...Without coming off as lazy? I know this is a question I've posed many times in the past, but it's still something I haven't figured out yet - as in, how to make it work well for my purposes. In my current story, I did have a time skip of five years, but I handled that by having the PoV character (it's written in 1st person) summarize how things changed during that time. No problem there as far as I'm concerned. What I've been struggling with are time skips of days or even hours in the current setting. The main character has been going through training for her new role, which is a lot of tedious meditation, studying, and other stuff that's no longer important to the story (it was important when she was first starting it). So now that it's just another normal part of her day-to-day life, I feel I don't need to include any of it anymore unless if something important does happen during one of those training sessions. Which therefore means that I can skip over them and focus only on the stuff that's still important to the ongoing main plot and any sub-plots. But here's the thing: I can't figure out a way to skip over these unimportant bits without it coming off as lazy. I don't want to document everything going on each day, that's for sure, but I don't want to do time skips that either briefly summarize such unimportant stuff or that go "blah blah time passed..." or "the next day..." because that still comes off as super lazy to me. How can I make it NOT seem lazy?
It's not lazy. It's your job as an author to select the events that are interesting to your reader and relevant to your story, and present only those events, in a smooth narrative. Doing that is hard, complex work. It's the failure to do that that would be lazy.
I'm just having a problem with my brain telling me: "If you skip something because it's 'boring', then you are being lazy. Time skips are for lazy people". I'm not sure how to handle that.
You could grab a few books and read them, making a point of noticing all the time skips. Or watch some TV. In that cop show, do they show the cop going home from the crime scene, eating some pizza, brushing his teeth, going to bed, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, getting up to use the bathroom, getting back in bed, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, getting up, using the bathroom again, shaving, showering, getting in his car....? They don't even do a rapid-montage of that, right? They just end the last interesting scene, and then it's the next morning, or even weeks later in the courtroom. You're demanding, of yourself, something that NO form of fiction ever does, and something that it shouldn't do. Can you clarify a little more why you think you should do it?
The easiest way that I've found to do this is to broadly go over what the character's been doing for that period of time. For example: The trek through Antarctica was cold and treacherous. Joe had to stop on multiple occasions, sometimes for days at a time, just to warm his frozen bones. Finally, after a month of suffering, he had arrived in Anchorage.
For some weird reason, when writing this specific story, I feel that if I completely omit everything that's not in any way interesting, it'll just be jumping from one dramatic bit to the next with no rest, effectively making important things occur too quickly. I don't know. I can't explain it. It's only an issue with this story for some weird reason.
Maybe the issue, then, is that the story needs some interesting but slower/less dramatic bits? Not that skipping is wrong but that sometimes you could deliberately skip to a slow moment and treat that moment with all the interest and respect that you do a more dramatic moment?
That kind of summary worked fine for me when it did the multi-year skip, and when there actually was a trip between one part of the country to another. But I feel I've been doing that kind of summarization too much for the inconsequential moments lately. I even feel that saying something along the lines of "nothing interesting happened for the rest of the day" is lame as all hell and stupid. But what else am I supposed to do?
You don't need to summarize. Just cut. (scene scene scene in the classroom) "(bad news)," said Jane. Anna covered her face with her hands. Hopeless. It was hopeless. **** The next day, Anna felt better about it all. The day was sunny, the breakfast special involved hollandaise, and the dorm cat had chosen her, of all people, for a friendly ankle-rubbing. Anna still had no solution, but she felt renewed confidence that one would present itself. (scene scene scene at the breakfast table)
Not bad! One month on foot with stopovers from Antarctica to Anchorage! As far as my method of skipping over time goes, like others who have posted, I just choose an appropriate point and make the leap. It's kind of like starting a completely new story, if the timespan is long enough. I am working on a story about a young man who was adopted. The first segment on the day of his adoption at five years of age ends with him getting into bed, wondering about his future. The next segment begins with him waking up one morning years later at the age of twelve.
Another aspect of this: I just write scenes. I let the question of the “glue” between scenes wait for later.
