McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Travelling

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Belial:
At the moment i'm having a little trouble with my writing, so i thought i'd see what you guys thought.

It all has to do with the character travelling you see. When he goes from point A to point B nothing very important to the story happens, although he and his umm "friend" might get more companionable... not sure, but that's beside the point. Pretty much, if i were to write out the traveling, it wouldn't add that much to the storyline, and might end up being fluff.

On the other hand, if i were to skip it, the reader would lose about a month of the character's life, which in a short story can be an awful lot.

So i thought I would ask if you guys have any techniques for character travel. Keep in mind that this is fantasy-fiction, so there won't be any high-tech forms of travel, just feet and horses.

Thank you all in advance.

blue moon:
As a reader, I say find something important that happens during that month, or skip it.  If I want to read about people rambling along, eating and taking naps, I'll pick up Tolkien.

As a writer, I say write it if you need to.  You might need to take your characters on that journey, even if the whole chapter disappears in the final edit.  Do what works for you.

But if nothing of any importance happens in those pages, don't make us read them.

Dom:
I agree with blue moon.

If you need to write them to figure things out, that's fine.  But if nothing happens, you may eventually need to cut them.  But that's not a big deal--I do it all the time.  I have an archive of "old scenes" for every single story I have, things I wrote that ended up having to be cut (and I'm still on the first draft of a lot of things).  I keep them around in seperate files so I can mine them for things later on.

Belial:
Thanks a ton to both of you (sorry Blue Moon, i meant to respond sooner than this), that's more or less what i was thinking, except i've seen writers do it before, and it utterly pissed me off, (i.e. "Wait, what's this about him sailing down the dragon straights? i wanna read about that!") so i wasn't sure if that would be the best route, but as blue moon said, i've also read tolkien, and it does wander too much.

novium:
you could do what the movies do and only show the important parts of travel- show them leaving, show them arriving, and then having some sort of travelling scene in the middle. Not just, "hey look, another rock"... maybe a little flirting to suggest what you want, or a complaint, or something.

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