The transition scene is the hardest part of a story for me to figure out when writing the first draft. I get stuck, trying to decide what information needs to come out and what should be held back. I forget that the first draft is only the foundation.
In my work, the first draft is really more of an expanded outline, a series of scenes that have characters doing things. But those scenes need to be connected so each flows naturally into the next without jarring the reader out of the narrative.
My first draft manuscript is finished in the regard that it has a beginning, middle, and ending. But it’s only a skeleton, a pile of bones I’ve unearthed, waiting for the anthropologist’s forensic reconstruction. It still needs muscles and heart and flesh.
In a story, muscle is applied to the bones in the form of the transition scene. Transition scenes propel the weight of the narrative, pushing things forward. Action, transition, action, transition—this is called pacing.
Pacing of a story is created by the rise and fall of action. We have our characters do a little something, then they show something, then they tell us something, and it begins again.
I picked up my kit and looked around. No wife to kiss goodbye, no real home to leave behind, nothing of value to pack. Only the need to bid Aeoven and my failures goodbye. The quiet snick of the door closing behind me sounded like deliverance.
The character in the above transition scene completes an action in one scene and moves on to the next event. It reveals his mood and some of his history in 46 words and propels him into the next scene.
He does something: I picked up my kit and looked around.
His emotional state is shown through his thoughts: No wife to kiss goodbye, no real home to leave behind, nothing of value to pack. Only the need to bid Aeoven and my failures goodbye.
The scene is concluded with one last thought and an action that pushes him to the next event: The quiet snick of the door closing behind me sounded like deliverance. The door has closed, there is no going back, and he is now in the next action sequence. We find out who and what is waiting for him on the other side of that door.
We are always told, “Don’t waste words on empty scenes.” I find this part of the revision process the most difficult. Frankly, I have a million words at my disposal, and wasting them is my best skill.
Most fiction has one thing in common regardless of genre and tropes: characters we can empathize with are thrown into chaos-with-a-plot.
To make an enjoyable story out chaos, we must have an underlying foundation of order in the layout of the narrative. This is pacing, and it’s subliminal. But without it, the book is either flat and boring or too chaotic and confusing.
Pacing looks like this:
- Processing the action.
- Action again.
- Processing/regrouping.
Our scenes have an arc, one that is as defined as the overarching arc of the story. A transition scene reveals something new and pushes the characters toward something unknown and unavoidable. It pushes us forward and lays the groundwork for what comes next.
If you ask a reader what makes a memorable story, they will tell you that the emotions it evoked are why they loved that novel. They were allowed to process the events, given a moment of rest and reflection between the action. Our characters can take a moment to think, but while doing so, they must be transitioning to the next scene.
The narrative is driven by the characters who have information that must come out. This information must only be given at a certain point in the storyline, and only to those who must have that knowledge in order to accomplish their goal.
These information scenes are transitions and are vital to the reader’s understanding of why these events occur. They show us what must be done to resolve the final problem. The fact that some characters must work with limited information creates roadblocks and raises tension in the reader.
The transition is also where you ratchet up the emotional tension. As I showed in the example above, introspection offers an opportunity for clues about the characters to emerge. It opens a window for the reader to see who they are and how they react. It illuminates their fears and strengths. It makes them seem real and self-aware.
Characters’ thoughts must illuminate their motives at a particular moment in time and explore information not previously discussed. Keep the moments of mind wandering brief. Go easy if you use italics to set your thoughts off. A wall of italics is hard to read, so don’t have your characters “think” too much if you use them.
Internal monologues should humanize our characters and show them as clueless about their flaws and strengths. It should even show they are ignorant of their deepest fears and don’t know how to achieve their goals.
With that said, we must avoid “head-hopping.” The best way to avoid confusion is to give a new chapter to each point-of-view character. (Head-hopping occurs when an author describes the thoughts of two point-of-view characters within a single scene.)
Visual Cues: In my own work, when I come across the word “smile” or other words conveying a facial expression or character’s mood, it sometimes requires a complete re-visualization of the scene. I’m forced to look for a different way to express my intention, which is a necessary but frustrating aspect of the craft.
Fade-to-black is a time-honored way of moving from one event to the next. However, I don’t like using fade-to-black scene breaks as transitions within a chapter. Why not just start a new chapter once the scene has faded to black?
One of my favorite authors sometimes has chapters of only five or six hundred words, keeping each character thread separate and flowing well. A hard scene break with a new chapter is my preferred way to end a nice, satisfying fade-to-black.
Chapter breaks are transitions. I have found that as I write, chapter breaks fall naturally at certain places.
Writing isn’t the simplest occupation I could have chosen. I struggle, trying to make each scene as emotionally powerful as possible without going overboard. In my case, walking the line between monotonous and melodramatic is a balancing act.
But when it comes to having a website, don’t sweat it. WordPress and Blogger (Google’s platform) offer free blogs and theme templates. You can have a nice-looking website, with only a small amount of effort and a little self-education.
A blog post doesn’t have to be long. Think of it as a slightly longer tweet or Facebook post. Just write a paragraph or two about what you are interested in at that moment. You will have 300 – 500 words written in no time.
After six months, you’ll have a history of stats to look at. Use that information to gauge what topics did best. Make sure the time the blog goes live is a good slot. You want to post it when people are looking for something short to read, like when riding the bus or train to or from work.
