Hello, writers. One of the little tricks a writer has to learn is how to make time pass. In a story, that is.
An author at a retreat I attended last year made a throwaway comment in conversation: “Make slow stuff fast and fast stuff slow.” She meant for the reader, of course, not for the writer, who might have to agonize for hours or days on how to get past the dull bits.
When time is passing and nothing is happening, use as few words as possible to convey that fact. One of the Icelandic sagas contains the phrase “And then for a long time nothing happened.” Since you don’t have the luxury of a captive audience huddled around the longfire in a turf-roofed hall, you’ll want to avoid such tension-killing language.
One of the simplest ways to make time pass is to begin a scene with a statement that it has done so. This statement should ideally be focused on moving the story forward:
It wasn’t till months afterward that Francesca realized what her mother had meant.
As the years went by, the hill that loomed over the town grew.
When Eric checked again at the end of winter, there was no one living in the old grey house by the mill.
These lines go at the beginning of the scene.
The manuscript convention for changing scenes while showing that time has passed is the good ol’ pound sign:
#
Actually “#” is the convention for changing scenes at all, but unless you’re writing more than one viewpoint character, you’re usually changing scenes because time has passed. In the finished book these scene changes may be marked by a blank line or by an image of the book-designer’s choice. (The Jinx books have three leaves in a row to mark scene breaks; the book I’m reading just now, which is about Mt Everest, has a tiny little Mt Everest at each scene break.)
You can also end a scene with a preparation for time passing before the next scene. You see this more often in older books:
It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds. (from Sula by Toni Morrison)
Frodo did not see him again for a long time. (last line of the first chapter of Fellowship of the Ring.)
I am not sure why we don’t see time passing at the end of a scene rather than the beginning as often as we used to, but my guess would be that we expect a fast pace in books these days, which means the chapter often has to end with a suggestion of suspense.
In future WO!s we’ll talk about pacing and about which scenes are best summarized or skipped altogether.
Tonight’s challenge:
The lines in the first quote block above are not from books. I just made them up. Write a scene beginning with any of these lines.
Limit yourself to 120 words.
Please include the line “There’s nobody here but us chickens.”
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