time passing. . . .

[marycatelli]

I'm bad at it.  This scene, that scene -- I can do the scenes themselves, but how to indicate how much, or approximately how much, time passes in between.

"Three weeks later" or "two minutes later" or "the next day" would stick out like a sore thumb in my prose style.

Having the characters make reference to the time passing has to find a natural location to do it in.  Even if I do locate it, I sometimes have first readers complaining that it's a jolt, they hadn't realized it was that much later, they had thought these things were bang, bang, bang right after each other.

Even if I set up that the characters have to sit around all day because something will happen at night, if something happens during the day, and I do a scene cut from dawn to it, I have to find some way to indicate how much time has passed.

Clocks help, or nightwatchmen, or the slant of the sunlight.  If I've got them.  But there are scenes when slithering them in does not work.  And there are characters -- even reflective characters, and certainly impulsive ones -- who would not notice such things well enough to tell the time.

Transitions, sometimes, when the gap is short enough.  But they have to be both summary and interesting to read.  I'm bad at them.

Comments

[cj-ruby.livejournal.com]

I find transitions difficult in short stories since they don't have chapter breaks.

I just finished a short story for a writer's workshop. In this story the transitions seemed to have a nice flow. I changed scenes with the smell of pork chops cooking for dinner and then later the cool of the evening on the porch. The biggest transition was going from the climatic scene in the middle of the night to the ending by noting the summer sun in the first sentence of the final paragraph.

I'm very interested in what the critiquing authors think about my transitions. They've always been a weakness for me.

[marycatelli]

Chapter breaks help when you want to indicate a transition is more of a break than another, but they still leave me wrestling with time.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Sensory indications like that are really good, in my opinion. Showing how things smell, with the change in the hours, is often good with characters who are rather nonverbal in other ways.

[marycatelli]

Especially for time of day.

Seasonal changes, like falling leaves, or flowering trees, can be good too for some purposes.

[jeff2001.livejournal.com]

I think you're overthinking it. Simple stuff like, "Later that night", will suffice. Readers don't even notice that stuff.

Though perhaps I'm not quite understanding you. Could you post a transition of the type you find vexing?

[marycatelli]

Well, reading with my writer's eye, I think most readers don't even notice it because it's not there. Most writers don't use it.

Unfortunately, the particular passage is in longhand at the moment.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Filling in the transitions later on final draft can help prevent continuity errors, so at least you only have to write each transition _once_.

I don't know what would fit your style, but I wonder how important the exact time is? Some very popular books hardly pause between one location/time and another. Does it really matter whether the conversation picked up at lunch or at dinner? If it turns out to matter (like for an alibi), the characters could talk ABOUT the timing later.

If it does matter, then WHY does it matter to the character or to the story? "But John was so late that when he finally came in, long after dark, Susan's anger had cooled and she had begun to worry about him."

[marycatelli]

It matter how much time it had been. If they quarreled over breakfast it would matter enormously whether Jack is still sulking over dinner that day or dinner three weeks later.

But if Jill mutters "still" she could be a reasonable soul who thinks three weeks are too long or a self-centered twerp who thinks she's entitled to insult him all the time.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

My readers have complained about a lack of temporal markers, too. I try and look for a thematic transition if at all possible where I can step back a little and describe the passage of time in terms of leaves turning, weather changing, people coming into a shop, whatever. The other alternative - particularly for shorter passages - is a single line like 'by the time they had finished, she was hungry again.'

[marycatelli]

It's tricky, but it can be worked on.

Once upon a time -- I was twelve -- I had a whole stack of unfinished stories. One day, I don't remember why, I sat down and read them. At which point it was blazingly obvious that I "lost interest" just when I had to write a transition. That was when I started working on them.

I've gotten better. (Then it would have been hard to get worse!)

LOST and transitions

[ilion7.livejournal.com]

One of the things that has always annoyed me about the show LOST is the crazy way time flies between scenes. For instance, in the most recent episode, the woman I'm calling "Smash-Momma" finds the shipwrecked pregnant woman seeminging no later than early afternoon ... and doesn't get around to asking her name until after nightfall.

Re: LOST and transitions

[marycatelli]

Ouch!

Of course, if you don't have enough temporal clues, you get annoyed when a character knows something in the next scene that wasn't revealed in the last -- even with a time gap.