If you’d like to receive these posts in your in-box each week, click here.

One of the most common issues authors struggle with is how to give their stories smooth, propulsive narrative flow. They may painstakingly develop airtight plots and steadily advance characters along their arcs, and yet their manuscripts may still risk feeling disjointed, choppy, or even confusing if their stories don’t move readers smoothly from scene to scene.

This transitional material—or what I call connective tissue—orients readers to how the story moves from one event to the next, filling in necessary details of what’s happening “offstage” to condense real time into “story time,” leaving out, in Elmore Leonard’s famous words, the parts people skip.

The problem with Leonard’s advice is that authors may take it too far, leaving out essential information that orients readers to how a character got from the end of one scene to the beginning of the next, what made them arrive at their current objective and motivation, what shaped their actions and behaviors in the scene on the page in the interim between now and the last time we saw them.

In other words, to paraphrase David Byrne, you must ask yourself, How did they get here?

There are ways a writer can incorporate this indispensable material readers and stories need without burying them in verbiage or bogging down momentum, if they keep three ideas in mind.

Identify what readers need to know

The first step in paving in connective tissue is to understand what readers might be wondering. What needs to be established to bridge the gap of understanding how the character “arrived where they are” at the beginning of one scene from the end of their previous one?

That means asking yourself some key questions:

• Whose scene is this—who is the focal/POV character (if you’re not writing in omniscient POV)?
• When is this scene relative to the last time we saw this character?
• Where is the character and what brought them here?
• What has happened since the last time we saw the character, if the action isn’t contiguous? In other words, what plot developments and fallout from it happened “offstage”?
• If the action is contiguous from the last scene for this character but there’s been a lag since we last saw them (as with multiple storyline/POV stories), what may readers need reminding of to reorient them to where we last left their storyline?
• What’s the character’s objective in this scene and what shaped it?
• What’s their state of mind, and why—in other words, how did it result from whatever happened before or between scenes, “offstage”?
• How germane to the story and/or character arcs are the developments that happened between scenes?

This last question is important in creating connective tissue that doesn’t stall momentum or weigh down the story. You want to offer the minimum amount of information needed to give readers what they need to stay invested and engaged and follow the story’s narrative flow, rather than slowing the pace and bogging them down in minor or unnecessary details.

Know how much transition your story needs

One of the ways authors commonly misconstrue Leonard’s canonical advice to basically leave out the boring parts is leaping straight into the action of a scene without “wasting time” or page space on what they worry may feel like info dumps or dry exposition.

The problem is that this connective tissue is often necessary—otherwise it’s like you’ve plunged someone into the middle of a conversation or action without giving them any context and said, “Go!” First we need some sense of what we’re diving into.

That doesn’t have to be swaths of explanation or description, but it does need to answer the key questions readers may have to be able to connect the dots between this scene or chapter and the previous one. And you can start in the middle of the action, but you do need to ensure readers get sufficient connective tissue fairly early in the scene—usually within the first few paragraphs or they may be left floundering.

Don’t overthink it; usually adequate transitional material can be conveyed within a few lines—brushstrokes of context that plant the reader’s feet.

For instance, here’s a transition without enough connective tissue:

After the fury of the hurricane, the silence that followed was almost unbearable as they waited for morning to see how much damage had been done.

Chapter

Rebuilding was happening slowly, but their town was finally getting back to normal, and many already seemed to have forgotten how bad the storm had been.

This might be a jarring shift for readers to leave the characters huddling after a hurricane in one chapter and rejoin them when things are suddenly getting back to normal in the next. We need more linking information about how the characters and situation got to this point from where we last saw them.

As long as what happened in between isn’t relevant and important enough to the characters or arc that it would be stronger to show it, then we don’t need much to orient us to when this is and what happened in the interim; a line or two would suffice. For example:

Chapter

Rebuilding was happening slowly, but by spring their town was finally getting back to normal, thanks to hardworking residents and fleets of goodhearted volunteers and donors, and many already seemed to have forgotten how bad the storm had been.

