I Wanna Do More Of These… >:U

3 Ways to Write Scene Transitions

Moving from one scene to another in your short story or novel can be challenging. If your plot spans more than a day or a week, you've got plenty of time to cover.

How do you transition your scenes without jumping over crucial plot points or making the pacing feel rushed?

There are a few tips you can try when you're facing this problem.

1. Tease What's to Come

Let's say you've started a chapter with your protagonist encountering people they don't like while shopping at the grocery store with their exhausted two-year-old. The experience is frustrating, so your protagonist is simmering while sitting at a red light on the way home.

The main action of the chapter happens when the babysitter arrives that night, but it's only 12 o'clock in your scene. You needed your protagonist to encounter the people that annoy them to establish motivation for the action later on.

You could jump time by teasing the action itself. Your protagonist could thrum their fingers on the steering wheel and glare at the red light.

They opened their arms to the resentment churning under their skin. It sank into their bones, morphing into electricity that kept [Protagonist] plodding through their day. The red light mocked their need to take action, but they could wait.

Because when the babysitter showed up that night, they would take their revenge out on the city.

That could be a great place for a scene break or even the end of your chapter, depending on how much you've written. The reader won't mind a time jump because their interest gets piqued. They'll want to know what revenge means for that character and what will spin out from the choices they make.

2. Switch Points of View

If you're writing a 3rd person POV story with perspectives from at least two characters, you can also transition scenes by switching narrators.

While one character completes a plot-relevant action, the other could move the plot along by being a bit further in the future.

Consider something like this as an example:

Sarah's heart beat wildly in her chest as the heavy words finally fell from her lips. It was just the two of them in that park, but it had felt like the whole world had watched her admit her love for Melanie in the molten gold rays of the setting sun. All she needed now was an answer.

[Scene break symbol or the start of a new chapter]

Melanie heard Sarah's heartfelt words echo in her ears long after she had mumbled something about needing time. Time to think, to process. Sarah had been so understanding, even when she dropped Melanie off at home right afterward and skipped their usual Facetime call that night.

It wasn't until Melanie woke up the next morning in a sweat that she realized she finally had to unearth her biggest secret—she had only started the friendship with Sarah because she'd been in love with Sarah's older sister since the second grade.

You could make that time jump into however long you needed. Play with the scene set up in particular and then give the page or two to whoever loves to read your writing. They could talk about if it felt like a rushed scene or if the time jump felt right for that moment.

3. Wrap Up the Moment

Most of the time, I find myself struggling with a scene transition because the moment that I'm writing isn't finished.

Recently I was writing a scene with two friends in a wagon on their way to a new city. They have a great conversation that sparks some character development in-between plot points, but I could feel that conversation coming to a lull.

It felt like the right moment to insert a transition, but something didn't feel right.

I had to walk away from my work and come back to it to realize that I needed to wrap up the moment to move anything forward.

The solution I found was ending the conversation by making them appreciate their friendship more than before, based on what had been said, and then the protagonist ended the scene by reflecting on how they knew they could face anything in the new city with their friend by their side.

The next scene started with their wagon approaching the city walls after a night of sleeping under the stars. The reader will still understand that it took more time to reach their destination, but they don't have to read excessive details about the cold night air or hard ground under the protagonist's back to get to what they're most looking forward to—the arrival at the new city.

Nothing about that night would add anything to the plot, so dropping the overnight experience at the beginning of the sentence makes for a great transition to the next scene.

Make Your Transitions Clear

Whether you end a scene with a cliffhanger, a heartfelt moment, or by switching between points of view, your transitions should always help the plot.

You can always edit them while reworking the finished draft later or ask for beta reader opinions from the people who always love reading what you write.

NGC 3314

At first glance you'd be forgiven for thinking this was two galaxies merging, but they are actually 23 million light years from one another, and just happen to be overlapping due to our perspective.

The closest galaxy is 117 million light years away with the other 140 in the constellation of Hydra.

Supernova Remnants © Chandra

Hello everyone! after a couple of months of work on this beast of a thing, the first draft of my promised writeup on understanding composition is finally ready! This badboy is almost 15,000 words, and over 150 pages long. In these images, you can see a couple of examples of the kind of subject matter I’ll be covering, but it’s very comprehensive. 

This is currently available on my Patreon starting at just $2!

I think what I offer is a pretty unique take on composition, and it’s geared to be understood without a lot of consideration for the more finnicky technical elements of drawing, so if that’s part of art you have trouble with you might find some answers in my approach. Using my own art and examples from various disciplines and eras, I break down how to understand why a composition does - or doesn’t - work, all building to a toolset that lets you have control over your own compositions with precision and intent. 

A sincere thank you to anyone who takes the time to look at it, and at the end of the day, always remember one fundamental rule of art:

Some people asked how I paint hair, so I made this very simplified explanation, but I hope it helps someone.

The @ is my twitter btw ^~

How to learn drawing MH monsters

Hey Anon! First of all I’m very honored, thanks a lot!!

You’re asking a very interesting question in my opinion, so I hope you will find a long response interesting as well c:

When I want to learn how to draw a new Monster, I base myself on the Monster’s design (ofc) but also on general knowledge, especially anatomy. Anatomy is crucially important even when drawing creatures that do not exist, simply in order to make them believable!

So if you struggle to draw MH Monsters, that are famous for their ‘realism’ and believability, first ask yourself what level you have in basic anatomy: if you know how skeleton works, muscles work, transcribing it into proportions and joints, things like that.

(Art I made for fun for my RP blog)

I sadly can’t offer you much advice on how to learn it, because anatomy is partly intuitive to me; and lots of my artistic anatomy studies were more centered around human anatomy (however, a lot of muscle groups are similar to animals, so even my knowledge of humans is useful when drawing monsters). I also have to mention I’m a vet student, and we had medical anatomy classes in the first year, which helped a lot as well; but I’m sure you can find online resources that will teach you the basics for art!

Keep reading

Your writing will always feel awkward to you, because you wrote it.

Your plot twists will always feel predictable, because you created them.

Your stories will always feel a bit boring to you, because you read them a million times.

They won't feel like that for your reader.

The Cats Eye Nebula in Optical and X-ray : To some it looks like a cat’s eye. To others, perhaps like a giant cosmic conch shell. It is actually one of brightest and most highly detailed planetary nebula known, composed of gas expelled in the brief yet glorious phase near the end of life of a Sun-like star. This nebula’s dying central star may have produced the outer circular concentric shells by shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. The formation of the beautiful, complex-yet-symmetric inner structures, however, is not well understood. The featured image is a composite of a digitally sharpened Hubble Space Telescope image with X-ray light captured by the orbiting Chandra Observatory. The exquisite floating space statue spans over half a light-year across. Of course, gazing into this Cat’s Eye, humanity may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution … in about 5 billion years. via NASA