Read on Twitter
if i could achieve anything in my writing it would be a fluidity in terms of like incidental human choreography? action that isn't Action? i'm trying to think how to phrase it. people walking, gesturing, moving around in their environment—eg transitioning from one room to another
i think i'm able to make both conversations and internal, abstract narration flow naturally, in a way that is easy to read... but i feel like when i have to come back down to earth and write the simple cut-and-dry motions of existing my prose falls a little flat. it slows down
not to say that writing cannot be slow ofc, and at this point i'm kind of gazing firmly at my navel, but i think that effective writing is able to render those motions in a way that is clear and easy to follow but doesn't draw attention to itself. like... effective directing
in the example that's giving me such a headache rn, it's obviously not remotely the point of the scene that trish is walking down the stairs, moving from the upper level of the bus to the lower one, but it's also not something i can skip around—and i want it to be crisp and fast
but not too fast, not so fast that there isn't a clear bridge for the reader between location 1 and location 2—it should be a sentence at most, maybe two. but the thing is while the ACTION of going down the stairs is simple, the emotional journey of it is not, tbh—so i can't skim
like there are several points at which theoretically she could chicken out and go back up and chooses not to, so it could be worthwhile to linger on the details for a second, but the preceding scene is already pretty dense so would it be redundant? would it stunt the flow?
gwendolyn lastname and the unexpected labor of going down stairs
anyway i think a successful transition—whether it's as large as a transition from one place to another or as small as a transition from lying down to sitting up—finds the perfect balance between simplicity and clarity, and conveys information w/o the reader even realizing it
in my own writing, anyway! there are many different ways to do this and many different styles/angles of approach... but that's the ideal i want to strive towards... about to make another attempt. will report back
