In a new post on Writer Unboxed, Donald Maass offers advice on avoiding sequential narration, the tendency of writers to follow their characters through every mundane part of their day. “The most obvious shortcoming of sequential narration is that it produces lulls, pages that present low-tension business such as lengthy arrivals, traveling between scenes, domestic humdrum, and so on,” Maass writes. “For the most part, those things are presented visually in the belief that anything that a protagonist might be doing matters if we can ‘see’ it.”
Writers eventually learn to summarize, but Maass says that only masks their misunderstanding of what actually conveys a story and how it progresses. Plot events provide a sense of forward motion, but readers feel movement when they experience a human moment. “Every time we ‘get’ it—meaning not what a character feels but what a story moment feels like—then we inwardly take a step forward,” Maass says. “This kind of movement arises not from what characters are going through, but from what readers are going through. And one thing that readers can go through—if you make it happen—are human moments of recognition and connection.”
When writers create these human moments, there are several variables, starting with narrative distance. The closer the POV, the more likely the reader will feel in the moment, but Maass says it doesn’t really matter how “close” we are to the characters. “What matters is whether what you are writing about on any given page produces an experience for the reader,” he says.
Maass walks through a single scene written with increasingly deepening POV. At each stage, the reader may feel immersed in the experience, but there isn’t necessarily a human connection. Finally, Maass rewrites the scene to minimize sensory details and create an experience of being the main character in the moment. In that version, Maass creates a snapshot of the character’s life, not merely what he’s doing in the moment.
“In creating non-plot story momentum, what matters the most, perhaps, is not what we can see,” Maass says. “What matters the most is who characters are in a given moment. Their condition. What they are experiencing.” Again, what Maass has written is less about what the character sees or feels, but about what it feels like to be that person.
