For all the fantasy writers here, what do you write for when your characters have to travel from one point to another? Or if you skip those parts, how do you transition from one point in time to another? Asking cause I'm having a lot of trouble doing it at the moment.
If your characters are going to be traveling for a while, you can have transition scenes that control the pacing while developing the characters. Talking on the road, having characters discuss minor challenges they'll face while traveling but which aren't plot-relevant enough to actually write, so on. You could also have one chapter end with the characters getting on a boat, and the next chapter begin with characters getting off the boat, and someone saying "Wow, a month on that boat did not do wonders for my nausea".
I'd write about packing gear (of things they need to bring to the destination), rationing supplies (of food, water, light, weapons), pulling security in the black of night (to protect against highwaymen and fauna), and the injuries they incur during their travel (of foot blisters, infections, sprained joints). The journey is interesting in and of itself.
I tend to skip them, moving from one important scene to the next. Drawn-out description of traveling has been done so often in fantasy I rarely see an author bring anything fresh to it.
So plot-wise you want a character elsewhere? What else are you trying to achieve, particularly with regards to pacing? If you want to slow the pace down, then an extended description would do that. If you want to show off your world, describe it. If you want to give further depth to your characters, have that come out during the travelling. And if you want to get on with the story, cover the journey in an sentence or two.
I know it's gross.....but why doesn't anyone ever talk about the problems of waste disposal? You know, urine and feces? Heck, somewhere else in the setting forum, someone mentioned that feces was worth it's weight in gold as fertilizer. What about the issues with women and their periods? Other than the movie "Pitch Black" where Vin Diesel's character refers to the fact the girl who was disguised as a boy was having her period and he could smell the blood, this has *NEVER* been done to my knowledge. It would seem like it could be scary to be moving around in the wilds if you're bleeding and there are animals that hunt by scent. What do the female characters do? Moss pads? Something else? Anyways.....it may not be what you were looking for, but something to think about.
I'd have dialogue scenes whilst they ride on horseback and scenes when they set up camp at night are good too.
Just dig a hole and fill it back up. You're not going to be lugging around a farm, so it wouldn't make sense to save it for fertilizer.
A) Are your readers going to be interested in the journey itself? Does anything important plot-wise or character development-wise happen? If not, skip it. B) Are readers REALLY going to want to read about characters taking a shit? While it might be interesting to a small subset of readers with very specific interests, most probably wouldn't care to read about it. I know I wouldn't.
... then in the blackest moments of the wind-swept night, his patrol was interrupted by a rumble, then a grumble. His eyed popped open, his face scrunched up, then birthed the most pants-splittingest, rip-roaringest tear of water diarrhea ever known to, and ever to be known to this neck of the woods. The stench that filled the glen that night was recorded as one of the most significant events of the post-collapse dark age, for then descended upon them, drawn by the resounding resonance of the raunchy roar, the ... ... forced to grab only what they could carry in hand, they fled to the boat moored to the outcropping of fallen concrete and pushed off into the sullenly flowing stream. The river wasn't the only river to flow that night. "Anyone happen to grab any new underpants?" asked George, first staring longingly at the campsite fading into the distance, their weapons, their food - - and his spare set of underwear, then to his soiled jeans and underwear floating stubbornly close to the boat. It was only then that he realized they had left behind the MacGuffin they were meant to take to the MacGuffin receptacle to end this nightmare. "Oh, crap..." He mutters before turning to the group, face as white as his underwear previously had been.
This assumes you can bury it - the ground isn't rocky or frozen and you have a digging tool. Usually when I have read these situations, people toss it into a nearby river or lake - "out of sight, out of mind" - which is probably not the best for the environment but one travelling party of 8 people would probably not have that much impact.....a hundred or more would be different. I'm not really referring to talking about it in extreme detail that goes on for pages and pages but more a sentence here and there about someone ducking behind a tree to piss or finding a private spot to squat. It has always seemed like a pretty basic thing to overlook. Doesn't EVERYONE poop and piss? If it is actually mentioned in a book, it's usually related to their animals - and even that is extremely rare. (Or the individual is ill and unable to poop or piss.) I am only referring to the logistics challenges of waste disposal when travelling. The rest of the time, I can assume people have houses or shit pits somewhere. I haven't really followed the series but there is a writer in the fantasy realm who has humans and horses having a type of telepathic bond.....Katherine Kurtz? Mercedes Lackey? Someone else...?? Anyways, the stories I remember, none of the humans or people ever had to deal with the issues of poop and piss. To me, with environmental awareness nowadays I am really surprised this has never been touched on. It can't take much to dig a hole or to dump your waste in the local stream and have the indigenous population show up with weapons and try to murder you for spoiling the pristine wilderness. Even the people in towns, surely there's conflict where people choose to piss? "Hey!! That's MY vegetable garden!! What the BEEP do you think you're doing?!"
