Building the Essential Linkages
If the human body were composed only of organs, bones, and muscles, we’d merely be a bloody pile. We need ligaments, tendons, fascia: connective tissue, so we don’t fall apart into a disorganized mess.
Same with any structure, if you think about it. Put up a brick wall without mortar and see how that works out. Lumber won’t stick to itself. Nails, rivets, bolts, screws, caulk—the right connectors at the places make the whole thing sound.
Fiction is a structured art form; therefore it too needs bonding elements. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call it connective tissue: the small, subtle things, the adroit stuff top authors do to make their stories feel seamless. Where are the characters? What are they thinking? What are they doing?
Here is a passage that could use some help:
They argued with no resolution. At work, Omar heard a sudden sound.
Here’s a simple transition, embedded directly in the third-person narrative:
After the argument with Frances, Omar went home and ordered a pizza, though he didn’t enjoy it much. The next day at work, he was running the macros on the new database when a sharp crack interrupted his concentration. A gunshot?
With this adjustment, we follow Omar from one piece of action to another, from one place to another in time and space, even from one mood to the next.
When a work of fiction feels choppy, it’s often because the author has skipped from one place or character to another without enough help for the reader. And when a story feels labored or sludgy, it’s because the author has put in too much connective tissue: It’s overtold. This is one of those elements of fiction that are subtle and unquantifiable, and best understood by examples.
Let’s start with the simplest sorts of connective tissue and move through to more intricate ones. (Spoilers from real novels and stories ahead.)
1. Dateline
The dateline is the most basic connective tissue. At the top of a chapter or section, you can use any combination of place, time, even including a character name:
June 30, Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, Wednesday, 2.45 p.m.
Chief of Staff Victor Jung’s office, Washington, D.C., 11:00 a.m.
An open boat on Hudson Bay
2. Chapter Break
When you’re unsure how to go on, but you feel you need a change of direction, an easy answer is a chapter break. Readers will expect a jump in time or place, so you don’t have to do much extra writing to get them there. A professional secret of authors is to break a chapter when you’ve finished writing a heart-clutching moment. This is a much more natural way to create a chapter end, instead of trying to manufacture a strong moment out of nothing. Don’t worry about dropping in a micro-chapter here and there; your chapters don’t need to be of similar lengths.
3. Section break
If you’ve come to a place where you want an abrupt change, but you don’t feel it’s significant enough to end the chapter and start another, skip a line or two, omit the indent, then get going on whatever’s next. A section break is ideal for signaling an emotional shift.
This from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day:
Such as, for instance, the matter of Miss Kenton’s days off.
~
By the time she first arrived at Darlington Hall right up until perhaps a month or so before that incident in my pantry, Miss Kenton’s days off had followed a predictable pattern.
The reader is intended to feel that little break. We are to sense, perhaps, a shift in the thoughts of the narrator, Stevens the butler. I fancy Stevens is taking a moment to heave a weighty sigh before commencing to explain this greatly troubling situation with Miss Kenton.
For the sake of interest in formatting, you can center a neutral symbol or figure, such as a diamond or scroll, in your section break. This makes it a little easier for readers to apprehend that it’s intentional (and not a typo). Publishers sometimes opt for this, and if you’re self-publishing, you can do it too.
4. POV Change
Another way to do a simple, clear transition without much fuss is do a point-of-view change. Thrillers are great for this; think of cinematic jump cuts all over the place:
Lt. Stone is racing through traffic, dodging elderly pedestrians and baby buggies.
The bad guys are hustling their hostage out the back door of the warehouse.
Back to Lt. Stone, now stuck behind a moving van … He sees a hot dog vendor’s cart and gets an idea …
By keeping the scenes close in time, as in the above example, it’s easy for the reader to be comfortable with what’s going on.
5. Spewed Opinion
An excellent way to buffer a couple of scenes while keeping track of your characters is to have one of them spew an opinion:
Geoffrey thought if he heard “Rhinestone Cowboy” in that elevator one more time, he’d have a stroke.
Doesn’t have to be the slightest bit momentous. If Geoffrey must ride in that elevator, let him keep it a little bit amusing for us. We’re there with him!
“Bear in mind that readers like to be refreshed, occasionally, on where everybody is, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how they’re feeling.” —Elizabeth Sims
Writer’s Digest
6. Soliloquy
Shakespeare is the most famous writer of soliloquies, though they’re found throughout literature. The Bard’s tragic character Hamlet steps to the footlights to speak his innermost thoughts aloud to himself, though of course the purpose is to inform the audience. Each of Hamlet’s seven soliloquies—jammed with the prince’s swirling thoughts and feelings—develop the character by letting us inside his head to watch the progression of his ideas from chaotic to organized. The soliloquies are tremendously successful connective tissue, bridging action while letting us in on Hamlet’s sadness, exultation, calculation, and wit.
How to do it:
When you need to move from one piece of action to the next—especially if you want to slow the pace—let a character struggle internally with the choices before them. Give them room to develop their thoughts; don’t be in too big of a hurry to get to the next scene, which will almost certainly be richer for what you’ve just crafted.
7. Stream of Consciousness
The distinguished contemporary writer George Saunders often lets his narrators connect the elements of his darkly comic short stories with streams of consciousness. This technique, while similar to the soliloquy, amps soliloquy into more complex territory.
