‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.’
’A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!‘
From Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
In 1961, the play Mary, Mary opened in New York. It took place entirely in one room. In 1963 it was transferred to screen, starring Debbie Reynolds, and except for one small scene it was still confined to the one room of a New York apartment. It may have worked on stage (I didn’t see it performed there), but the movie had a claustrophobic feel to it, never moving from the one place for almost all of its two hours.
In all but the briefest of fiction, characters do move around from place to place. They may go through the looking glass in their own parlor, or they may go around the world in 80 days. They might go down the river or they might not make it further than their own secret garden. Maybe they go up, up and away in a beautiful balloon, or maybe they climb a stairway to heaven. Some sail the seven seas, and others sail to galaxies far, far away. There are those who journey to the center of the earth, and others who journey 20,000 leagues under the sea. A tornado may lift them out of Kansas accidentally, or they may ride the sand worm on purpose. But move they do.
With some stories, such as Looking Glass or Grapes of Wrath, the change of locations is the point of the story. In The Haunting of Hill House, the drive to Hill House gives a stock of incidents, places, and people to populate Eleanor’s later declining connection to reality. In one of the Little House books the travel by covered wagon is a significant part of the tale while in others the travel is just brushed over as a necessary transition to a new home.
Whether your characters drop down the rabbit hole or trudge across the desert on a horse with no name or ride among the 600 into the valley of death, or whether they knock on the round door of Bag End hoping to be invited to second breakfast, they probably aren’t standing (sitting) in the same spot at the end as they were at the beginning. Oh, sure, Frodo could have told Samwise to just drop that darned old ring into the hole where he was planting potatoes. Aladdin could have decided the carpet fit nicely in the entryway, where visitors could wipe their muddy boots. Orpheus could have sobbed into his wine, singing sad songs and irritating the neighbors. The unicorn could have stayed alone in her lilac wood, admiring her reflection in the pool. Instead, they went places and did things, things that people wanted to write about.
There can be a variety of ways to cover travel in our writing. Travel can be desperate (crossing Mordor to get to Mount Doom), silly (running in place with the Red Queen), tense (riding the Orient Express with an unknown murderer). Or, if nothing at all interesting is happening and it’s just basic transportation but still you write paragraphs (or pages) about it, it can bore your readers’ socks off. So it’s important to write about movement in a way that is both in harmony with the style of the work as a whole and appropriate for the particular reason that the characters are going somewhere.
Sometimes, I start near the end of the travel, when the action is getting underway. Here we are on a ship, two weeks left of a six week voyage to London, and Our Hero meets the most interesting fellow passengers. I’ve also been known to say that Our Hero boarded a ship for Australia (or wherever) and end there, skipping any details of the trip totally.
Earthsea is an archipelago in a sea bounded by ocean no one has traversed. Ged travels almost exclusively by boat between islands, and of necessity by foot when on land. When the tone is set for his dangerous journey as far as anyone has ever been known to sail and even beyond, the first part of the trip is told in detail.
With hand and spell Ged turned his boat, and it leaped like a dolphin from the water, rolling, in that quick turn. . . Rain, mixed with sleet and snow, came stinging across his back and his left cheek, and he could not see more than a hundred yards ahead. Before long, as the storm grew heavier, the shadow was lost to sight. . . Though the wind blew his way now he held the singing magewind in the sail, and flake-foam shot from the boat’s blunt prow, and she slapped the water as she went. . .
The world’s wind had been sinking, and the driving sleet of the storm had given way to a chill, ragged, thickening mist. . . it was his boat that ran aground, smashing up on shoal rocks that the blowing mist had hidden from his sight. He was pitched nearly out, but grabbed hold on the mast-staff before the next breaker struck. This was a great wave, which threw the little boat up out of water and brought her down on a rock, as a man might lift up and crush a snail’s shell.
From A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
For several pages we’re alone with Ged on the icy sea, blinded by the sleet and fog, heading into certain danger. Mood, huh?
