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Q&A Writing Montage in Novels

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...

posted 7y ago by aparente001‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

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#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2020-01-16T05:33:16Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26531
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T06:03:21Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26531
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T06:03:21Z (almost 5 years ago)
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.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2017-02-06T05:29:35Z (over 7 years ago)
Original score: 0