The Gaps Between Your Scenes
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
Scenes are the fundamental units of fiction.
What does that mean? It means the following:
- A novel is made up of scenes.
- Each scene is a miniature “story-within-a-story”.
- Your reader consumes these scenes in order.
Just as an example, if your novel is 100,000 words, and if your scenes are, on average, about 1000 words, then your novel would have about 100 scenes. Your own numbers will be somewhat different than these, but I give these as an example to show what orders of magnitude we’re talking about.
But scenes don’t live alone as separate things. They tend to cluster into groups, which I call “sequences of scenes.” (I don’t think there’s any standard term; few books on fiction writing even talk about these sequences.) The scenes in each sequence work together to form a chunk of your story. When you submit a synopsis to a publisher, usually each paragraph of the synopsis tells what happens in one scene sequence.
A sequence of scenes is typically somewhere between 2 and 7 scenes. It typically is clustered together in time (and often clustered in space). A sequence of scenes is often clustered together in theme. A novel will typically have around 20 of these scene sequences.
Now here’s the important point. Very often, there’ll be a gap in time between your sequences of scenes. Maybe all the scenes in one sequence happen in the same day, and then time skips forward by a few days before the next sequence begins. Or maybe all the scenes in a sequence happen over the course of a few weeks, and then time skips forward several months or even years.
How do you handle those gaps in time? If you’re not careful, you can lose your reader. (“Hey, it was January for several scenes, and now suddenly it’s July! I feel like I’ve missed something.”)
There are a number of techniques you can use to help bridge the gap between sequences of scenes. In this article, we’ll talk about three of them, but you can probably think of others.
Character Continuity
Most novels are written so that each scene has a point-of-view character. It’s very common to use several different POV characters, switching between them every time you switch to a new scene.
If that’s your strategy, you can help bridge the gap from one scene sequence to the next by using the same POV character in the last scene of the earlier scene sequence and in the first scene of the later scene sequence.
Then, even though time has passed, the reader feels less of a “speed bump,” because at least they’ve crossed that big time gap inside the skin of the same character.
Plot Continuity
Scenes typically are of two types:
- Proactive Scenes, which begin with a Goal, work through an obstacle course of Conflicts, and end with a Setback.
- Reactive Scenes, which begin with a Reaction, work through a Dilemma, and end with a Decision.
(If this is new to you, you might find helpful my book How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method.)
When you’re making a transition from one scene sequence to another, you can smooth the gap by either of the following two strategies:
- End the earlier scene sequence on a Reactive Scene with some Decision which then forms the Goal for a Proactive Scene that begins the next scene sequence.
- End the earlier scene sequance on a Proactive Scene with some Setback, and begin the next scene sequence with a Reactive Scene in which the Reaction responds to the Setback of the previous scene.
Either way, you’ve made a plot bridge that will help carry your reader across that gap in time.
Theme Continuity
Stories are “about something.” Most stories are, anyway. Theme is the thing that the story is about. This is often some abstract thing like freedom or hope or love or hate or death or war or whatever.
If your story is very strongly theme-oriented, then you’ll have some scenes in which the theme rises to the top and is highly visible.
If you arrange to end one scene sequence with your theme highly visible, and then begin the next scene sequence with that same theme still highly visible, you’ve bridged the gap nicely.
Homework:
- How many scenes does your current novel have?
- And how many scene sequences? (If you’ve never noticed the scene sequences before, now is a good time to look at them. In a synopsis of a few pages, typically each paragraph covers one scene sequence, so that’s an easy way to spot them.)
- Do you have any large gaps in time between any of your scene sequences? (Some novels don’t, but some have several. Either situation is OK, but you should be aware of what you’re dealing with.)
- Do you need to do any work to bridge these time gaps, if you have them? (You may have already done all your time transitions perfectly, but it doesn’t hurt to check and make sure there are no speed bumps in your story.)
- If there are a few large breaks in time, what strategy can you take to ease your reader through each one, so they don’t feel disoriented?
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