Writing Advice: Connective Tissue

From @lar@plush.city: “@kyellgold how the hell do you find ways to connect key scenes you have in your head with smaller stuff in between without it feeling slapped together and actually feels fluid.”

Connective tissue is one of the annoying parts of writing. We have these big brilliant ideas in our heads, the turning points and climactic battles, but we can’t just write those because they ring hollow. So we build all of the background, formative points that support our brilliant ideas, and then there’s still more. Somehow the characters have to get from the stunning revelation that the world is in danger to the point where their first attempt to save the world goes wrong, but that can feel as tedious as a series of stops on a train line. And what we want is just to write the express, that stops at the key scenes only, but that jumps around too much.

I’m going to talk about novels here, because you shouldn’t be using a lot of connective tissue in short stories. Some, sure, but short stories are the express train: strong opener, introduce the problem, introduce the obstacle, solve the problem. In a novel, we’re stopping at every stop on the way to build character and world and tension.

That last bit is important because that’s part of how we make connective tissue feel more fluid (only one part; the other part I’ll talk about in a bit). The more you can make your prose work, the better, so think about every scene you write in those terms: is it building character? Building (or releasing; you have to balance the two) tension? Building the world or setting? If not, how could it do one of those things? Could it do two of them?

The better you integrate those goals, the more integrated the prose will feel. For example: There’s a word for worldbuilding that doesn’t feel well integrated. It’s called an “infodump.” This happens when you feel like the reader needs to know something about the world that hasn’t been revealed or explained yet, and you just tell them about it. Often this brings the story to a halt while the reader catches up on your world mechanics, and it can take some people out of the story

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But if you look at your infodump and ask, “How could this also build character?” then maybe instead of just telling your reader about the way the walled city’s banks have over hundreds of years incorporated dragons into their accounting systems, you could think about an experience your character had with a dragon in a bank. Now your infodump is relevant to the character and also teaches the reader something about them. Or you could ask, “How can this also advance the plot?” and decide that your character needs money to finance the next key scene and so has to encounter a bank dragon. Now the reader is learning about the world and there are stakes to this information.

But I think the main question was less about infodumps and more about the awkward feeling when you’re just trying to get from one key scene to another and nothing seems to work right, so you’re left with “then this happened and then this happened” kind of scenes.

What I fall back on in that case is getting into the mindset of the characters. What would the main character realistically do next in this situation? I find that asking that one simple question goes a long way toward making connective tissue fit fluidly into the story. Now, there are further questions that lead to decision points, like “is the next thing interesting to the reader?” (if not, let’s make it interesting by making it work, see above) or “is the next thing just jumping right to the key scene?” (if so, insert an obstacle to explain why they can’t just go there right away). But if your connective tissue starts with your main character acting reasonably (or at least interestingly), it will feel like part of the story, and then you can work out how to make it a good part of your story.

Another note: this method, of following your character through a story, can often lead you away from the key scenes you’ve been champing at the bit (if you’re a horse furry) to write. If this happens, you have two options: First, you can scrap or modify the key scenes to fit the new narrative; or second, you can introduce new parameters to nudge the character back on track. For me, the key scenes are generally about a feeling, and so the details are less important than the emotional weight, so I usually go the first route and try to figure out what new key scene will deliver the emotional weight of the one I’d wanted before my character went off on their own path. I feel that this makes for more engaging and believable stories, rather than trying to force a character along a path we think will be neat. But there’s an art to the second path as well, because it forces you to ask the question “what would have to happen for this character to make that choice?” and then set up that exact scenario. Sometimes (this has happened to me) you can’t see any way the character would do the thing they’re supposed to, and then you have to (or anyway, I had to) rewrite the story.

The fact that you’re worried about making your story feel fluid means that you have a sense for that sort of thing. Don’t be afraid to follow it! Write what naturally would happen next, and let editor-you worry about how to massage it into a coherent story.

1. There are artful ways to do infodumps, and certain genres (fantasy and SF notably) whose readers are more forgiving of them.