JUMPS AND CUTS: RESPONDING TO LIBBY SOMMER
As Libby Sommer writes (in a recent article 'Jump cuts on the page'): 'Transitions are important in fiction because you can’t possibly show or account for every moment in a character’s day, week, or life. A story may stretch over years—readers don’t need to know what happened every minute of those years.' The trick, of course, is how to manage those transitions. If you are writing a fast-paced narrative you can jump from scene to scene (each, as Libby also writes, having 'a beginning, a middle and an end'), but if the story unfolds more slowly other techniques are needed. A place, a mystery, something missing - Libby is opting for the latter in her new manuscript, namely a golden Labrador that goes missing from a park.
Having just completed the 6-week Writers' Studio Character and Critique course I now confront the task of rewriting a manuscript (from an new POV), which involves a contemporary protagonist bringing to light three generations of women artists in the process of solving the problematic provenance of some artworks - some missing, some implicated in a tangled inheritance. The time frames involve the first half 20th century, the 1950w-1970s and the present.
How to weave these stories together into a cohesive narrative is a challenge I embrace but it will be a challenge. To begin with I intend to insert some of trigger in each 'now'chapter to lead me back to the past - be it an image, a phrase, an incident.
Here goes!