But a bit later, on another leg of the journey, we already know what Ged is up against. LeGuin doesn’t belabor the point, just lets us know he’s on his way again.
He sailed a day and a night over the lonesome sea, and on the second day he came to a small isle, which they told him was called Vemish.
Because of course this part of the trip wasn’t as dramatic, either in plot or weather, and there wasn’t much to be gained by a lengthy telling when it could be covered in a single sentence.
In the short story “Broken Pit”, Pip Maddern tells of a group of timid dwarves making an escape.
There were seven of them crawling, one behind the other, up the stony airshaft. They were all carrying loads of miscellaneous filched goods. Filek went first because the whole idea was his; he carried on his back a small square package of the precious bang-crash stuff. Mosil dragged a pick, and an assortment of shoring boards. Seim and Diak had packets of food (crusts and scraps they had collected over many hungry days), dried mushroom spores, and some more shoring boards. Garm carried two shovels on his shoulder. They were heavy, and kept slipping. His left hand flickered nervously between the shovels and the rock floor of the shaft, keeping the shovels, and himself, in proper balance. Wiken and Hom propelled a little ore-carrying trolley between them. Wiken pulled and Hom pushed. It was hard work, and they made a good deal of noise over it, arguing in whispers as the wheels clanged and wrenched at the stones on the steep slope. Periodically the whole line would take fright, and a ripple of shushing would pass up and down the shaft. They would all be silent for a minute or two, listening. . . Then, slowly, timidly, they would start forward again, slipping, muttering and whispering toward the Top. . .
When he reached the edge, Filek stopped, hesitated, dithered. The six behind him cannoned into each other, with varying degrees of scuffle and confusion. . .
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They were reminded of what they had fled from. Filek said quickly, “We go.” And so they ran, with inefficient hurry, down the outside of their mountain.
From “Broken Pit” by Philippa C. Maddern in the workshop anthology The Altered I.
Not a grand and noble adventure like Ged pursuing his shadow or Frodo seeking the fires of Mount Doom, but still it was engaging, with enough description to draw a whimsical picture of seven awkward dwarves on the lam. The first part, climbing the mine shaft, needed detail, not just to introduce the characters but also because getting up a stony shaft with all that equipment would be difficult, with enough noise that they risked discovery. The last part, going down the mountain over grass, wouldn’t be nearly as challenging—or interesting, even if they did it with “inefficient hurry”— and Maddern described it accordingly. Two sentences.
Although the second parts of each example could have been told in exciting detail, doing that might risk wearing the reader out with repetition. That’s another piece of craft for us to consider. How many voyages, how many treks, how many flights before Dear Reader’s eyes glaze over and they say, “Been there, done that. Get on with the story, already!” Or worse, they put the book down.
Often, though, we don’t make this distinction of how much description to put into the travels when writing the first draft—or when outlining, if that’s your process. The first draft is usually just getting the story down in pixels, working through the flow. It’s essential to keep it in mind, though, when revising in the second draft. That’s where we make the less emotional decisions, paying as much attention to craft as to story. If it comes naturally on the first try, fine, but many times it won’t. But it’s important to get it balanced on the second pass-through, before you’ve put so much work into a scene that you can’t bear to cut it—known as ‘killing your darlings.’
Challenge:
Write a scene that takes place while someone or something moves from one location to another. Make the travel an essential part of the scene, so they aren’t doing something that could have been done just as well staying in a single spot. You can use any of the pictures or songs for inspiration, or characters from your own work, or our stock Togwog characters. Or invent something new for this. Not a complete story, not necessarily even a complete scene, but move us along.
A note: Consider before you post something from your WIP. Putting it in a public forum like this will limit your publishing options. A publishing house won’t take work that has even a tiny bit of it already freely available. And it will limit your copyright protections. Although you can still copyright the material, you will have to declare that parts have been previously published, and if it’s plagiarized you can issue a take-down notice but you will not be able to collect punitive monetary damages.
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