Bridging key scenes

I write almost exclusively in first-person (I suspect this fact may be relevant) and would like to know if anyone else struggles with this to the extent I do. I'm convinced it's the reason I've never finished a novel and is more often than not the moment when I begin to lose interest in the story and give up. I'm talking, as my thread title suggests, about linking key scenes.

How is this done while still keeping the readers' interest? For me, it seems so unnatural to have my characters go straight from one key event to the next that I just can't do it. I like to write believable stuff and constantly find myself wanting to take my foot off the gas pedal (as opposed to the common advice of 'keep it on') because to me that's more like real life. And I know that's possibly where my problem lies (wasn't it Hitchcock who was said 'A novel is like life with all the boring bits taken out'), but even if this is good advice why then do I never get the sense that the novels I read are doing this? When I read a (good) novel, the pacing, flow and turn of events all seem natural, and yet I can't see what they're doing to achieve this.

What is the definition of good bridging? What should it do? And how is it done?

 

Thanks, chaps.

@Homer Potvin - it's funny, but your reasons for not writing in FP are precisely the reasons I do. Not because it saps tension, of course - a good writer can avoid that, even in FP - but because I prefer all the internal stuff. As a way of 'telling a story', FP just seems like the natural choice to me, but that's a subject for a different discussion. And you're right, I am still struggling with that thing called plot.

It's not that I can't write 'downtime', in fact I could right mundane crap page after page but no one wants that, it's that I don't know how to keep things moving forward during these times.

Which brings me neatly on to @big soft moose. This is what I've tried to do in the past, but I quickly begin to doubt I'm being any of these things (interesting/amusing/poignant).

As I said in a recent status update, maybe the real problem is that I'm a planner in a panster's body. Most of my novels grind to a halt when my characters begin to get bored and don't know what to do next. Of course my characters get bored and don't know what to do next because in truth it's ME who gets bored and doesn't know what to do next. And all because I've been making up the story as I go along.

Even when I have a rough B,M & E, like during my last attempt, I still get lost and bored with the events, long LONG before my word-count target is even close. I underwrite, but I can't over-write to compensate. It's like I don't have the tools to be a writer and it's as frustrating as hell!

Anyway, thanks again for the advise

 

Yes, I really need to try and conquer my fear of third-person for this reason alone, but I have so many issues with it.

 

Those issues sound like they're worth a thread of their own.

But for your main issue: Are you refusing to allow yourself to write scenes without also writing the "glue" between them? Could you allow yourself to write all the major scenes and worry about the glue later?

 

I agree with @ChickenFreak in the above post. Get your main scenes written and figure out later on what you need to do to 'glue' them together. It can be as simple as starting a chapter with, "When Thanksgiving Day finally came, Jane...." Or, "For the past three months, Jane had managed to keep her nose out of Fred's business, and just let him get on with it. So when Thanksgiving Day finally came and she opened the door to him, she was not expecting...."

Or you might need to write a transitional scene that shows us an important event, but doesn't require a whole chapter. There are all sorts of ways to tackle the issue, and the more you write, the easier it will be to decide what events need the full 'show' treatment, and which time lapses can just be mentioned in passing, or brought up to speed with just a sentence or two.

I did want to add, in relation to what @OurJud said, that a rest or downtime scene doesn't need (and shouldn't be) mundane. Even though there is a slacking off of action, the story should still be moving forward.

Instead of characters banging heads together, you can have a moment where they actually share something fun (which makes their relationship a lot more interesting.) Or one character can spend time thinking about something that has happened, or is about to happen, and his insights can be extremely interesting to follow.

It's a fine dance between allowing a reader to rest a bit, knowing that nothing major is going to change in the next few pages, and allowing the story to stall. Find subtle ways to move the story forward while still allowing the characters to be resting, recuperating, or enjoying themselves before the Next Big Thing happens. These periods can add colour to the story, and deepen the reader's understanding of what the story is about and what they should be paying attention to.

 

@ChickenFreak - in answer to your question, yes, I do refuse to let myself write all the key scenes first. I'm my own worst enemy in so many ways, but I naturally want to write chronologically. In other words I try to write a novel in the order it will be read. The problem I'd have with your method (and I accept and recognise it's a good method) is that I very rarely have all the key scenes laid out before me, because I refuse to plan. I write aimlessly, praying to some magical being that a complete and coherent story will fall out onto the page before me.

And yes, my third-person POV hang-ups could indeed make a thread of their own.

@jannert - I understand that a bridge can be a simple line or paragraph, dismissing a period of time where nothing happened, but this brings me to my other problem, and that is that I already underwrite massively. I've always said that even if I was given a golden, best-selling plot by a professional writer, I could still tell the story in less than 20,000 words.

 

I, too, refuse to plan, but I'm not writing chronologically. What I'm doing with the Highly Flavored Novel is writing the scenes that I want to write, the highly flavored ones that make me say, "Ooh! What if that happened?"

And apparently the magical being stopped by, because several of those scenes pointed to a somewhat coherent plotline up to the middle of the book. (While several others went in the scrap bucket and may or many not ever get used.) That gave me a vague guideline as to what other Highly Flavored Scenes might be useful, and the patchwork is starting to come together--again, up to that halfway point. I have only vague notions of what comes after.

So based purely from my experience, I'd say just write scenes and keep writing scenes. But I'm me, so there's no assurance that my method will work for you.

 

Well it's got to be worth a try - nothing else works for me. Thanks.

 

I should add that in addition to highly flavored, I pushed through the censor to write the scenes that made me think, "Ergh. It would be SO embarrassing if anyone I knew actually read this." I no longer remember what I found embarrassing about those scenes; I have a pretty nervous censor. Which probably means that pushing-through was worthwhile.

 

Do you mean you no longer remember because they're gone, or because they don't sound embarrassing now?

 

Sorry--because they no longer sound embarrassing.

 

I've got the opposite problem. I never shut up. Happy medium would be great, wouldn't it?