Linking Scenes

You know, those scenes that join the action between two relatively major locations, where the character is walking/riding/driving, those are quite challenging to make engaging.   Often it's useful to skip them with chapter breaks, but sometimes that can't be done because of their placement in the narrative.   And it would look very artificial to skip over them entirely every time you run into one.   So what I find myself doing is diving into the character's mind, whoever's point of view has been taken, we see their thoughts on the page, as they considering where they're going and how they got there.   This lets you connect with the emotions of the character, true, but I'm also running the risk of disengaging from the current series of events.

I say all of this now because one of these in-between scenes has been next up in Songlord for a few days now.   It links together two quite action-heavy sequences, which makes personal reflection even more of a strenuous step for the reader.   It's natural for the characters involved to have fierce emotional responses, but not necessarily to carefully reflect over them.   Tomorrow, always a great prospect.   Tomorrow I'm going to write that scene, piecing together what I've written already with a couple of other scenes that I'm eagerly anticipating.

This issue of connecting scenes was less prevalent in my previous novel, Kosmos.   (*Minor story details for Kosmos to follow*)   In Kosmos, the characters could transport themselves from one place to another with a thought, dragging parties in their wake and easily linking together any scenery of setting I wanted.   Very convenient, but reflecting myself it makes the story feel somewhat disjointed.   I rush from one crux of the story to the other, without taking the time to fill in the necessary character building for the ancillaries.   That's something that can definitely be solved in a further draft, since the lack of detail isn't a lack of vision, there are already backstories for these people that I've come up with and drive their decisions, but it turned out to be quite difficult to impart that information to the reader without it feeling like a simple info dump.   To be improved, most certainly.

So, in the end, this has been quite a circular point.   The linking scenes are difficult to write, and I worry that they pull too much away from the crux of the issues being dealt with in their surrounding chapters/paragraphs, but missing them out is clearly a mistake.   If I come up with any magic ways around the quandary, I'll let you know.