When the reader encounters a new scene, the curtain opens on … what? They don’t know until we tell them, or maybe they never know, depending on how badly we messed up. But we don’t want to bore the pants off them through over-description, either. What’s a writer to do?
The most important thing is to nail down the basics, the things the reader must know before they can absorb the rest of the scene. I have a mental checklist for this.
Oh, and everything I say about scene openings applies to chapter openings, only more so.
“First Things First” Checklist
In the first few sentences of the new scene, establish the following (listed in no particular order):
- Where are we?
- How much time has passed?
- Who’s here?
- What’s going on right now?
- Who’s the viewpoint character? (If your story has only one viewpoint character, you don’t have to do this except in the first chapter.)
- How did we get here?
This doesn’t take much space. For example, “Frank and I went to the library after lunch. As expected, we had it to ourselves.” (I didn’t establish a viewpoint character because the story has only one viewpoint character.)
Everything in the example falls into the “signposting” category. I’ll combine it with mood and artistry and various kinds of flourishes when the opportunity presents itself, but in this case I’ve spent fifteen words setting the scene only.
Establishing the Viewpoint Character
But what if the story has more than one viewpoint character? No problem. Readers are already used to the convention for changing viewpoints (or for demonstrating that we haven’t changed viewpoints): report the character’s name and something only they would know, such as a thought, emotion, or sensation:
“Bill woke up with a pounding headache and a mouth that tasted like old socks.”
Only Bill knows about his headache or the bad taste in his mouth, so he must be the viewpoint character.
That’s really all there is to it.
Technically, you don’t have to wait for a scene break to switch viewpoint characters. A paragraph break will do. But other considerations tend to favor scene breaks for the switch.
Readerology
But there’s more to bringing the reader up to speed on our new scene than the checklist. The checklist is necessary but not sufficient.
This brings us to readerology, a term I just now made up for the study of our readers and how they absorb our stories.
Read more
For some reason, perhaps a hatred of humanity, when people talk about third-person objective (“fly on the wall”) narration, they always lead with Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants. This is a lousy story. It reads more like an exercise, not one of Hemingway’s better efforts at all, so we’ve started off on the wrong foot.