, the choice was, we're gonna go stake out the suspect's house. So if you open the next scene and we're outside the house, right. Like, it doesn't really matter how much time has passed. We know that like, all the prep happened. You don't have to explain that. Like, now we're in the action of it. So you can. You can trust your reader to fill in a lot of holes, but you have to give them the information they need to fill in the holes. Right. And that information is time, place, whose body we're in. And. And oftentimes what they're. What they want, what they're after would kind of be like a fourth little bonus there.

Rachel: 5:35

Yes. When you're. Again, when you're writing early drafts, this is going to be a lot of tell. So, like, I will see writers almost do the. The movie movie camera play by play. I walked here, and then I walked over here, and then I picked up a glass, and then I took a drink. And then the next scene, I. I had walked through the hallway to reach the front door, and I walked through the front door, and, like, it literally is step by step. That's okay. Go for it. Early drafts, then when you're revising, you can get into showing those differences. So if we had taken a drink at the kitchen, the next time we're outside, we're not gonna think they teleported there. We're going to think they walked through the house and went outside. Like, it's okay to be like, then you could show. How do you show us that you're outside? Then you can get a little fancy where with, like, the. The stars twinkled above in the night sky. Okay, cool. It's night. I know you're outside, or you're at least looking through a window. You know, like, I can make some connections. You don't have to tell me that, like, you went outside, you sat on the porch, and you sat there for three hours, and now you're looking up at the stars and they're twinkling and just be like, oh, the stars are twinkling and there's bugs flying around. Cool. Yeah, I'm there.

Emily: 6:58

I get it. A good example of this that we have on our. We have a blog on how to set a scene, which we'll link in the show notes. But a good example of this is from Victoria Schwab. So V. Schwab is brilliant at this because so many of her books have. Have various. They have a lot of points of views and a lot of timelines. Right. So we're bouncing from. We're bouncing around in time a lot. A lot of her characters live forever. So they've been, like, alive for 300 years, and we're bouncing around in time. So V. E Schwab's books are really good for studying this because at the beginning of every scene she has to really establish, like, whose head are we in? Where are we and when are we? Because her characters move around so much and the timeline bounces around. So the example that we have from Vicious by V. E Schwab, it's a multi point of view story about these two college friends who become enemies as adults and they have superpowers. But at this point in the book, we last saw the character named Victor in prison with his cellmate Mitch. But we haven't seen them in a lot of chapters because we've bounced around in time around other people's heads. And so when she picks up in this new chapter with Victor, we know it's Victor because I think it says Victor at the top of the chapter. We are actually 10 years in the future. And so she establishes where they are and like, what's happened pretty quickly. So I'm going to read it real quick and then we can talk about it. Or maybe we could talk about it while I read it. So the rain hit the car in waves. All right, we're in a car, right? Like viscerally, we're in a car. There was so much of it that the wiper blades did nothing to clear it away, only managed to move it on the windows. But neither Mitch nor Victor complained. All right, we are out of prison, right?

Rachel: 8:52

Yeah. If we left them in prison, we aren't there anymore.

Emily: 8:55

They're not in prison anymore, but they're together after all. The car was stolen. Okay, criminals. Is this how they got out of prison and obviously stolen. Well, they'd been driving it without incident for almost a week, ever since they swiped it from a rest stop a few miles from the prison. So we can assume that they're in the setting in this car because they broke out of prison, Right? Right. Like that's what. And she's not explicitly saying that, but that's kind of what she's saying. But we know that the stakes aren't super high because it's been almost a week, right? Yeah. The car passed a sign that pronounced merit 23 miles. So we know where we are in space too. We're headed to Merit. Victor drove or Mitch drove. And Victor stared out past the downpour as the at the world as it flew by. It felt so fast. Everything felt fast after being in a cell for 10 years.

Rachel: 9:43

Right.

Emily: 9:43

Okay, so now we know it's been 10 years or more since the last scene when they were in a cell. Everything felt free for the first few days they had driven aimlessly, the need to move outweighing the need for a destination. Victor hadn't known where they were driving. He hadn't yet decided where to start the search. Ten years was long enough to plan the details of the prison break down to the minutia. Within an hour, he had new clothes. Within a day, he had money. But a week out and he still didn't have a place to start looking for Eli until that morning. So there's his goal. They're looking for the. For Eli, who's the. The frenemy that got him in prison in the first place. Right. And so that's three paragraphs, four paragraphs. It's two single sentence paragraphs and two longer paragraphs. Right. But it's. It's sinking us. Victoria Schwab is sinking us into the. The visceral scene, right? With the rain. We can feel it. And then once we're kind of in that setting and feeling it, she gives us information about time, so we know place. And then we. And then we get the goal, we get the, the motivation that's going to drive the scene. And so again, great, great author to look at for this kind of thing because her books do this so well.

