In a guest post on Jane Friedman’s blog, Sharon Oard Warner talks about the space between scenes and how they can help you build a great story. “Good scenes also make good novellas, novels, and memoirs, but scenes alone won’t give you a graceful and sturdy narrative arc,” she says. “For that, you need a little mortar, some grout or glue, and—yes—you need spacers.”
One way we use the space between scenes is the summary. “Summary provides a means of moving time forward without a loss of momentum,” Warner explains. “It’s inevitable that we share the information that’s necessary but not significant through the means of summary.” She describes two kinds of summaries.
Sequential summary lets you account of a specific period of time between scenes, greatly condensed for efficiency. The information is used to bring the reader from one scene and orient them to the next. The condensed time can be a few minutes, a day, a week, or longer.
Circumstantial summaries provide a glimpse of a character’s life or the setting. You might describe your protagonist’s habits with such a summary, encapsulating the activities they repeat day to day, or how they behave at certain times of year or around holidays. In other words, you can sum up what they usually do without having to dive into scenes that would derail your narrative.
Spacers are when you jump ahead in time without summarizing. One scene ends and the narrative picks up at a certain time later. “Most often, the jump-ahead is referred to as gap, and in contemporary fiction, gap is delineated by white space,” Warner says. “Sometimes, a writer designates white space for a short gap, one that moves the narrative briefly forward and uses white space and an asterisk or some other symbol to signify a leap in time.”
