Mini-transitions

Breaking a scene with *** is only effective up to a point, in my opinion. It does establish that the time and place (or the POV character) has changed, but sometimes more clarification is needed if it's not immediately recognizable through conflict (i.e. if you transition from day to night, a simple mention of the moon or stars would probably do). A few instances of "As they moved on" or whatever shouldn't hurt your story too badly, though.

 

Are these transitions not a good time to begin a new chapter?

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If it's a consistent thing, maybe use your “Later that night/After they had started moving again/While they took a short break” stuff as almost a heading or a chapter title. Set it apart, bold it, put an ellipsis after it, whatever. Make it a stylistic thing rather than a problem.

 

I've heard it's best to start in the middle of some action, so what I've been trying to do is change this:

---
The next morning, they packed up camp, ate a quick breakfast, and started again before the sun was up. After a few miles of hiking, the long previous day began to catch up with them.
"The doctor's gonna take both my feet next time I get a checkup," Toma said between heavy breaths.
---

To this:

---
"The doctor's gonna take both my feet next time I get a checkup," Toma said between heavy breaths.
They had packed up camp, had a quick breakfast, and started again before the sun was up. After a few miles of hiking, the long previous day was starting to catch up with them.
---

It's a crappy example, but you get the idea. I think pushing the "catch-up" a few lines down adds interest to the transitions. I have a bunch of them too.

 

One approach you might consider since these are all short scenes in which you probably aren't delivering any surprises to the reader, but you do want to convey travel, logistics, scenery, etc., would be to have the characters involved to discuss what lays ahead of them, especially if some of them don't know already and some do. Let the dialogue do the work for you. Then skip the actual telling of what happens and get on with the story that would have followed all those troublesome short scenes.

 

Yeah, I'd use multiple methods for your transitions, although I do think that using typographical things like the three asterisks pretty much means you'd always have to use those three asterisks between scenes. A simple extra line break should be just as good.

One of the more basic strategies is simply to signpost the change in context early in each scene. So if the party settles down to eat second breakfast at the end of one scene, the next scene could open something like this:

"By Lothar's Goat, Hermint, you didn't have to eat all the apple pastries we had!"

Hermint shrugged and avoided Serpina's eyes. She had made the complaint five times now, so he was getting good practice pretending to scan the rocky trail for loose stone that could trip an incautious Hobbit.

So...you could signal the passage of time by referencing events that happened off-stage between the two scenes.

Or, you could reference a change in daylight, sun/moon position, location, and so forth that would have required the passage of time.

Basically, you can use content rather than those phrases (after ___, later ______, etc.) to signal a change in context and time.

 

Keep on going, you'll get there in the end.

 

Alternatively, instead of cutting, you could look at combining some of them.

I have a book sitting on my Kindle, unread, that I'd bought because it had decent Amazon reviews, was from an author whose name I'd encountered many times, and was in a genre I like but that suffers from a limited supply. I thought I'd finally found another good book in that genre. But it opens with a lot of short scenes that have a strobe-like feel, skipping from conversation/scene to conversation/scene that are, individually, focused in the present or immediate activity but that on the whole aren't greatly separated in context and time. I've tried reading the book a couple times but I just can't get past those scenes. There's no connective tissue; they could have been consolidated into fewer but longer scenes with transition paragraphs between the focus on present activity.

I don't know the situation of your story or the types of scenes you are using, so I don't know if this will work, but there's nothing wrong with using transition paragraphs within a scene. Especially in the case of extended travel scenes. There doesn't need to be a separate scene for each time the party members stop or launch into a new conversation topic.

 

One exercise I could recommend is to write one sentence for each scene. Leave out any references to the passage of time. Just get the core essence of each scene down. Put your sentences all together in one paragraph or two, and see how they read. It's bound to be "telling" instead of "showing" when you do this, but it could give you a different perspective on the whole big picture. Sometimes different perspectives will help open up other options for you when your brain is balking at the task before it.

 

My instinct would also be to chop/merge/massage that many short scenes, but without seeing the passages in question, it's hard to know. I struggle a lot with transitions as well, so I don't have much advice, but one thing that I don't think has been mentioned is to use content as your bridge, rather than just the passage of time. Some thread of conflict. This would require looking deep into why these scenes are connected, what's happening between them, why they all lead together. A not-great example:

Okay, maybe that's little better than the transition phrase alone, but it at least provides some continuity.

 

I decided early on to be consistent in my transitional usage. So I tend to use only two methods for transitions that are too small or insubstantial to require their own full chapter.

I use the triple asterisk when I stay with the same characters in the same party, but move from character to character. I also use it when I wish to make a time change with that same group of characters.

But when I make a scene change that involves different characters and takes place in a different place, I use a solid line about two inches long to make a transitional break that appears more powerful and distinctive.

Some of my chapters are only two pages long, and some are almost thirty pages. But when I change chapters, that new segment must have enough strength to carry the load of its own chapter. If it doesn't, then I make the necessary transitional breaks within the same chapter, as I mentioned above.

Of course, we all develop techniques that work best for us. Sometimes it just takes a little time to find what's most comfortable for us.

Good luck to you, Incanus. I know you can find what works best for you. But as with most aspects of writing, nothing seems to come easily. So, hang in there, my friend.

 

Caged Maiden, those are great. They give a sense of continuity, which is something that was missing in the book I previously mentioned. Perhaps the book in question suffered even more because those short scenes occurred at the very beginning, so just as I was getting into the story and the main character, I was knocked back out, skipping a few hours ahead into a whole different situation. Very strobe-like. With those connective transitions, I could have remained with the character, got a feel for how his life/living happened.