You should be ashamed of yourself and your lunatic ways

What I’m going to write about this week, in the grand scheme of storytelling, isn’t hugely important. It’s more a matter of finesse. It’s adding bells and whistles to that grand machine you’ve just built to pull the legs off antelope.

Speaking of which, do you know what sound an antelope makes? I don’t. I expect if you pulled its legs off it’d emit some kind of a pained, howling scream. Kind of like this:

EEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAOOOOOWWWWWW! Bing-bong! Peeeeep!

The bing-bong and peep isn’t the antelope by the way. They come from the bells and whistles you added to your machine, because sometimes it’s worth applying those little extra touches to make the mutilation of ungulates a little easier to stomach.

Walter stood looking at the red stains splattered across the snow. It didn’t look like blood. It looked like someone had spilled strawberry slushie on the ground. But strawberry slushie doesn’t ooze from dismembered legs and there were two such severed limbs here, bare of clothes, flesh already blue.

Footprints led away from the scene of the crime. Walter sucked hard on his blueberry slushie and then ambled off in their wake.

#

“Bingo!” cried Elsbeth.

“You bloody cheat!” cried Marilyn.

The clock on the wall of the residential home’s main lounge counted off a moment of silence. The other residents stared at the table at which both Elsbeth and Marilyn were seated, expecting recriminations at worst, fisticuffs at best.

“What did you call me?” asked Elsbeth.

Two unrelated scenes, one following after the other. You may have read them without missing a beat, but I didn’t make it easy for you. After the blood in the snow, I suddenly threw you into a game of Bingo. You coped, like I knew you would, but even so, there would have been tiny iota of cognitive floundering during that transition and that’s what this article is about. Transitions and cognitive floundering. Oh, and legless antelope.

Footprints led away from the scene of the crime. Walter sucked hard on his blueberry slushie and then ambled off in their wake.

#

The wake of Javier Muldrew did not follow usual protocol. Instead, he requested that his recent neighbours play his favourite game.

“Bingo!” cried Elsbeth.

“You bloody cheat!” cried Marilyn.

That transition should be a little smoother. Instead of a harsh break between scenes, there is a thread that leads from one to the next. It’s achieved in a fairly blunt manner – repeating a word from the last sentence of the first scene in the first sentence of the second scene – but a link is there to reduce the jarring sensation of switching scenes and that link makes it just a little bit easier to read.

Of course, there are more subtle techniques:

Footprints led away from the scene of the crime. Walter sucked hard on his blueberry slushie and then ambled off in their wake.

#

Derek ran, hard. Sweat was bleeding into his eyes and he could barely see where he was going, but he pressed on regardless, desperate only to get away.

The transition in this case isn’t a word, it’s an idea: that of movement. Walter is ambling, Derek is running. Derek could have ambled too and that would have worked, but the example illustrates the effect of employing contrast. It's like driving a car and, in an instant, putting your foot down and changing up a gear. It's not like driving a car in that there is no car and any sounds of revving engines have to be self-generated.

End at night, open at night and there's a direct line between scenes. End at night, open with day and you retain a logical thread - time of day - but you're also delivering a change of mood or setting. As long as you have a word, a place, a mood, an idea, anything that serves as an anchor for the reader's train of thought, then everything else can pivot around that and the reader won't get lost when you throw them into a whole new situation.

Keep the train of thought on track and everything will flow. Flow plays into pacing.

Footprints led away from the scene of the crime. Walter sucked hard on his blueberry slushie and then ambled off in their wake.

# [movement]

Derek ran, hard. Sweat was bleeding into his eyes and he could barely see where he was going, but he pressed on regardless, desperate only to get away.

# [movement]

Greg did not move, did not flinch, did not even look up when the man with the knife stepped up before him and explained that his arm would be cut off next.

# [appendages]

More severed limbs lying in the snow. Walter wondered when the scavengers would come - the foxes, the wolves. Would they arrive before the police? He didn’t really care. He just wanted to get back what was stolen from him.

Giving the reader an ‘in’ to a scene means they save time orientating themselves to the new situation. One scene flows easily into the next and they read more quickly, they stay with the story.

Dead antelope. Just over there. The one without the legs. It bled to death while you were reading this. It also served to kill whatever momentum I’d built up in the previous passages. This was intentional, because I was making a point. Sometimes you need to kill the pace. Stop things dead. Confuse the reader, even if just for a second. If so, that’s how you can do it. Pushing your audience off balance every now and again makes them doubt their ability to second-guess what you’re going to do next. Do it too often and your story becomes hard to follow; the reader will put down your book and they won’t pick it up again.

But, y’know, good transitions are still just bells and whistles. They don’t make or break a story, they just make it a little bit more readable. Yet, call me crazy, but I find myself loathe to start one scene without carefully tying it back to the one that came before it (which makes re-writes a bastard, I can tell you).

Of course, if you do call me crazy, I’ll just shake my head and point to the bells and whistles you’ve got on your antelope dismembering machine.