Of course some voices and stories make it easier than others to come up with an opening line which establishes us securely and sounds completely natural. "Instead of you handing your project in to the headmaster Mr Arnold, Tom Brown, I'm going to make sure that the fire in this dustbin burns up every page," said Flashman, touching the flame of his lighter to the other corner of the folder. In the effort to make sure the reader isn't baffled, it's horribly easy to end up starting a new scene like this, but please don't: You're having to start the story-engine up again from zero, each time, including establishing us in the new situation and cast, and maybe having to fill in later the one relevant thing which happened in between*. The disadvantages are more subtle, but that deliberately muddled effort illustrates them. "And if Mulder or I hear so much as a whisper through the staff room window that that little shit Tom Brown has been saying anything different, Scully will break your legs." "You're going to tell Mr Arnold that you didn't do your project because you forgot," said Flashman, putting his lighter back in his pocket. I'll find some other way, and I'll make sure every single member of the Rotary Club knows I did it on my own!" And then I'll do Physics, and if you won't pay, you won't pay. "My Mars project is going to be the best ever and get me an A.
Peaceful, almost, but a white-hot sort of peaceful. I'm not paying out for years for you to indulge some stupid David Bowie fantasy of twinkly stars," said his father, turning his back and putting on his gumboots to go and lock up the pigeon loft. But how do you go from one to the other? The jump-cut is simple: For the first time in his life, Tom fights back, refusing to do what his father wants either now or at university, and the next important scene shows Tom persuading the Head to back him against his father. Imagine an important scene: a set-to between Tom Brown, who wants to do his A Level Maths project on the mathematics of the Mars probe, and his father, who tells him to do it on the mathematics of banking because that's what he will be studying at university. It's fast, it's dramatic, and we're increasingly adept at reading narratives constructed in this way, because it's how movies work, since they can't narrate, only juxtapose. We can, literally perhaps, cut to the beginning of the chase. And the reader doesn't waste time reading that stuff. The advantages are obvious: the writer doesn't have to imagine any of the minor, unimportant intervening stuff which must actually have happened, which advances the mechanics of the plot, but does nothing for the story of character-in-action and change. The jump-cut does what it says on the tin: the narrative stops dead at the end of the previous scene, leaves a double-line space in which the reader teleports instantly through time and/or space, and then drops us straight into the beginning of the next scene. (If you're not sure how you'd define a scene in prose narrative (as opposed to a play), click here.) Fiction and time are related in complicated ways, as I explored here, and the real time of the story is affected by what I've called the storytelling time it helps to think of the two possibilities as the jump-cut, and the narrated slide. It's taken a while to get to this, but it's such a good question - which is only to be expected from Sophie Beal, whose blogpost Dark Matter, Dark Glass and Anne Tyler was Highly Commended in the Postiversary Competition. My writing gets quite clumsy at this point as I try to avoid 'It was Saturday and we were sitting in the kitchen.' How about scene changes, especially getting the prose right while establishing time and place. Dear Emma, I saw in your twitter feed that you're looking for blog ideas.
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