Transitions – Becky Levine

Fixing Delilah is a wonderful book. The bottom line, for me, is that Sarah Ockler’s prose is smooth, tight, and flowing; her characters are strong and sympathetic; and the story moves along with just enough questions and answers to make me happy. I liked her first book, Twenty Boy Summer, a lot, and Fixing Delilah was just as good–but hit more personal chords for me, so I can recommend it with even more pleasure.

I’m not going to do a full review, because mostly I want to talk about one element of the book that Ockler handles beautifully, from a writing craft point of view, something I’ve been thinking about how to do as I plot my second draft. That element is the transitions, or rather the lack of transitions, from scene to scene. From moment-of-time to moment-of-time.

(If you’re interested in a more complete review, one that gives a good story summary without spoilers, check out this one at A Chair, A Fireplace & a Tea Cozy.)

Okay, on to transitions.

In the old days, one scene followed another in time and space or, if it didn’t, we pretty much got filled in about what happened during the gaps. The best writers did it trimly and succinctly, rather than giving long, rambly passages of telling, but still–there seemed to be a need for writers to explain what had come between.

Today, not so much. I love that authors drop readers into the moment, often in the middle of some action or conflict. I don’t miss the lead-up or the summary. It’s the kind of writing I want to do myself. But it’s tricky. I haven’t quite figured out yet how much time, as a chunk, my WIP will cover, but I do know that I don’t want to cover all the moments or hours, not even all the days. I want to find a way to write the important scenes and the scenes that make connections, without leaving the reader confused about when they are.

Which is why, after having thoroughly enjoyed the library copy of Fixing Delilah, I’m off to buy my own copy. Because Ockler has managed to do this flawlessly, and I want to read the book through a time or two again–to study, analyze, dissect why and how it works.

The story takes place over an entire summer. Almost three months. 10-12 weeks. 70+ days.

With 34 chapters. One of which contains a single line of dialogue, and other sets in which multiple chapters take place on the same day. Sometimes, Ockler skips hours between a scene, sometimes days, at least once–I’m sure–she skips weeks. And it’s all smooth.

The book feels just like school vacation–when you can barely say what you did for six days in a row, the an afternoon in the treehouse or hiking to a mountaintop stands out in clear, memorable relief. You get a sense of time passing–summer time, made of warmth and laziness with passages of sadness and anger and love and excitement. It’s time set away from the rest of the world, which is what–I think–makes Delilah’s story possible. This book had to take place over time, because the characters need that time–and some of that peace–to change and heal. And Ockler gave them–and us–that gift.

Lovely.

Remember, in the days when you were writing essays for English class, and a teacher would write the word “transition” in the margin of your paper? They wanted you to smooth out the jump from one paragraph to another, to use a phrase that would make the flow of text more clean. So you’d stick in something like “After Joe got home from the zoo…” or “Once Sally dug the pickle out of the pudding…” Then you’d hand the essay back in and hope for a better grade.

When we’re writing fiction, moving our readers from scene to scene, we need transitions, too. What we don’t want, though, is for our stories to sound like high-school essays, with the only goal being a higher grade. If we use an obvious, mechanical solution like the ones I showed above, the writing is not going to make an agent or editor happy. (It shouldn’t make your critique group happy, either.)

So what do we do? How do we keep each scene linked with the one that comes before, the one after, and–honestly–all the other scenes in our book. What can we do to put in that layer of connection that gives the story and the characters the depth and complexity our readers want.

We have to be elephants. That’s right–we have to never forget. Okay, go ahead and forget in your first draft. 🙂 As you revise, though, you’ll need to look at each scene and think about what’s come before. If your hero just got dumped by her boyfriend, you can’t have her move into the next scene in a smiling, happy-dance voice. And if your detective just broke open a major clue in his case, you don’t want to start the next scene showing him curled up with a good book and a glass of wine, ignoring the new path he just discovered. Not without a really good reason.

So you remember the connections. How do you show them, though, without boring the reader with a restatement of what’s come before or slowing down the action that’s still to come?

Here are a few suggestions:

Show your hero stuck in, or fighting off, her mood from the scene before.
Drop the characters into an action set up by the previous scene’s cliff-hanger.
Send the story in a new direction, but let the main character show an awareness of that change. Let her remind herself (and the reader) that she’ll be coming back to the old, unresolved path soon.
Write some dialog between a few characters, to (briefly!) tie together what just happened with what’s going to happen next.

Don’t, as we all did with that pat phrase on our essays, stick your transition awkwardly and obviously into the first sentence of every new scene. But keep the old scene in mind and watch for the right moment to weave the old in with the new. Show your readers the continuity of action and character that makes the story one story, not lots of separate stories connected only by chapter breaks.

How do you work out your transitions? How do you keep the connections playing out in each scene, smoothly and seamlessly?

Tag: Transitions

Time Passage in Sarah Ockler’s FIXING DELILAH

Scene Transitions