Who needs a box of corkscrews? Apparently, we do as they go along with our three boxes of wine glasses. Greg’s medication precludes alcohol consumption, and I am a teetotaler. But we proudly serve 
The house seems to have a rhythm. In the morning, a tide of ancient artifacts rolls into the living room from every closet and corner, making me irritable. The afternoon sees boxes of items ebb out to the car, driven away to be donated to charities. By evening the sea of clutter is down to a moderately tidy level, only for the tide of chaos to rise again the next day.
And over here, we have three PlayStation consoles (1, 2, and 3), an early Wii, a Super Nintendo console, and a cabinet full of the games that go with every platform. I quit playing console games after the PS3, and now I play on the PC with an Xbox controller. It’s simpler and takes up less space.
Yes, getting our house ready to put on the market is a daunting task, and it sometimes makes me crazy. But something gets done every day, and we’re inching closer to being able to make that final decision.
If you enjoy reading magazines like 
The narrative essay conveys our experiences and ideas in a form that is easy to digest, so writing this kind of piece requires authors to have some idea of the craft of writing.
A narrative essay is a story that begins with an experience you once had. You know how that event began and ended. Just like any other form of short fiction, a narrative essay has a plot arc.
We don’t want to disclose too much information about ourselves or the people we have encountered. An honest narrative essay contains an author’s opinions. Sometimes those sentiments are not glowing accolades. One can lose friends if they aren’t careful.
Take some time to review what you submitted, keeping those comments in mind. Then form a plan to address those issues with a rewrite.
When a new writer decides to begin their career by embarking on writing a novel, the magnitude of the undertaking soon becomes apparent.
Writing a drabble takes less time than writing a 3,000-word story or a 70,000-word novel, but all writing is a time commitment. When writing a drabble, you can expect to spend an hour or more getting it to fit within the 100-word constraint.
I use a loose outline to break the arc of every story I write into acts, each with a specific word count. (I’ve included a graphic at the bottom of this post.)
I mentioned rewards in the title of this post. The completed story is a small gift you give yourself, and the surge of endorphins you experience in that moment of “Yes! I can write after all!” are the reward.
Strange beasts are a common trope in speculative fiction.
So, why do I feel the need to be so vague on a subject that fans are obviously interested in? The original idea for Keltin Moore’s world came from a RPG video game, which is one of the main reasons why the series shares many conventions with role-playing games, including the presence of a variety of dangerous creatures in an otherwise ‘normal’ world. While some games may give token explanations for their wandering monsters, the majority of enemy units in these games are just accepted as a part of the RPG world, no more unusual than ability cool-downs or health regenerating potions.
I am more of a planner. Like Lindsay, some of my fantasy work is RPG game-based. My mind works in a linear, logical manner. In real life, if something anomalous to the native plants and animals exists, it arrived there via external means.
Suburban coyotes, racoons, possums, deer – they all make their living in our backyards. In real life, our local fauna is there, part of the environment. Some are predators, so we keep our cats inside and work around the wildlife as a matter of course.
Here, the shoreline of Puget Sound determines the path of the interstate highway. The major cities and towns are located where there are good deepwater ports.
If you are designing a fantasy world, you might want to make a pencil-drawn map. Place north at the top, east to the right, south to the bottom, and west to the left. Those are called 
Access to water is crucial to life and prosperity. Humans have long understood the value of clean water for drinking, and you can’t count on getting that from streams or pools. Wells and the technology to make them have been around for a very long time. Cisterns have too, collecting rainwater for drinking and irrigation.
Those birch trees were nowhere near as tall as the giant cedars and Douglas firs I was familiar with. But once you were away from the road, the birch forests became dark jungles, tangled and mysterious.
We humans are tribal. We prefer an overarching power structure leading us because someone has to be the leader. We call that power structure a government.
Power structures are the hierarchies encompassing the leaders and the people with the power. Government is an overall system of restraint and control among selected members of a group. Think of it as a pyramid, a few at the top governing a wide base of citizens.
The same sort of God complex occurs among academicians and scientists. Some people are prone to excess when presented with the opportunity to become all-powerful.
Once NaNoWriMo is over, I try to shave my cast of thousands down to a reasonable level.
Take a second look at the characters in each scene and remove those with no real purpose. (Save everything you cut in a separate file—you might want to reuse these characters someday.)
What is even worse, halfway through the first draft of the second book in the series, Marta suddenly was a protagonist with a significant storyline. She actually becomes Marya’s mother-in-law in the third book. Fortunately, I was in the final stage of editing book one for publication. I immediately realized I had to make a major correction: Marta was renamed Halee.
Names are also a component of world-building. While recording Tales from the Dreamtime, a novella consisting of three fairy tales, my narrator had trouble pronouncing the names of two characters. This happened because I had written the names so they would feel foreign and look good on paper. 
Some people call this writers’ block. I think of it as a temporary lull in my creativity.
Sometimes, the problem is that your mind has seen a shiny thing, a different project that wants to be written, and you can’t focus on the job at hand. If that is the case, work on the project that is on your mind. Let that creative energy flow, and you can reconnect with the first project once the new project is out of the way.
In my real life, getting our house ready to put on the market saps my creativity, but I am muddling along. Boxes here and there, getting rid of this and that—it’s exhausting. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to write.
When we daydream, our brain is free to process tasks more effectively.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
