KEEPING IT SEXY — WRITING TRANSITIONS & THE DINKUS

Writing Round Up and a Place to Submit

In life and in story, you have these things called transitions. Places where things change. You go from one place to another, one scene to another, one chapter to another, one husband to another, one president to another.

A really good transition is really just a bridge that helps the reader go logically from one section, scene, chapter to another without it being awkward like a bad date or making their brain hitch where they say things like “We were just in space and now we’re at Wal-Mart? What the heck?”

Some people are amazing at transitions.

Some people have awkward transitions.

Some refuse to acknowledge there even is a transition.

But in the writing world, you want them to be smooth and there are a bunch of transitional phrases and words that authors fall back on to help them do that like:

• A week later (or whenever)
• At the same time
• Afterwards
• For two weeks/days/minutes
• Meanwhile
• At night
• The next day
• The next night
• For a month, I cried into the phone
• In the morning
• When the sun rose
• When the sun set
• The following Monday/night/mornin
• Months passed
• Weeks passed
• When we got back to the office
• When they got back home
• As the neared the date site

Then there are the phrases that show us a change in location:

• They boarded the train
• Down the street
• Up on the third floor of the office
• Over by the water cooler
• Back in my living room
• The motorcycle was situated
• She ran fast through the dark alley
• In the hall of the hospital