Do I skip the "settling in" stuff?

Summarize it. "They sold the horse and rented a room." Boom! One sentence. Your readers will thank you. They don't want to read about the horse and the room any more than you want to write about it.

This is a good time to tell instead of show. Summarize it.

I agree completely. The first pages (or chapter) is not the place to take care of incidentals. Editors and agents will thank you for it, so will your readers. I've never made that mistake again and it's paid off. I go even further--I'll always start mid-crisis and its pulled a lot of praise.

tri

I agree with everyone above. In fact, I'm reading Going Postal right now, and there is a sequence almost identical to the one you're describing (no doctor, only one person, but functionally the same). Pratchett covered it in about the same number of words you used to describe it in your question.

Blinkk said:

I'm having a hard time writing about these mundane matters, so I'd assume the reader would feel the same way reading about it.

Click to expand...

You would be right.

Summarize it, unless there's a reason to show it in scene. And/or, you can do small snippets of the scene to highlight something that happened.

"The jingle earned from selling the horse rented a comfortable room for them." You imply stuff happened without saying it in total beige prose. But I agree with the others that cutting to the literal chase is wise.

Nothing wrong with summarizing, as others have said. I've done this quite frequently in my fantasy. If it's not interesting, I see no reason to show it. Get to the good stuff.

I will add one caveat, however. If you want to show the reader the atmosphere of the city, you might have to spend more time with this stuff. But that's up to you. You don't have to all Wheel of Time and describe everything in excruciating detail (enjoyed those books, but they could have done with some trimming).

I think your instincts are right. In fact, I think that's generally a good way to tell if you're writing a scene that will be boring to read. Very simply: 'Are you bored writing it?' I think RSwordsman gave a good suggestion for fulfilling the expository need without draining the life from your prose.

Unless you're writing in first person in this I'm-telling-you-a-story type of POV, summarizing is gonna feel like jumping out of character.

To remedy that, you can go straight to that scene you want to go to. Then bring up the horse and room discreetly in character dialogue or interior monologue.

Pretty much what everyone else said. Summarize. I can't stand it when authors prattle on for no good reason.

You should read Raymond E. Fiest's Riftwar Saga. There's an author who doesn't prattle on.

Brutal Mustang said:

Unless you're writing in first person in this I'm-telling-you-a-story type of POV, summarizing is gonna feel like jumping out of character.

Click to expand...

How so? If you can summarize in first-person, you can certainly do it in third-person.

Brutal Mustang said:

Unless you're writing in first person in this I'm-telling-you-a-story type of POV, summarizing is gonna feel like jumping out of character.

Click to expand...

I've never experienced that. I don't see how summarizing jumps out of character.

And I usually prefer a summary to just jumping ahead. It allows me to settle into the next scene more easily.

I write almost exclusively in 3rd limited/close. In some cases, while a main MC is traveling, etc, I will switch to another MC who is active and has a stake in the game...

As an experiment once, I had a group of character enter a large city. The job was to find a place that would give them room and board in exchange for performing as bards. They also needed to find a place to care for the mounts, stash their wagons and tents, and resupply. Writing down all they did took over 5,000 words. I let the thing set for several months and then came back to read it. What I thought was exciting and reasonable turned out to be boring and tedious upon further review. As I suspected...

Brutal Mustang said:

Unless you're writing in first person in this I'm-telling-you-a-story type of POV, summarizing is gonna feel like jumping out of character.

To remedy that, you can go straight to that scene you want to go to. Then bring up the horse and room discreetly in character dialogue or interior monologue.

Click to expand...

"By the time we'd managed to sell the horse and find the inn after dragging Troy to the doctor's, we were exhausted."

cornflake said:

"By the time we'd managed to sell the horse and find the inn after dragging Troy to the doctor's, we were exhausted."

Click to expand...

That's written from first person. Like I said above, first person is an 'I'm telling you, the reader a story', sort of a POV. Third person, is more like being with the character, without them knowing you are there.

For someone writing in a third POV, summarizing will feel like falling out of character and telling. Will the character ever think, 'By the time we'd managed to sell the horse and find the inn after dragging Troy to the doctor's, we were exhausted.'? Didn't think so. Unless they're really weird.

No. It will be more like this:Or something like that. Not a flawless example, but hopefully you get my meaning.

Its something i struggle with too. An idea is to write it out as basic as you want. Then take that and make it even briefer. Eventually you'll be left with a snappy paragraph that covers all the boring stuff but atleast lets the reader know it has happened.

A throwaway line in dialogue to explain where the horse went works too

rwm4768 said:

I've never experienced that. I don't see how summarizing jumps out of character.

And I usually prefer a summary to just jumping ahead. It allows me to settle into the next scene more easily.

Click to expand...

I agree- I'd rather have a quick summary of what's going on than a huge jump in plot. If you're having trouble writing that part, you could always skip writing it and come back to it later, too!

Blinkk said:

Interesting point about first/third person. I can see how first person wants to be more linear, but is a little more direct. Thoughts can come in easier which can reflect on the past. It's a little trickier in 3rd person, but I'm thinking some quick dialogue can fix this up. They can mention all these things in a few sentences and then move on to the exciting scenes.

Click to expand...

Just make sure the dialogue sounds completely natural and not there solely for the purpose of informing the reader.

Fwiw, third-person limited POV novels employ passages of summary all the time. It's a natural extension of the character's POV, as long as the summary doesn't include information he or she would have no way of knowing.

