Hi

just finished a 40,000 draft, running through the plot. some of it is a bit 'we walked there. then she did that. then we walked somewhere else.'
I need to add a sense of time to it, that they didnt just teleport around the place, but I can only think of adding little thoughts or physical details of a road, for example, so the reader doesnt skip through at a hectic pace all the time. although sometimes i want to have a fast pace but not when someones walking for miles and miles down a road. Its where film seemingly gets off so lightly by showing, say, beautiful scenery, and playing a bit of travelling music. while in books too many descriptions of place can get a bit tedious. or am i talking rubbish?
Oh and its set in east anglia (flat farm land) so its not like they can pass waterfalls or walk through thick forests dodging snakes.

My question seems a bit lost.
does anyone have any thoughts?
it would be very very very much appreciated.

Not sure about adding too much scenery, as it can seem a bit bolted on, but you can help the sense of time passing with nights and days, weather, seasons, changes of clothes/moods/blisters.

One trick is to take some physical symptom, or idea, and cover the ground/time, in its terms:

But at sunrise the pain hadn't faded, and by the time they stopped for lunch her ankle was throbbing. It was dusk as they reached the campsite and pitched the tent, and he had to hold the torch while she stripped off her sock. The streaks of gangrene had reached her knee.

The road began as a shiny black tarmac ribbon, winding ahead of them, easy walking but dull. The lanes nearer the summit were rougher, with mud and even tufts of grass down the middle, and in their weariness they nearly missed the turn to the house. The track wound between high banks, with cow parsley towering above their heads, until suddenly it opened out...

Well, you get the idea.

Emma

Look again at films. The scenery is usually incorporated into a scene - either something happening in a car, on a bus, along the way, not a way to say "they're off again." Films tend to cut from one thing happening to another, forcing the viewer to fill in the gaps.

One very simple example comes to mind. From the seventies version of Dawn of the Dead. I used to have two versions of this. The final cut and an unedited version. I eventually watched them side to side to see why one was eighteen minutes longer than the other. One scene in the unedited version showed a character hiding being a bench (or something). You saw him crouch down, watching some zombies (quick cut to zombies), then he stands up, leaps over the bench and begins to run. In the edited version we see him crouching down, watching the zombies (cut to zombies, same as before) then we see him running. Your mind fills in the gap because the "tweening" (to use an animator's term) is obvious. He was crouching. Now he's running. He must have jumped over. This makes the scene move faster.

Try rewriting a scene without the action pointers - at least the boring ones - and see if it still works.

Colin M

Hi Lucy, and welcome to WriteWords.

One of the things I rmember about Brokeback Mountain were the long lingering and panning shots of the characters moving through the scenery; the two men jumping in the river; herding sheep in the snow; the outside image at the end, filmed through the caravan window.

There are various novels based around long journeys along a road - basically anything with 'road' in the title.

Memoirs and travel books are a good source of descriptions of scenery, along with the people, places and animals within it.

All the best with the writing.

- NaomiM

<Added>

There are several novelists who have based novels in the flat fenlands...Louise Doughty is one that springs to mind.

Colin, that's fascinating - rather like that regular they used to have in Mslexia, where a writer shows how they went from first to final draft. Sometimes it gets shorter, sometimes it gets longer...

Emma