I worked on a transitional section tonight, dealing with Galen’s reaction to one event in the story, and how he moves on to the next series of events.
1,056 words, if you’re keeping count. Not the 2k per night I was hoping for, but I really am hoping to fill in some slack this weekend and next weekend.
Transitional sections like tonight’s are tricky beasts. They tend to be either a straight prose exposition, or a conversational exposition. In other words, it’s a lot of explaining in a medium where being mysterious is better.
But you have to show your protagonist making the leap of logic to process weird information, and maybe move onto making some weird conclusions of his own. If you just toss it out there, “Fred decided the best course of action, based on no experience or expectations whatsoever, was to jump off the very tall lighthouse onto the very sharp, jagged rocks.”
You can do something like that, if you can show WHY Fred might decided to do that. Does he expect to live? Is he thinking water will surge in and break his fall? Has someone secretly replaced his coffee with Folger’s crystals?
Telling a weird story is all about selling your audience — and yourself — on choices and courses of action. If an action or decision doesn’t feel true to the character acting or deciding, it will feel like a flashing neon sign. I call it, “story logic” and it’s sort of like when you have a scary movie and the director needs the stupid kids to present themselves to the killer / monster / whatever so the gore can start. You can justify them splitting up or getting separated in a good, reasonable, consistent way, or you can have the intensely stupid one just announce, “I think I’ll go take a shower. Alone. In the monster-infested hotel.”
It’s better to make it real and believable. The best fictions are realty + something. Whatever that “something” may be, it’s the “reality” part that makes your reader empathize and feel the story around them
It’s possible, though, that I’m just punchy. I am pretty tired here.