I am now several more chapters into my (very amateur) novel, thanks to all your incredibly helpful answers to my previous 2 posts. I am understanding my strengths and weaknesses a little better now and have realised that the point at which I tend to lose motivation is when I have to link scenes together.

I enjoy writing scenes themselves. Say I write a scene in a ballroom and a scene outside on the street. I can write each scene fully, they advance the plot and they sound quite good after a few edits. But getting from the ballroom to the street - from A to B - is so much more difficult than I imagined.

I suppose my question is how do I judge how much detail to include on these A to B transitions? If what I am writing is not relevant to the plot itself, how much detail is actually needed? How do I strike the balance between not making it sound like an Ikea instruction manual, nor like another scene in itself?

ie, the difference between

"Jawad and Howard descended the staircase which was located to the left of the ballroom door and found themselves on the quiet street at dusk."

or

"Jawad ducked to avoid several waltzing couples as he made a beeline for the door. Howard was just behind him, catching the door as it swung back from Jawad's departure. After the events in the ballroom, he did not want to follow too closely behind him, in case it was mistaken for enthusiasm. Ahead of him he saw Jawad at the door, glancing at him quizzically, while the moonlit street glinted through the gap."

I know what you'll say - it depends on whether it's relevant to the plot. This is just an example - there is no plot in this example, but for the sake of argument - what if I have already indicated Howard's reticence in the scene before this - would I need to reiterate in again (ie keep him in character) during the transition just to make sure the reader 'gets' it?

Sorry if this is confusing.

My instinct would be, if the detail is not relevant and might even slow the plot down, pare it as much as possible - i.e. in the first example, would you even need to specify which staircase they descended?

Even in the second example,I would probably cut this:

After the events in the ballroom, he did not want to follow too closely behind him, in case it was mistaken for enthusiasm.

The key thing I think is to make things feel as seamless as possible, so if you can streamline without losing important elements, I'd always try to do this.

Jawad, I think your instinct that you don't necessarily need much, to link scenes, is a good one, but that doesn't mean - as you've realised! - that it's not worth spending some thought on it.

Essentially, you can slide, or you can jump, across the gap between one full-on scene and the next.

Jump is easy:

"I don't want to dance any more," said John. "Let's go!" And they did. When they reached home, the front door was flapping wide.

Slide takes more deciding - how long do you spend, how much detail do you put in? - and the main thing is to make sure you take the reader with you, so that we always feel our feet are in the right place. Plus, if you're writing anything of the characters actually moving from scene a to scene b, you want to make sure you still do it in terms of character in action.

So, in your example, the fact that the ballroom door is on the left might not be relevant. But the fact that their feet clunk embarrassingly loudly on the bare boards as they walk downstairs might be very relevant - it says something about them (that they're embarrassed to have people know they left early), and about their physical experience of their actions. It's physical evocation which keeps our experience connected to their experience.

"I don't want to dance any more," said John. "Let's go!" And they did, their feet clopping embarrassingly on the local authority lino of the back stairs. At least they found a taxi quickly, and rolled home quite cheerfully in the fags-and-air-freshener fug. As John pushed open the front gate, the security light clicked on. The front door was flapping wide.

You may find that you need to write "too much" of the business of your characters getting from the hotel to home, before you know which bits are really evocative of character in action. That's fine - it's just process writing. And every now and then you discover that the row-and-makeup-sex-which-gets-her-pregnant, which you'd planned to happen at home, turns out to happen under the bandstand on the common, halfway home.

This post might be useful; it starts by talking about how your Showing can get out of hand, but moves on to how you can cover the ground and get on with the story, while keeping things vivid and evocative.

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/10/are-you-showing-too-much.html

and this post is about handling the description of places in terms of character in action and so making it part of the storytelling, not just a chunk of info:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2012/06/how-would-you-describe-it.html

Thanks so much for this, those answers are so great. When I feel lost and bogged down in detail, this forum is great for making me realise that it's normal and I am not useless and that these are common problems.

Emma your blog is fantastic, I am going to start reading some of the other posts.

Jawad, you are soooooo right that we all fret about all these things. It's easy to forget, faced with a good novel, that it was created by struggling with just the same puzzlements and wrestlings and bafflements as we all do all the time.

This post, too, might be useful - it's more about how you expand and contract the narrative within a scene, but the same issues apply:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2012/02/blow-by-blow.html

Edited by EmmaD at 09:12:00 on 12 December 2013

I'm off to read some of those posts as well, Emma! Great questions jawad.