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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27090
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27090
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You can't do a montage in prose, anymore than you can paint a symphony or score a sunset. It is simply a technique of a different media. Each media has its own storytelling devices and you should not try to mimic the devices of one media while working in another.

It is worth asking, in this regard, whether you are actually trying to write a covert movie. It seems that many writers today are doing this. They are writing a novel, but in their heads they are really seeing a movie. I suspect the reason so many are writing like this is that while it is extraordinarily difficult to get a movie script produced, anyone can write a novel and self publish on Amazon. Still, the novel is a fundamentally different form, and you simply cannot achieve the effect of a movie in the novel format. You would do much better to accept the format you have chosen to write in and use its devices and conventions to achieve your end.

And here's the thing about montages: they are a rather lame attempt by movies to do something that novels can do very well, but which movies really have no good way of doing, and that is narration. A novel can use narration to bridge between one dramatized scene and another. In the hands of a good writer, the narrative passages can be just as fine, just as compelling, and just as important to the story arc as the dramatized parts. Indeed, they are some of the finest passages in literature. Prose is the perfect medium for narrative.

Doing narrative in the movies, however, is next to impossible. You can do scrolling captions, like the beginning of Star Wars, you can do narrative voice over, you can do various forms of one character filling in another, and you can do montages. All of these have to be used with the greatest restraint because they all make for lousy film. "Show don't tell" is imperative in the movies because movies cannot tell well. Thus movies have a really hard time doing the narrative bridge. This restricts the kinds of stories you can tell well in that format.

So, you are writing in a medium that excels at the narrative bridge, that can make the narrative bridge a piece of fine and memorable art as powerful as any dramatized portion of the text, and you are asking for a way to imitate the way a media that can't do this well attempts to make up for its deficiency, and one that is in any case impossible to execute in prose. So don't. Write narrative. It's the right choice for the media, and, if done well, a powerful choice.

Original score: 5