‘Any tips on how to handle transitions?’ asks a former Goldsmiths student in an email today.
She's working to finish her novel and her question prompts me to look up from finishing my own. I haven’t posted in a while, having been submerged since the end of the teaching term in March in my remake of Taking In Water.
In a novel that relies on revealing, say, a family history in flashbacks how do you shift smoothly from present to past. Try asking these questions:
Is this memory really important to the character at this moment?
If it is, how can you show it dramatically, how can you make it an intense episode, that relates to current events? How will revealing this affect the character's next action.
Will the reader at this point in the narrative be happy to be pitched back?
Do they care enough about the character to go with them?
If yes, to all of that, what sensory detail in the present has triggered the past?
A strong image?
A smell – cooking, perfume, flowers?
A sound – music, cries of children etc?
Can the past be revealed in tantalising glimpses through letters, photographs or other material?
Transitions in real time can be handled by just fading to white. Leave a white space and move on. If say, you have a chapter that needs to show the character at key moments on a particular morning, there is no need to show their whole morning, minute by minute. It can get tedious accounting for every nose blow, scratch of the head etc. Dramatically you want to move from key moment to key moment. What do you need to show to keep the momentum? Show the moment, fade to white, show the next moment. The reader will be happy to leap over the gaps.
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