Rachel: 10:48

I love that. And this, this is very much in the middle of things. You know, we're driving a car down the road and it's raining really hard. We're in the middle of what's happening, right? And then within. And as you. If you're. We're visually looking at this example, but it's a paragraph and then a new line, like a line, and then another paragraph and then another line. So this is on the page, a very short amount of words that, like, you're asking your reader to read to establish that context. This is not taking a long time to orient the reader in what's happening. And it feels like a very natural unfolding, right? Like, we're not confused when we hear the rain hit the car in waves. There was so much that. There was so much of it that the wiper blades did nothing to clear it away, only move it around the windows. But neither Mitch nor Victor complained. Like, like we immediately know who is. Who's here, what's happening now. What. What keeps us actually engaged a little bit is what are they doing? And like that we can keep reading about. You know, that's a fun thing. But we're not confused. We're like, ah, what's happening here?

Emily: 11:56

And we're given just enough information. What I love about this is she could have picked up this chapter by being like, for the next 10 years.

Rachel: 12:04

Exactly.

Emily: 12:05

Became great friends with Mitch, and they planned their prison break in. Here's how they broke out of prison. And like all this exposition dumping. Like, let me catch you up, right? She doesn't do that. She drops you into the action very gently. Right. They've been in the car for almost a week. There's no. We don't have to start looking for the police right now. Like, we're. We're good. But she gives you just the details that you need. It's been 10 years. They spent 10 years planning to get out of prison. We don't need to know how. We just. He. He's got new clothes, he's got money. We don't need to know how he got it. It's just. He's a smart dude, but he doesn't know where Eli is. Right. And so. And. And they're outside merit. Like, there's very few details that are given. But none of the other stuff matters. What matters is Victor and Eli's story. And what matters. The only other thing that matters in this is that Mitch and Victor are close now. Right. The last time we saw Mitch, he. He had just become Victor's new cellmate, and so they didn't have a relationship. Now, that relationship isn't even described. It's just heavily implied. They have been in a cell together for 10 years and they planned a prison break successfully. They must be close in some way. Right? Some way. Shape or form. So she could have told us all of that, but she didn't. She kind of shows us just with the details that she reveals.

Rachel: 13:20

Yes, exactly. So don't. Don't overthink it. You will revise this. If you're doing an early draft. Just get things down on the page and. And then later you can think about, how can I show what's happening versus tell what's happening? How can I sink us into the action versus lead us up to. There is action or there will be action. So don't overthink it. Again, we're looking for context. We're looking for time, space, and then like bonus goals. What are we doing?

Emily: 13:56

Yeah. And who's headwear, if you have a pov.

Rachel: 13:59

Yeah. Whose head we're in. Where are we in time? Where are we in space? Setting. That means like setting location. Not like we are in outer space, but setting location physically. Where are we? And then what are. What do we want? What are we doing in this scene? What goals are we pursuing?

Emily: 14:19

Yeah.

Rachel: 14:21

Yeah.

Emily: 14:21

The other thing I would say is just really, this is a great one to look for examples. I know I keep saying that, but it's like the best, best way to learn how to do this is to look at how people have done it before. And it's such an easy thing. You just flip open a book that you love and look at the beginnings of every chapter and just look, like, look for the time, look for the place, look for how they establish, like, whose head you're in and, like, put you in their body. Right. Like, how does the author do that? And you'll find all kinds of clever ways to do it and will give you so much inspiration for how to write your own. So once you get to that point where you're line editing and you're looking at those scene transitions and you really want to nail them, just pick up some comp titles and, like, just go crazy. It'll be really fun, I promise.

Rachel: 15:02

Oh, explore, have fun. And if you get like, you know, this is a great time to invoke the help of outside eyes, because if you are gonna make me perhaps a bold choice in a scene transition, you could send the end of one chapter and the beginning of another to your. Your reader, your alpha reader, your beta reader, your writing group, whatever it is, and be like, hey, does this transition make sense? They could be like, yes or no. You're like, okay, got it. Because another thing, too, is you. You know, we were talking about the writer earlier who was perhaps overthinking it, but you might be like, oh, this makes total sense to me. I'm picking it right up where I left off. And then you might have a reader be like, where. Where are we? What do we do? So outside eyes, those are always important on making sure that a reader feels grounded and not disengaged.

Emily: 15:56

Absolutely. I think that's all we got on that. So go have fun. Don't overthink it. You got this. Just. Yeah. Take it in layers. Take it with time.

Rachel: 16:06

Layers. If you want to build a successful, fulfilling, and sustainable writing life that works for you, you've got to get on our email list.

Emily: 16:13

Sign up now to get our free email course, the Magic of Character Arcs. After seven days of email magic, you'll have the power to keep your readers flipping pages all through the night.

Rachel: 16:21

Link in the show notes. We'll see you.

Emily: 16:23

Bye.