transitions, blech

[swan_tower]

There are certain kinds of transition scenes I detest writing. One of them is the “holy shit, the supernatural is real!” scene common to so much urban fantasy; it was a source of great pleasure to me that I could more or less skip that scene in Midnight Never Come, on the grounds that the reaction of a sixteenth-century gentleman would not so much be “there are faeries under London?” as “there are faeries under London?” (You’ll note that nearly every pov character for the remainder of the Onyx Court series already knew about the fae by the time they showed up in the story. This was not deliberate, in the sense of being a thing I consciously decided to do . . . but I wouldn’t call it an accident, either. The sole exception that leaps to mind is Jack Ellin, and I had more than enough going on in the story to divert him, and me, while that transition happened.) It’s boring to me because the audience already knows the supernatural is real (or at the very least has no reason to be surprised by this fact), and we’ve seen that conversation so many times, making it fresh is really difficult. Your main hope is to undermine it in some fashion, like the time on Buffy when they told Oz vampires and demons were real. “I know it’s a lot to take in –” “Actually, that explains a lot.”

I’m dealing with a similar kind of thing in the fifth Memoir right now. The scene isn’t about the supernatural being real; it’s a different kind of transition, one I don’t really have a name for. And of course I can’t get into specifics, but it’s one of those deals where something very complicated is going on, only the complication is of a type that doesn’t actually make for great narrative. After the initial drama of the moment is over, there’s a lot of explaining that needs to happen, and a lot of very tedious suspicion that can’t be laid to rest with the right words or a single decisive action. Inside the story, the whole thing is going to drag on for days — probably for weeks. Making the reader sit through all of that would be dire, starting with the fact that I would have to write all of that.

It’s at moments like these when I love the retrospective, consciously-framed first person viewpoint of this series. Because I can 100% get away with Isabella saying “what followed was very tedious and dragged on for weeks, because there was nothing I could do that would resolve it with a single decisive action. But X, Y, and Z got settled — not without a great deal of wrangling and suspicion, but settled all the same, and now let’s move on to the next interesting bit.” Any viewpoint can skip over things, but this one gives me greater latitude to summarize what I’m skipping, without making it seem like the elided material is simple to deal with in real life. Isabella can acknowledge all the complications without getting bogged down in them.

I had no idea, when I started writing this series, all the advantages that would come with framing the entire thing as a series of memoirs. It just seemed like a period- and subject-appropriate way to approach the whole thing. But my god . . . it’s probably the best craft decision I’ve made all series long.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[dhampyresa]

“there are faeries under London?” as “there are faeries under London?”

Seems reasonable.

[reedrover]

Thank you for sharing the insight!

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I'd think there could be some potential in showing how characters react to the revelation, especially if there are multiple ones. A couple of examples:

In the anime version of Twelve Kingdoms, a couple of schoolmates are present when Youko is basically abducted into portal fantasy. One of them is sort of inadvertently abducted by Youko in turn ("make sure my friends are safe!") but the other is a fantasy reader herself who's Jumping At The Call (except no one's actually Calling her.) It's an interesting contrast: the protagonist is a normal "oh god what is this shit get me out of here person" while the antagonist is more like the people watching the series...

Also in 12K, the future En-ou, from 1500s Japan, seemed to have amusingly no reaction at all to anything, not even a flat What. "Some orphan kid is offering me a new kingdom? Sure, I'll say yes. Oh look, his hair just turned yellow. Whatever." I was sad we didn't see him learning about the accompanying medical benefits.

(Because if there's one transition I'm really sick of, it's "oh no, I'm blessed with eternal youth and health, how horrible".)

In "Roswell", you had these human-like alien kids who'd been raised by human families, and then the human "it was my diary, well my journal, because journals are what scientists call their diaries" Liz. As stuff got weird, I kind of wanted the aliens to be reluctant to leave their families, and have Liz be the one jumping at a chance to go to another world. But it didn't go there. And I guess there was some more traditional transition earlier, as Liz learned about the alien powers.