E.g.: The eponymous narrator of the Saunders short story “Al Roosten” gives us perfect connectivity between the events of the story, about a loser who lives almost entirely inside his head. As Al judges others and rages against them, he tells a story of petty revenge:
He could say he’d accidentally kicked the wallet under there. Which was sort of true. He hadn’t thought about it, really. He’d just felt like kicking it and then he had. He was impulsive like that. That was one of the good things about him. It was how he’d bought the shop. Failing shop. He gave the keys a kick.
Through the character’s own eyes, we perceive that he is utterly lacking in honesty and courage; therefore, happiness will forever be out of his reach.
How to do it:
Let your narrator imagine the thoughts and feelings of others, and let those imaginings drive (to one extent or another) her or his decisions. You’ll always be able to move a story smoothly with this technique. I might add that the novelist Henry James, himself an important piece of connective tissue between the literary realists and the modernists of the turn of the 20th century, used this approach to superb effect.
A key is to let your narrator’s thoughts wander, but keep the topics to anything that:
Reveals the inner workings of the character (e.g. via judgments and opinions), or Describes action.
8. One-Sentence Cornucopia
Take a close look at this single sentence from the O. Henry award-winning short story “Defeat” by Kay Boyle:
That was the morning of the thirteenth, and they rode all day in the heat, two what-might-have-been peasants cycling slowly hour after hour across the hushed, summery, sunny land.
We get a wealth of connective tissue in this sentence: what day it is, what the weather is, how many characters we’re seeing, what they’re doing, what the mood is.
The sentence occurs between a scene of the soldiers disguising themselves and the next scene, of them reaching their proximate goal, a place where they can find safety and food. And we’re solidly with them.
How to do it:
Challenge yourself every so often to pack several paragraphs’ worth of material into a single sentence. Such a sentence can serve beautifully to link two distinct events.
9. Short Flashback
Short flashbacks can succeed as connective tissue when used judiciously. Long flashbacks are different; they essentially serve to deliver substantive backstory. But short ones can add interest, help you control the pace, and keep a little suspense going.
E.g.: You end a chapter at a moment of profound impact, say a romantic proposal of marriage. The suitor takes a knee, opens the gem box, and pops the question. End of chapter!
Next chapter opens with the guy out hunting a day later [with a proper game license and legal firearm, of course]. We see him stalk and successfully shoot an elk. He rejoices inwardly that he and his bride will eat well this winter. As he packs the field-dressed quarters to his cabin, he thinks back to the moment he asked for her hand, and we see her happy reaction through his eyes.
The elk hunt serves as both a transition and a bridge forward (progression of the lives of the two lovers). Because of the break in continuity, we get a little suspense, and savvy readers will know and expect that the payoff will come soon. And it does: She said yes! It’s fine to craft something like this once in a while. If you make a constant pattern of it, though, your readers will get bored. As you gain experience as a writer, these things will sort themselves out.
10. Mad Dog
A mad dog, for our purposes discussing connective tissue, is a story element that is tiny but reaches way beyond itself to pull together situations, themes, moods, fates.
Zora Neale Hurston uses an actual mad dog in her influential novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
A series of intense moments occur late in the book. One comes when the character nicknamed Tea Cake saves the main character Janie from drowning in a post-hurricane flood. What’s the flood for? Hurston wanted to give Tea Cake a heroic moment. But she needed more; she needed Tea Cake to die, and she needed much more besides. It would have been easy to make Tea Cake drown in the flood while saving Janie, but also a bit cheap, easy. Moreover, Hurston wanted to give the two characters a chance to have some discussion about their past and future before the next cataclysm.
The author decided to craft a delayed, dreadful death for Tea Cake: He’s bitten by a rabid dog during his rescue of Janie. It takes weeks for the disease to manifest. When the crazed, dying Tea Cake attacks Janie, she shoots him dead to save herself, then finds herself in jail. The story continues its energetic, compelling journey through the relations between the sexes, servitude and subjugation, loyalty, vengeance, forgiveness, and more.
Tea Cake’s encounter with the mad dog is entirely by chance, and the moment of the bite seems almost insignificant. Yet it becomes a multiplier of story, creating bridges, transitions, and pinch points all along the way.
How to invent your own mad dog:
Make a list of the biggest moments you’re going to need as you think about wrapping up your story. Make at least one of them bigger.Looking at those moments, what sort of tiny cataclysm suggests itself? You want something that will have impact and reach far beyond the moment.Progressive diseases are good. Also consider a character who returns from exile with a grudge, a prank that goes a wee bit wrong, a child who misunderstands an urgent directive …
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Something to remember about connective tissue is this: You’re intimately familiar with your own project. You know it better than anyone; you breathe and sleep it. For you to keep track of your characters and timeline, well, that’s easy. Therefore, sometimes we neglect connective tissue, because, hey, it’s already obvious, isn’t it? We saw Tiffany steal that minivan in Chapter 4. Why do I need to remind the reader in Chapter 12 that Tiffany is still driving it, still on the way to Florida?
Just bear in mind that readers like to be refreshed, occasionally, on where everybody is, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how they’re feeling. They need these things a little bit more than you do, as the author. The more you bring conscious choice to this element of fiction, the better you’ll get at it, and the easier it will come to you.
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