Dear Ally, How Do You Write a Book by Ally Carter

Author:Ally Carter [Carter, Ally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2019-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

What’s the best writing advice you ever got?

David Levithan In college, someone told me, “You could never expect Mark Twain to write like Jane Austen.” The point being, they’re both great, but in their own way. So you can find your own way to be great.

Wanna know a secret? Transitions are probably my least favorite thing to write. I hate them! I have no idea why it’s so much harder to write the sentence that starts a scene than it is to write the entire scene sometimes. But it is.

So how do you do it? Well, I think a lot depends on the two scenes you’re trying to transition between. And I think the key might lie in why the two scenes were split in the first place.

Is it because a great deal of time has passed between the two scenes? Then the passing of that time—showing the reader how much it is and what all has changed—is a good approach. For example, if you’re going from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, it can be as simple as “The next morning, XYZ character was …” Seriously. They don’t always have to be fancy or poignant. Sometimes they just need to get the job done.

Are you splitting up two scenes because you’re going from one POV character to another? Then your transition should probably show that, both to signal to the reader that we’re now in someone else’s head, and also because, presumably, that jump was important. For some reason, you needed to know what that other character was thinking or feeling, so get right to those thoughts and feelings when possible.

Maybe you’re going from one scene/chapter to the next because something super big just happened, marking the end of one moment and the beginning of a very different kind of moment (taking place just seconds apart). For example, if you’ve got a scene with your hero and heroine making cupcakes and then a dragon busts through the wall—well, I’d say the dragon is probably a great place to start the next scene. (You’ll notice this is all closely tied to the earlier question about when to include a chapter break.)

Transitions need to show a lot of things: whose POV we’re in (when writing in third person or multiple first person), where we are, how much time has passed. They can also be really funny sometimes. For example, when you end a scene with We’ll be fine as long as it doesn’t rain! and then you open the next scene with It only rained nine inches.

Sometimes a transition is a great opportunity to sprinkle in some backstory.

Imagine the scene that ends with a dragon bursting through the wall. Maybe you start the next scene with something like When Chloe was six, she wanted a lizard for a pet. When she was seven, she asked for a reptile cage. And for her tenth birthday, she’d begged and pleaded with her mother, arguing that she was now mature enough to handle a much larger animal.

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