Wash a lot, I suspect. Cloths to soak up the discharge while walking. One of the many issues with our history being written by men is that they didn't address these things; didn't record it beyond references to "woman stuff".
depending on the time period (no pun intended), hygiene was a major issue for both men and women. most wore thick swaths of cotton cloths that were pinned to their undergarments that had to be washed frequently. Indigenous women across various continents have survived the wilds while menstruating for centuries. No biggy. But honestly, if this is an issue in your story, look up the history of sanitary pads.
If nothing interesting happens much during the walk, I would cut to when something interesting is about to happen, and recap the missed days just before it does. "Two days we walked before we reached the forest, on our walk we noticed that the world around us seemed to be changing much faster than it should have had..." there no more than a medium sized paragraph of said changes, defs not two days worth of talking.
I agree. Adding a bit of connective tissue, a line or two about the passage of time that sets up an event would be a good way of going about it. "The hours passed as the miles did; long, flat, and dull. The group had been silent for a while now, and the tedium was starting to play on George's paranoia. For the past half an hour or so, he had that feeling of needles pricking his back, the way they do when you just know that someone is watching you. It wasn't until one of the others spoke up that he realized that feeling wasn't just his mind playing tricks on him. The twang of a crossbow string reverberates through the cavernous ruins. George has only enough time to reel around before the bolt whizzes by, right where his head was only half a second earlier. It was then that he wished he hadn't left been forced to abandon his weapons at the campsite by the stream."
Wow.... I just read Joe Abercrombie's "Half a King" and he makes two mentions of pissing in the story. The first is when the group is travelling through the extreme chill and they complain when they have to remove clothing to toilet because it's so cold. The second is when the female navigator excuses herself from the male company to take a piss behind a tree. I was just saying earlier in this thread that I never read those details and Joe A had it in his story.....glad to see someone else agrees with me that this detail can/should be included in some stories. I still feel it adds realism to the story, makes it more "alive."
In my WIP, My 2 main characters are travelling from their home to the citadel. Before they set off their father gives them some directions and tells them the land marks they will encounter. Vale of Leiths Baldin's Burst etc. Now there is a reason why these landmarks are called this and their is a story associated with each one. When my characters reach said landmark, the POV character recalls the history of the place so for example Vale of Leiths was a sight for a big War that was the start for the reasons why they were no longer tribal but lived in a kingdom. Baldins Burst named after one of the demi-Gods and is a hill overlooking the citadel. When they reach here the POV character describes what he sees in terms of the city. You can make a long journey seem interesting, it gives an opportunity to build or introduce your world to the reader without exposition and like others have said brings the story to life. If the character goes from A-B instantaneously without any explanation it just seems a bit contrived and unrealistic. unless of course they transport from one place or another instantaneously because of magic, in which case you still have to describe how they travel otherwise IMO it doesn't work. That being said, it does depend on your story plot... if there is nothing interesting on the journey no interesting landmarks then yes perhaps not worth spending long describing the journey, however, if this is not deliberate then I think your world building needs reimagining but that's just my opinion.
It boils down to personal taste. Think about the trip. Do you want some filler for the story and chose the transition between locations to use as filler. Or perhaps you'd like an event to occur during the transition between locations. In the event that your just doing filler, try looking up actual pictures of what the area would look like. When you find a picture that jumps out at you, describe it in the story. If you're creating an event then landmarks are good enough until the event occurs. If neither of these fit, it is perfectly acceptable to immediately transition to the destination and skip the journey, especially if the journey would be uneventful.
Dennis McKiernan covered this occasionally. Characters rise for the day and 'relieved themselves' quite often. Didn't mention much about disposal. I assumed it was much like camping - dig a hole then cover it before leaving. Even mentioning one of his female protagonist's cycle. She had a sanitary belt made of soft leather and used bits of soft cloth she packed in her gear to absorb menstrual fluids. She would purchase fresh bits of cloth when ever she had the chance. I enjoyed seeing a male author take this in to account. But I feel you...It is something I don't see often.
Writing this, I realize I have a rather strict view on the subject. If you choose to skip, you should explore some other set of events somewhere or sometime else to help the reader feel the passage of time the characters feel. If you don't do this, you should not skip ahead. Instead, you should carefully consider what interesting things might happen during the journey and describe those. I consider The Earthsea Series by Ursula K. Le Guin to be a master class in this regard, as most of the story is about travel. It's heavily influenced by the Icelandic sagas, which also have interesting interludes of travel. I know that's pretty restrictive. I wouldn't put these rules forward as authoritative, but I would abide by them in your position.
Magical teleportation gateways whenever possible. Also very fast airships, etc. Basically I hate wasting time on tedious or irrelevant stuff. If I do have the characters travel anywhere over a longer period of time, it will probably be because something noteworthy or important is going to occur along the way.
Well, as others have said, it depends on what you want to do with the trip. In the story I’m currently rewriting I used a trip plot myself in order to set up the love triangle that appear later in the story since once the wars start the time left for romance would be limited.