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How to Effectively Write Them

Ever wondered how smooth your scene changes are? When writing fiction longer than one scene, it is important to change scenes smoothly — otherwise you may lose your reader. While this article focuses mainly on scene changes in novels, the same advice applies to scene changes within a short story.

Chapters offer a natural scene break, but how do you handle changing scenes within a chapter; for example when you move from the house to the stable, or from the storm swept beach to the small village? What about switching POVs within a chapter? If you want to learn how to make effective scene changes, read on.

Transitions

Transitions are words and phrases that serve as bridges from one scene to the next. Transitional words provide bridges from one sentence to the next. Good transitional phrases seamlessly guide your reader from one scene to another.

What do transitions do?

Transitions help with the continuity of your story. You wouldn’t want your reader to become disoriented in the middle of your chapter, would you? If your reader needs to go back to the beginning of your chapter to understand what is happening, that could be an indication of poor transitioning techniques.

Fast changing scenes, without the appropriate use of transition, can result in your readers feeling jolted or confused and wondering what happened to the story line they were following.

Transitions connect your story and your characters. Readers know that even though you may move on to another character, or change locations in your story, you will come back. You won’t leave characters standing alone in the middle of a room on a stormy night, and never come back to tell what happened to them. They encourage your readers to have faith in you as a storyteller.

Chances are that your novel covers a span in time. You don’t show every action of every character, otherwise your book would be boring and monotonous in parts. As a writer you manipulate time and move your characters and events to new places. Transitions help you do this.

Your responsibility to your reader

Transitions don’t magically appear in your writing, or seldom do. This is the part that you, the author, have to do. Go through your book chapter by chapter, scene by scene, and determine if each scene change is smooth and clearly indicated.

Just as you strive to use proper punctuation, spelling and follow the rules of grammar, you should aim for clear scene changes. Your story might be great, plot well developed and tight, and your characters may have depth. But, if your story is poorly punctuated, words are misspelled and scene transitions are missing, you’ll lose your reader.

Setting the Scene

How can you make one scene flow into another, while still making it clear there’s been a scene change? One tip many writers use is to first describe the environment of the new scene, usually with the character in it, all in the first paragraph.

Bob Mayer (author and writing instructor) described one technique for doing this during a now no longer available Cruise and Mayer online writing workshop:

One other technique I recommend is called “set,” short for “set
the scene.” When you start a new chapter or change perspective, you have to quickly (in first two paragraphs usually) orient the reader as to:

-Where is the locale?

-When in the timeline is this, with relation to the previous
scene?

-What is the point of view, and if it is a character’s, which character?

-Who is here?

Answering those questions “sets” the scene.”

You can also separate scenes by narrative; a character’s thoughts on the previous scene, or thoughts to introduce the new scene.

Visually Dividing Scenes

Another idea is to use a visual divider when changing scenes . This is used for more abrupt scene changes such as when you transfer from one POV to another.

The standard way to mark a scene break in your manuscript is with one #. Of course you don’t notice scene changes marked that way in most published novels because the hash sign is not a mark for readers, but for editors or layout people. You use it in your manuscript to tell the editor that there’s a scene change. They then add a fancy graphic break, or include more white space.

Scene Transition — Does it Work?

A simple test as to if you have been successful in your transition between scenes is to have someone read the section in question and formulate a plot summary for that scene or chapter. If the summary includes all the elements in the series of connected scenes, then your transitions went well. If some parts of the summary are a blur, and your reader had to refer to the beginning of the chapter, or reread another earlier scene, this may mean you need to work more on your use of transition. You need to either use more transitional techniques. Or perhaps a particular scene change calls for a visual break.

In future articles I will discuss in more details transitional functions; and how you can vary the way you use transitions.

Writing Tips: Scene Changes Part 2
Writing Tips: Scene Changes Part 3