Fun with Trannys, er, Transitions!

If you're deep in the throes of NaNoWriMo, you're probably absorbing a lot of cool advice, probably even tempted to delve into ones with neat headlines like "How to Write a Best Seller" or "How Not to Drink So Much Coffee That You End Up in a Drooling Puddle of Self-Loathing." If so, you're not alone, but if you didn't know already, there's no guarantees.  Sometimes you're lucky you don't pee on that mad dash to the toilet.

Most of us sit down hoping to write a bestseller or at least not pee in the literary pool. We want to make waves, but no amount of splashing is going to empty it either, so why not take some chances?  It's why, even when we know it's probably going to be bad advice, we'll let curiosity drive us into strange territory.

This time around, I'd like to tackle those dastardly transitions.  You finish up that big scene that you're really excited about and come to the point where the next scene is already taunting you, but you have no damn clue where to start. You're flailing around with those 'it was a dark and stormy night' or 'so one guy walks into a bar' flubs and suddenly you think 'craaaaap, writer's block...'

Here's the thing: not every beginning has to be exciting. One piece of advice I have taken to heart is just that; while it doesn't have to be exciting it does have to be relevant. You don't have to end every scene on a cliffhanger, but you should tie it up.  As a rule, I generally treat every scene like a short story rather than a continuation. Sometimes the frustration lies in the journey of the characters.  Point A to Point B is not always going to be thrilling.  Sometimes you have to eliminate those pieces rather than insist on finding some way to dress it up.

However there ARE ways to dress it up, if you want to. I'll give a few examples:

• Tighten a bond. If there's nothing thrilling about the journey, make your characters curious. Why is she suddenly so somber when passing a building? Why is he laughing like an idiot when a cat crosses his path?
• Use a landmark. In the same vein of curiosity, maybe that statue of a woman holding her child evokes a childhood memory that explained why he risked his neck to save a family when the reader knows damn well he should be hauling ass.
• Create chaos. A great way to hurry past an otherwise boring spot is to light a fire under your character's ass and physically make them hurry to the next point.  A chase, a riot, a battle, give them reason to move!

If not, the transition may benefit from a time jump, a dream or even a flashback.  Make one of those either introduce you to the new scene or lead into it.  Maybe they really don't want to go to the place they have to go, so show the reader why. This is a place where I often love switching to a first person narrative. Maybe they had forgotten about it completely, but the trigger is vivid as if they are living it all over again.

I always see breaks in the exciting action as the perfect place for character development.  Stoic characters are tough nuts to crack.  Maybe you don't want them to reveal much as they journey, but you should give the reader a place to bond with them regardless.  Even if you're writing an unlikable asshole, make it tougher to really hate them by leading the reader to invest in them anyway.

Let's make it clear-- I don't fancy myself an expert, but while I'm crunching through a novel with little more than a skeletal ideal of my story beginning to end, one thing I do stumble on is transitions.  Every scene ending makes me stop and ask if I want to wait to explain something or come back to it later.  Sometimes I want you to hate a character you liked for a while before making them likable again.  Sometimes I want you to like someone who was the wrong person to trust so completely. Complexities are my cup of tea.

One thing I do like to note to myself is the point of the narrative.  Sometimes I want every character to be explored.  Other times, I want one viewpoint to keep other characters at a distance.  Sometimes you have to remember which strings you pull on the marionette so you're not tangling yourself up. One perspective that I do struggle with is first person.  I like to use it in short bursts, but it can be limiting so I'll catch myself veering away from 'I, me, my' and into third person before I have to scrap it. What you know as the writer is tempting to roll out in full glory, but if you choose first person, you have to stick to what the one character knows and sees.

What's so hard about that?  We all do come from our own perspective, right?  Well, writers reveling in escapism often learn to shift their consciousness into a single character and hop around with very little thought.  It goes beyond empathy and into omniscience. It's very natural to see the allure of jumping into another head.  It's still 'first person' but nope, you're now writing a different story.

I do like some limited omniscience sometimes though.  Sometimes the tone of the narrative I take will adopt the attitude of a character I choose from the scene.  I'm still writing for all of them, but sometimes one character's emotions will dominate the overall tone.  This is one form of leading, where other characters are taking emotional cues from a dominant force and it affects them whether they are conscious of it or not.

You've probably guessed where I'm sidetracking to-- psychology is a wonderful study for transitions.  Often when starting a scene, we tend to pull the camera back.  Slamming right into an action scene is often a clumsy way to start, but before pulling back, you have to consider those viewpoints.  You are probably considering them a little too much.  As I've listed above, there are ways to break rules that don't spoil the show.  Sometimes you pull back when you need to delve deeper.

I'll finish this blog out with one classic example of transition and pace that we all know.  In Alice in Wonderland, she falls into the rabbit hole. It's a wild swirly confusing trip and we get the sense that, like Dorothy in her tornado, we're not in Kansas anymore.  After that chaos, where does she end up?  A room with a table and two vials.  It doesn't sound like much, but the story is rife with those breather scenes that are never quite as safe as they seem.  Don't worry that the table and the vials aren't that exciting.  They will be, but first you have to have a little faith that those ordinary things can become relevant and possibly spectacular. Your plans are often a matter of that awkward set-up.  You don't have to make it immediately interesting in your first go.  Sometimes you just have to lay a few eggs and go back and paint them later.  

And if you don't? Maybe it needs to go altogether.  One hard lesson for many writers is acknowledging that some ideas end up on the cutting room floor.  Don't scrap them entirely-- you might find a better place to plant those seeds later.

Ah, transitions... what would we do without you?