Month: May 2013

Writing Travel Scenes: What to Keep Moving

Do you ever notice how often “the hero’s journey” isn’t just a metaphor? Travel’s a huge part of many stories, sometimes long days or weeks on the road, sometimes brief hops that still get wedged so close into the characters’ real moments they seem like they deserve a place in the story. But there’s always that question: how much do you write up, or do you show it at all?

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

More than anything I’d call this a pacing question, and check that against a writer’s overall style. Some periods just need to take more time–it could almost be a paradox of:

  • if none of the real plot has started yet, skip forward to when it has
  • but when the plot’s just underway, then show more of the journey
  • once things are moving toward high gear, skip to the good stuff
  • and then when the important scene’s near, once again show the approach to it

–Not very helpful, is it? But the pacing theory is that there’s an ideal plot distance away from the more important scenes, not so far that it’s no longer worth showing and not so close the reader’s gotten too eager to rush on, and that’s the sweet spot to take some time in. That is, once you decide which are the more important scenes and what makes other moments just how far away from them. One writer’s cut-to-the-chase’s-warmup is another’s favorite time to pause and say goodbye to how things were.

Part of that’s each writer’s own style. The more you use description and mood overall, the odder it’s going to look if you skip ahead… unless part of your pattern is skipping ahead, because you writer fewer but richer scenes. It all gets mixed together to decide which side of pacing a moment is.

(Another point: one way to give a sense of time passing without showing any of it is to show something else, or rather someone else. So if the story has multiple viewpoints, momentarily shifting to a different one for gives some weight to that passing time, even without the specifics of a villain’s schemes or a mentor’s trust or whatever contrast works with what’s going on now.)

Still, there’s no lack of options for what might fill up the travel time you want to show, to just the degree you want to show it:

Description of course. A lot of travel is having so much time to take in the scenery… and also get acquainted with how hard the seat is, how welcome the meals are, and other points that might not seem as exciting but do plenty to put the reader right in the characters’ place there.

Characterization, using dialog and other tools (and thoughts) to advance our knowledge of the characters, and the characters’ connection to each other– the classic Road Movie claims to be more about bonding with the other folks in the car than anything on the way.

News and clues, any updates on anything that matters, from broadcasts about the killer on the loose to moments the gas tank seems to be a lot emptier than it was before. Even a small hint or reminder can keep a bit of suspense building.

Progressions, whatever people are doing as they go. Remember Luke getting that lightsaber lesson on the way to Alderaan, and achieving his “first step into a larger universe?” Look for anything interesting that’s underway meanwhile.

(Of course, one common progression is the growing sense that they’re on the wrong road, or need to rest or otherwise change their plans…)

and then, Events. There are always small (or not so small) complications or shifts where what the people try to go past–or who’s going past them–step in and break up the pattern. They might be using a scene to make a point that could have been through general description or other methods, or it could the start of a genuine subplot or a taste of what’s up ahead.

A travel sequence could be a few words of “By the time they cleared the forest, he never wanted to smell sap again.” Or it could be pages or chapters, about either the journey itself or the writer’s wish list of how many things could be established or worked out on the way. But those are a few of the choices.

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If your scenes look too similar… try the Tarzan Test

It’s one of the nastiest problems in writing, because it can pop up either because we’re struggling or because we’re getting in the groove: we keep using another of the same kind of similar scenes. Hero and heroine argue, or maybe hero uses his professional skill to work through the problem, or bullets fly… again. I’ve slipped into a few of them more often than I’ll admit, maybe because I’m trying to play to my strengths as a writer or because a given story does call for a lot of a thing. (For some reason gangsters in trouble like shooting people.) So I try to look at my plot through what I call the Tarzan Test, both to keep my scenes distinct and to see if those patterns can be a good thing for what the story is.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

The test goes like this:

  • If Tarzan fights a lion, and then he ever fights another lion, that’s redundant
  • –or not

Check every scene against every other scene. Any two that start looking similar risk boring the reader… unless the writer’s good at making a distinction between them. But at the same time, if you’ve worked out a lot about what makes one lion stronger than another, or why one comedy act works and another fails, using both scenes puts real focus on what makes them each tick. The book I’m working on now, The High Road, has more a number of scenes of the heroes using their discovery to fly over the city, but in some scenes it’s to look for clues about their enemies and in others it’s to cope with the power’s side effects.

Of course, favoring action or conversation or whichever is part of what makes any story what it is, for genre and style and just because of what that tale’s key elements are. (Besides, we writers do have our preferences, and readers do open our books expecting certain things, so we ignore them at our peril.)

But it goes beyond that:

  • If Tarzan fights a lion, then fights a crocodile, the story’s about the jungle
  • If he fights a lion and then a poacher, it’s about the jungle plus who comes there
  • If he fights a lion and then a World War I battle, it’s Tarzan in the larger world

The variety in scenes might do more than anything else to define what the story is. Making only animals the enemy makes a different statement than giving a human a turn as villain, and so does every other choice. There are writers and readers that would love to see Tarzan in something as realistic as the WWI trenches (the period’s about right), and others who think that breaks the fantasy of what the stories should be.

  • If he fights a lion and then talks with Jane…
  • If he fights a lion and then speaks in London about ecology…

Naturally a story is more than one type of scene. But one tale could use only a few types, others could have many… and then, what’s the balance between them? One writer could use a visit to the city as a token excuse for a range of rooftop battles, while another works through dozens of different reactions to bringing him to “civilization.”

I sometimes think of scenes’ variety as dots within a circle. The shape they make might be wide and diverse or tightly clumped, but its overall breadth tells us how many things the story’s about; meanwhile within that given space, having at least some of those points evenly spread out tells a lot about how well it’s being explored.

  • If he fights a lion and dies saving Jane…

What each scene does for the story still means more than how it compares to the other scenes. And those effects are the biggest key for which parts are more different, and more important.

After all, even if you could kill off Tarzan, you could never do it through him saving anyone else. That’s just who he is.

(Update: for more musings on scene variety and ways to check for it, look at Been There Done That?)

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