My story focuses on a man's early life and how those events have repercussions at the end of his life. The plot structure goes back and forth between the two periods, alternating chapter by chapter. I need to cover the man's middle years when nothing of note happens, or is supposed to happen. Does anybody have any good ideas or examples of how this can be done. It always struck me as feeling odd after settling into one pace and structure to suddenly have a "and then winter became spring, and spring became summer..." and suddenly 30 years is condensed into one paragraph.
Since you are doing it on a chapter by chapter, you could make the leap in time by noting the years at some points to explain away the massive time gap. Usually I would just say use a time/space jump (***) to show that things have progressed in time or place, but not between time periods. So your best bet is to note the passage of time by years or dates. Though you will have a lot of readers asking why the time jump was so massive, and want to know what happened in that missing time. Unless you can explain it away so that it doesn't sound like it was just a random jump, and the guy was in a coma or something. But if you must turn 30yrs into a cliff note, then it should be at the end of a chapter or the beginning of one. Followed by a time/space marker spacing it from the rest of the story. I would say at the beginning of a chapter, so it is not confusing in chapter transitions.
I think the condensed time in a paragraph tool may be awkward, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternatives. (My first novel I didn't really understand how to skip over unimportant events and it got quite unwieldy as a result). But if you're making the shift at chapter breaks, I don't think it should be too tricky - you can start each chapter with a date, you can refer to deterioration of the character's body or growth and maturation of other characters, etc.
I agree...I think if you're going for a massive jump like that, it must be in a new chapter. Perhaps start the new chapter by having the older MC reflecting on the events we just read the younger MC going through. That would show how his mind and perspectives had changed, therefore showing us time passing. For example, say we just finished a chapter where young MC was at the funeral of his mother. Begin the next chapter with MC reminiscing about that day, focusing on the good times he had with his mother instead of his grief, thinking about how he handled that day as a young man, etc.