illustrate James’s bad temper and violence. Had I written a scene between a calm, polite, happy couple, and suddenly, by sheer accident, the man spilled water because I later needed it as a signpost, that would have been artificial.
Transitions
A difficult problem that one usually does not think of until one comes up against it is how to take the action from one point to another—for instance, how to take a person out of a room and down to the street, or have him cross a room to pick up something on the other side. On the stage, those small movements are taken care of unobtrusively by the director, who has to plan them so that they are unobtrusive. In a novel, they are the writer’s responsibility.
When you write a scene, you must preserve the reality of the setting. For instance, you have said that the heroine is by the fireplace to the left of the room and that some document is on a table to the right, and now she has to cross the room and seize the document. If you do not mention that she walks across the room, the reader will notice an inconsistency in the scene. But to mention it might be a bad interruption.
When you do not want to interrupt a scene with a technical reminder like that, “think outside the square.” Do not limit yourself to the dry assignment of saying, like a stage direction: “She crosses to the table.” Instead of saying “She rushed across the room and seized the document,” say something like “Her dress swished with the speed of her steps as she rushed across the room and seized the document.” Then the purpose of the sentence appears to be the description of the movement, which might tie in with the emotional violence of the scene (or whatever the mood is). But you have covered the point of taking the heroine to the other side.
In other words, when you need a “stage indication,” always tie it to some element of the scene—any element other than the dry factual reminder. As with exposition, you bring in a transition when your focus is on something else pertaining to the scene.
Suppose you finish a scene played in a house and you have to take the heroine outside. You need to give the reader some sense of transition, but you do not want to describe the heroine going down the stairs. So start the next paragraph with “The street looked lonely and deserted as she emerged from the house.”
The following is an example from the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged. Dagny, who has fallen asleep on a train, awakens and asks a passenger: “How long have we been standing?” Then:
“The man looked after her, sleepily astonished, because she leaped to her feet and rushed to the door.
“There was a cold wind outside, and an empty stretch of land under an empty sky. She heard weeds rustling in the darkness. Far ahead, she saw the figures of men standing by the engine—and above them, hanging detached in the sky, the red light of a signal.”
She is out already. I did not cover the technicalities of her opening the door and rushing down the steps; I switched viewpoint.
Do not say: “Six months later.” Instead, present your characters swimming at the beach, and at the beginning of the next scene, say: “It was snowing heavily.”
There are other such devices, but the principle is always: Don’t let your seams show. You cover the seams by connecting them to some other pertinent aspect of the scene. Do not, however, make your transitions so indirect that the result is awkward and forced. Then the seams will show more than ever.
Metaphors
The purpose of metaphors, or comparisons, is epistemological. If I describe a spread of snow and I say, “The snow was white like sugar,” the comparison conveys a sensory focus on the whiteness of the snow. It is more colorful than merely saying “The snow was white.” If I describe sugar, I can do it in reverse: “The sugar in the bowl was white like snow.” This conveys a better impression of the sugar than if I merely said: “The sugar was white.”
The operative principle here is that of abstraction. If you describe only one object, in concrete terms, it is difficult to convey a sensuous impression: you tell about the object, but you do not show it. The introduction of another concrete with the same attribute makes the two together give a