I'll have to check into summarizing. I'd rather not start a new chapter with a summary (even if it's one paragraph),

Click to expand...

Your choice, of course, but there's nothing wrong with doing that. Lots of novels have this. In fact, I just did a quick perusal of a random selection of books on my shelves and came across example after example of the author beginning a chapter with a summary to catch the reader up to date while skimming over events that don't merit being shown in scenes.

Blinkk said:

Thanks for all these great answers. I'm used to being flogged over the head with the "show don't tell" rule and this feels like its in violation of that.

Click to expand...

It's not. There are times and places for telling, and this is one of them. If you try to show everything, it will drag the pace down with trivial, boring information (as you already figured out) and if you try to work all of that into dialogue, it runs the risk of sounding contrived. And what a tedious task that would be, anyway, when the information can be elegantly and briefly conveyed by a simple sentence or paragraph.

Blinkk said:

I'll have to check into summarizing. I'd rather not start a new chapter with a summary

Click to expand...

(This is a blog post here.)

Generally, we want to start each new chapter with
(1) establishment of POV (if in 3rd limited)
(2) setting, and
(3) action that is happening right now.

This is the triumverate of
Whose head am I in?
Where am I?
What's going on (and we want something going on even if it's trivial.)

Hork was as fond of rodents as the next man. His sister raised prize-winning ROUXs back home--fine eating and and a soft, spinnable wool in the fall. But he didn't like the wild pygmy variety that scattered underfoot as they walked into The Willing Wench.

Here we have characters in motion, rather than static.
We know where we are.
We have identified the POV character for the chapter because we see his internals and he is the first identified character.

I like to go pretty fast to dialog. Just my preference. I like this first dialog to hold emotion about the scene at hand and to hint at the next problem.

"Why don't we just eat in a sewer and skip the middleman?" He followed Jeremy to a table in the arse end of the tavern, careful where he put his feet.

"You wanted skanky? I give you skanky." Jeremy brushed at the history of former meals that encrusted the table. Gave up. Sat on the bench. "Brytog will like this place."

"And we have to please Brytog."

"God help us, we do."

Okay. We are fifty or a hundred words into the scene and we have established action and time passing. At this point we can briefly ref stuff that happened elsewhen and elsewhere.

We mention only what is not obvious.

If our folks are warm and dry and last chapter they fell in a river, the reader will figure out they have changed clothing. If it is night and last chapter was noon, they know time has passed. If our folks walk off to their room at the inn, we don't need to say one of them rented a room earlier.

The backstory we add at this point is
(1) not bloody obvious,
(2) important, and
(3) related to the problem the characters are going to deal with.

Insofar as possible, we wrap the backstory stuff in terms of what will happen next.

Jeremy tapped the purse he wore at his belt. "I got three and six for the nag and eight for the tack. It won't be traced back to us. Spent all that on replacement arrows. I left them at the inn. You can complain about them later. The innkeep and the fletcher both say there's no werewolves in town. The Lythrops seem to be hiding or run off in disorder. Or dead."

"Maybe they ate here." Himself, he wasn't going to touch anything that came out of that kitchen, including the tavern wench headed their way.


That example takes a bit of the past -- the sale of the horse -- and drags it into the story present time by saying 'we won't get caught'. That's a 'now' worry. Takes the sale money from the past and relates it to arrows that are at present time at the inn and will in the future time be examined. Takes the renting of an inn room from the past because it relates to the current problem with werewolves.

So it's less ,"I rented a room. Then I sold the horse. Then I ..."
Not so much, "This is what I did four hours ago and that is what I did next."

It's more, "When I rented a room there was no rumor of the princess coming through town,"
which brings the past action of room rental into a relationship with what they're worried about right now.

Brutal Mustang said:

That's written from first person. Like I said above, first person is an 'I'm telling you, the reader a story', sort of a POV. Third person, is more like being with the character, without them knowing you are there.

For someone writing in a third POV, summarizing will feel like falling out of character and telling. Will the character ever think, 'By the time we'd managed to sell the horse and find the inn after dragging Troy to the doctor's, we were exhausted.'? Didn't think so. Unless they're really weird.

No. It will be more like this:

[Character A] counted stones missing from the road, drowning out their conversation. Hopefully the horse's new owner would take good care of it. [Character B] spoke, pulling [Character A] out of his/her thoughts.

"Did you see that rat run through the room we rented?"

​

Or something like that. Not a flawless example, but hopefully you get my meaning.

Click to expand...

I think the issue you may be circling here is more about present vs. past tense than first vs. third person.

I just reread your example, and maybe I got it wrong. But I still don't see why you don't think a 3P narrator couldn't just write "By the time they managed to sell the horse and find the inn after dragging Troy to the doctor's, they were exhausted."

"Show don't tell" is a really good guideline - unless it's time to tell instead of show.

Those times are generally rare, but they do happen. Basically if an event is boring, has no real impact on the plot, and no emotional effect on the characters, but needs to be mentioned or the reader is likely to be spending the rest of the chapter wondering "but where is the horse?"

It doesn't have to be boring, you can still use summary to show character or setting.

"They sold the horse to a tiny man with a turban on his head and sores all over his face. The horse didn't seem to mind, and his gold was as good as anyone's."

There. The horse is taken care of, the town has someone interesting in it, and they can move on.