This brief bit of context lets us understand how much time has passed and gives readers an idea of how the story moved from one development to the next.

The same concept works with emotional beats and character shifts as well. For example:

The funeral ended in silence. Claire stood beside the fresh grave until everyone else had gone, unable to imagine getting back to normal tomorrow—or any day after it.

#

Claire laughed at something her sister said as they unpacked groceries. “You always did buy enough pasta for an army,” she said, reaching for another bag.

Her phone buzzed.

“It’s the attorney,” she said, setting the groceries aside.

Not only are we missing transitional material to orient readers to when this is relative to the funeral, where the characters are, or how they got here from the last scene, but we lack emotional connective tissue as well to understand how Claire managed to move past what seemed like all-encompassing grief to this relatively light moment.

Again, readers don’t need too much, provided that the shift out of her overwhelming grief isn’t a key development or turning point in Claire’s arc (in which case it likely needs to be dramatized on the page instead of briefly summed up in transition material). A few relevant lines bridging the emotional and plot gap between the scenes smoothly conducts the reader across it:

Claire laughed at something her sister said as they unpacked groceries, still surprised, just weeks after burying her mother, at hearing the sound from her own mouth. “You always did buy enough pasta for an army,” she said, reaching for another bag.

At first she’d thought she’d live under the black clouds of grief that gathered in the last weeks of her mom’s life for the rest of her own.

Yet the world kept turning. She had a deadline at work; cookies to make for the PTA meeting; meals to cook and laundry to do, and one evening she realized that somehow the clouds were clearing. She and Thom had been watching a comedy—she couldn’t even remember what. Snuggled under his arm, she felt his chuckle vibrate through her and for a moment she simply felt happy. This is life, she realized. It goes on.

Her phone buzzed, and Claire glanced at Emily.

“It’s the attorney,” she said, setting the groceries aside.

Notice we’ve also paved in a bit of connective tissue to transition readers from the brief backstory back to the present scene with her sister—just a quick brushstroke (“Claire glanced at Emily”) to reorient readers to the shift.

Give your connective tissue more than one job

Finally, well-used transitions and connective tissue do more than simply connect the dots of your story. They are part of it, and can earn their keep by performing essential functions in each scene.

In the previous example, for instance, the connective tissue isn’t just dry logistical information; it’s helping to move the plot and the character’s arc forward.

If we wanted to also use it to raise the stakes, the third leg of the trifecta of functions that create propulsive story, or to heighten tension and suspense, we could also add something like this:

“It’s the attorney,” she said, setting the groceries aside.

Emily looked as uneasy as Claire felt. The dirt had barely been replaced over their mom’s casket before their uncle had contested her will, and in the unsettling silence since then both sisters had been braced for the battle to get ugly.

The more story functions you can efficiently serve with your connective tissue, the smoother it will seem to readers, making the information not just logistically necessary to orient them but intrinsic to moving the story forward.

#

Creating fluid, effective transitions and connective tissue in story serves as the stitching that weaves a story together. Without it the story may lack cohesion and flow, yet if readers notice or are distracted by it you risk weakening its impact or reader engagement. The trick is to use the smallest and most elegant stitches possible, and make sure it blends seamlessly into the tapestry of your story.

How about you, authors–what do you struggle most with in creating smooth narrative flow? How do you know when you need connective tissue and what information is necessary? Do you have specific techniques you use to bridge those gaps?

Want to dig deeper into creating smooth transitions and connective tissue? Join me (with Jane Friedman) for my newest class, “Mastering Narrative Flow.” (Wednesday, July 22, at 1 p.m.–2:30 p.m. EDT, $25 early registration/$35 late, with recordings available for registrants if you can’t make it live.)

FoxPrint Editorial helps writers strengthen their manuscripts through developmental editing, education, and practical writing guidance. Explore more articles on revision, storytelling, and the publishing process.

If you’d like to receive these posts in your in-box each week, click here.