Writers are so conscientious. We're always trying to help our characters out. This is especially true of writers new to fiction, who hate to make their protagonist move from Scene 1 to Scene 2 without giving them a lift. Take the fictional Sharlaine. In Scene 1, she’s having dinner with her mother. At the end of a long, awkward dinner, Sharlaine’s mother confesses: "'I never told you this. But Keith Hernandez is your real father!’" That seems like a dramatic stopping point, doesn’t it? But you’d be surprised how many writers keep on going with logistics: "After dinner with her mother, Sharlaine drove the shimmering streets of Los Angeles, wondering how she would tell baseball legend Keith Hernandez that he was her father. But she had an idea. Picking up her cell phone, she made a reservation on Southwest Airlines for the first flight out of LAX the next morning, heading to New York." Looking at it, you might even be thinking: "What's wrong with that? It explains her thought process and what Sharlaine is going to do next." And there you are, being conscientious again. If you’re willing to let the scene end with the dramatic revelation, how much more surprising and intriguing when we find Sharlaine, at the beginning of the next scene, on her way to New York.
Driving your character to the airport isn't restricted to filling in all the interstitial details between one scene and the next. Often, writers feel the need to explain where all the characters are positioned in space, especially when they are entering a scene or shifting focus to another character in the scene: "Sharlaine stood to the left of the doorway while Jerry, standing by his bedside table, fished through his desk drawer for Keith's number." Unless you're tackling a scene like the assassination of JFK, in which each person's position is going to be critical to understanding what has happened, you can clear out all of that extraneous detail: Jerry fished through his drawer for Keith’s number.” Stage direction like that is often a vestige of your own thought process but, like penciled in notes, they should be erased in your final version of a scene. Think of your narrative as a camera's lens. If you focus on every single thing in a scene, we don't know which things are important AND we quickly become bored. Save your eye for the things that matter, whether to advance the plot or develop the character or symbolism, and let the rest of it fall to the editing room floor. Trust your reader and trust your own storytelling ability and stop driving those characters to the airport!
Driving your character to the airport isn't restricted to filling in all the interstitial details between one scene and the next. Often, writers feel the need to explain where all the characters are positioned in space, especially when they are entering a scene or shifting focus to another character in the scene: "Sharlaine stood to the left of the doorway while Jerry, standing by his bedside table, fished through his desk drawer for Keith's number." Unless you're tackling a scene like the assassination of JFK, in which each person's position is going to be critical to understanding what has happened, you can clear out all of that extraneous detail: Jerry fished through his drawer for Keith’s number.” Stage direction like that is often a vestige of your own thought process but, like penciled in notes, they should be erased in your final version of a scene. Think of your narrative as a camera's lens. If you focus on every single thing in a scene, we don't know which things are important AND we quickly become bored. Save your eye for the things that matter, whether to advance the plot or develop the character or symbolism, and let the rest of it fall to the editing room floor. Trust your reader and trust your own storytelling ability and stop driving those characters to the airport!
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