Hello, writers. Years ago, I read a quote by some famous writer or other saying that he (if it’s quoted, it’s usually a he) always found it excruciatingly difficult to get a character across the room and out the door.
It was probably an exaggeration. Most writers learn pretty quickly to deal with this sort of housekeeping. You either skip the movement entirely, and show the character already outside the room; or you make it part of the story’s forward motion, eg:
“Same to you,” he called over his shoulder.
or
“Same to you!” And she slammed the door behind her.
or
He took one look and fled.
Essentially, you only need to show an everyday sort of movement insofar as it affects the story.
What if it’s not an everyday movement? What if it’s, say, falling off a cliff? The other day I ran across the following decription of that particular movement:
He fell off the cliff.
This would be all right for a police report, I suppose (just change “he” to “subject”). But it doesn’t work for fiction. It does nothing to put us in the moment. It gives us nothing to react to.
My characters have a tendency to fall off cliffs, so I’ve gotten some practice in this. The description is going to vary according to whether it’s the point of view character falling off the cliff, or the point of view character watching someone fall. If the latter, of course, it will matter how s/he feels about the person who fell off the cliff.
If the former, it depends whether s/he fell unexpectedly, whether s/he saw the cliff before s/he fell, tried to prevent the fall, jumped… and so forth.
I’m rather attached to how Jinx falls off his first cliff. He’s fighting the Bonemaster, and he takes a big step backward...
A big step backward onto nothing.
End of chapter. Can’t say it ended on a cliffhanger, but good enough.
His next cliff is one he sees coming as he slides down the ice toward it, desperately tries to avoid it, uses magic, clings to the side, uses more magic… etc etc. A couple of hopefully suspenseful pages; when you see the cliff coming, you can milk it.
In the manuscript I’m working on now, the protagonist watches her favorite person fall over a cliff. So the focus is on the protagonist’s emotions: horror, grief, disbelief. How it all affects her; what she chooses to do next.
I suppose all this is also true of having a character walk across a room and out the door. Whether and how much you decribe it is going to depend on who’s doing it, POV, and what it means to the protagonist and the story.
By the way, in Going Postal, Terry Pratchett manages to get a man across a room, out a door, and off a cliff all at once without directly showing any of it:
“But Mr. Gilt, I notice, is not here.”
Vetinari sighed. “You have to admire a man who really believes in the freedom of choice,” he said, looking at the open doorway. “Sadly, he did not believe in angels.”
Skipping a cataclysmic event and referring to it obliquely is something of a Pratchett specialty, but probably not anything the rest of us can get away with. (By the way, this may be the only time in 30-some books that the “ruthless” Lord Vetinari actually kills anyone. I don’t count Raising Steam.)
You can probably guess tonight’s challenge:
A Callow Youth and his/her Stout Companion have secured the Jewel of Togwogmagog. Now they have another problem. They have to get out of the room with it.
And through a door.
The cliff is optional.
Try to limit yourself to 150 words.
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