Writing.Com General Discussion

I watched a panel last year at Comicpalooza and Martha Wells (award winning sci-fi author) talked about how when she started, she struggled with this same concept. How do you get from one scene to the next, or time passing.

I admit, that puzzled me that somebody could be puzzled by how to do that, but Martha ain't dumb, so it's got to be more about people learn and absorb from reading examples in different ways.

Zen and Northern have pretty much covered it. New paragraph or chapter, mention the time passage or somehow make it obvious wer're someplace/somewhen different. For me in my WIP, the hero ended chapter 5 with finding the name and address of a suspect. So chapter 6 will start like the following (made up on the fly for example purposes).

My car pulled up to the gate of Ascension Heights, a swank gated community populated by snobby jerks, including my suspect.

It should be pretty obvious to the reader that the hero left his wizard's tower, got in the car, and drove to this sub-division. The sentence even connects why I'm there, to find the suspect that I got a name for from the last chapter. It's implied time has passed, and all that boring stuff about Houston traffic was skipped.

I'm not a fan of writing in books, but there's some merit to the exercise with a highlighter. In your current book you're reading, find where it says where the hero is and highlight it. Now read through and find where the hero is someplace else, and time has passed. Highlight that. Keep doing that. Notice the different ways the shift was made. Most should align with that aforementioned advice from Northern and Zen.