“Hey, Eddie, can you lend me a few bucks? Tonight can you get us a ride?
Gotta make it through the tunnel, got a meeting with a man on the other side. . .”
—Bruce Springsteen, Meeting Across the River

An interesting topic’s being wrestled into submission on #litchat on Twitter this week (which, in case you don’t know, is a bunch of people sitting around firing opinions about writing literature at each other, hoping Twitter will actually pass them on): transitions.

Lucia Orth quoted Oscar Hijuelos yesterday as saying that sometimes you need to write a transition to find your next scene. “Thus, Hijuelos says, you write the transition even though you may edit it out of a next draft. You may find in a later draft that the transition was simply the bridge you needed.”

Maggie Dana contributed the metaphor of transition as a clamp to hold your story until the glue dries.

And Syd Fields points out in his canonical book Screenplay—which I’ve been studying this summer—that the best place to start a scene is at the end, where all the excitement is.

Remember that readers like to get roughed up.

When I was eleven or twelve I thought it would be absolutely grand if someone wrote the story of my life. I’d be taller, of course, and my bullying older siblings would be—I don’t know—in a zoo somewhere. But other than that it would be basically the truth all about ME.

Would you like to watch an eleven-year-old eat breakfast exactly the same way day after day without making a single important or even unexpected comment? How about watching her walk in and out of her house over and over again as she goes about her daily business? Listen to her bicker with her little sister about the same stupid dolls unfailingly every afternoon? See her mother roll her eyes over the same predictable objection to cleaning the table before supper every single night? Brush her teeth? Blow her nose? Trip over her shoelaces? Constantly?

That’s what everyone’s clamoring to pay $9.99 on Kindle for. You BETCHA.

Now, the truth is my life at the age of eleven and twelve was actually rather riveting. I lived in a 200-year-old hacienda in rural Ecuador without either plumbing or electricity, with my family of six. I got up before dawn every morning and walked a half-mile down a dirt road between adobe walls to a Spanish-language convent school in a miniscule mountain village and came home at lunch time to schoolwork from the Calvert School of Correspondence in Baltimore. I spent my afternoons playing alone in unending agricultural fields, peopled by quiet Ecuadorian peasants plowing with mules and oxen under a fathomless blue sky. Eucalyptus in the distance marked the foot of the snow-covered cone of Chimborazo, the highest mountain on the equator, which dominated our view. Sometimes I was woken at night by the rumbling of the live volcano, Sangai.

Plenty of material there to write about. More, quite honestly, than I can handle.

But a live-blog of my daily activities would not be part of it.

The thing is, you can’t possibly tell the entire story of everything your characters do from the first significant event to the grand finale. That would take as long to read as it would to live, and your readers have lives of their own. They spend a massive amount of time walking in and out of rooms, opening and closing doors, arriving and leaving, going to bed and getting back up again. It’s all periphery stuff!

Transitions are that periphery stuff, all the things your characters have to do to get themselves between those few essential moments in which the elements of your plot occur. Transitions weaken fiction and distract the reader from the actual story. A huge part of first-draft revision is simply going through and removing every single instance of, “She walked into the room. He went over and opened the door. She got up and left. He took off his clothes and went to bed.”

Say you’ve got a scene in a crappy little apartment in urban New Jersey. Your characters have to get from the apartment to New York City where they’re going to rip someone off, and they have to do it in a state of acute anxiety. They’re both bit players, they’ve screwed up in the past, and this is their one chance to either be incredibly cool or suffer the consequences. One of them’s a bumbler, but the other’s got a more level head and knows their only chance of pulling this off is to keep their mouths shut and their eyes open.

What do you say we put them in a ratty old car and drive them over there talking the whole way about how nervous they are, arguing about how to handle it, and remembering how they’ve bungled jobs like this before?

If the main scenes are in the apartment and the city, that scene in the car is a transition. We don’t learn anything about the story that keeps us focused intently upon the upcoming scene in the city that’s going to determine their fates. In fact, it diffuses the clarity of the scenes on either side, in taking reader attention upon itself.

Try this instead: put the characters in the apartment where they’re getting ready for the gig, and the level-headed one spends the whole time admonishing the bumbler on how to behave, all but tucking in their shirt for them, then comments briefly at the end upon a rather poignant fantasy of how they’ll use the money they hope to get to win back a girl.

Then you cut STRAIGHT to the scene in the city and show them blowing it.

If you’re very good and know exactly what you’re doing, you can even leave out the scene in the city.

“Eddie, all we gotta do is hold up our end.
Here, stuff this in your pocket. It’ll look like you’re carrying a friend.
And, remember, just don’t smile. Change your shirt, ’cause tonight we got style—”