Writing Montage in Novels

I really think people are much too obsessed with not telling. Many of the novels I enjoy most, tell. Lots.

If you have, for example, a group of characters recovering from a fight, just friggin' say so:

For the next three weeks we stayed in camp and recovered from our wounds.

Really, please don't show me three weeks of recovering! I don't want to know what they ate and whether they brushed their teeth. Make it one sentence and be done with it. Thank you.

Re: Your edit

If something happens during the three weeks, you summarize ("tell") the week until that something happens, then narrate what happens as expansively as you do the rest of your novel ("show") and then summarize the remainder again.

Think of it this way: You constantly summarize uninteresting periods of time, but you probably don't notice it yourself. For example, when your characters are sleeping you don't "show" that but simply leave it out: The next morning.... But if a character wakes up during the night you continue your narrative in the middle of the night in stead of the next morning: I woke up around midnight....

Your problem, as I see it, is that you think of that long period in your novel as a whole that you want to summarize, but have some things happening during this "summary" that you want to show in more detail, but don't know how. The solution is to stop thinking of the whole period.

Your think:

--------------long period of time------------------
    event A                           event B

You should think:

---period A---event A---period B---event B---period C---

What you have is not one long period that you summarize and have to break out of, but a normal narrative with three unimportant periods (like nights) that you summarize.

Like this:

For the next three weeks we stayed in camp and recovered from our wounds. In the second week, one morning John was torn from his lazy revery by... The next week all was quiet again, until finally everyone was healed and itching to fight.

If your characters do not act (that is, do not break their inactivity) but only observe certain things, then you don't need to break your summary ("telling") and can simply tell what they saw:

For the next three weeks we stayed in camp and recovered from our wounds. During that time we saw the villagers raise unfair taxes and many other injustices, and they all served to steel our resolve to overcome Lord Dark. So when we were finally healed and ready to fight again, we...

Of course this is just a quick example, and you can go into much more detail in such a summary. There is nothing wrong with a few paragraphs of it. That's no different than taking some time to describe the setting or to provide a character's backstory.

posted over 7 years ago

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System‭

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In The Internet President: None of the Above, I create the equivalent of montage as a series of short chapters to cover campaigning for president. I enter each scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible. Leave a taste and let the reader's imagination fill in the rest. This worked for me because my book was written in a terse cinematic writing style. If your pacing is slower, this technique may not work as well.

I use one chapter per scene, even if it's a one-page transition. If you're using multiple scenes in a chapter with separators, then put a number of short vignettes in a chapter. Summarize what you can. Beowulf reflected fifty years in a single sentence.

posted over 5 years ago

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P.G. Sundling‭

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If you are drawing a house, and you want to convey a sense of the texture and detail of the building material used, you can draw three bricks in the middle of an expanse of wall. You don't have to draw all the bricks in the whole wall.

Pick out the bricks you want to draw; talk about them. You can situate them in time rather vaguely. You don't have to spread the events or incidents out uniformly. In other words, you don't have to put one incident in the first week, the second in the second, etc. Some possible adverbs are: During this time, as time wore on, one day, one morning.

A totally different possible approach is to have separators between vignettes. The separator could be a chunk of blank space, or a little squiggle or other symbol. I've seen whole books written this way.

Even if you don't want to use this approach in your final version, you could at least use it for your first draft. Once you've written the vignettes as separate sections, it may be easier to connect them.

posted over 7 years ago

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aparente001‭

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I'm currently re-writing a story that was originally a screen play as prose. Two parts of the screen play are montages, each depicting the development of a stage in the relationship between two of the characters.

After giving it due consideration, I decided to rewrite each montage into a continuous narrative.

Now that I think about it, I suspect that montages are the live action equivalent of "telling" in prose, a way of saying, "this sort of thing happens here."

posted over 7 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

EvilSnack‭

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