Missed connections - importance of writing good transitions

A dearth of good transitions creates lapses in logic and means busy readers won't bother to read through a story--or your magazine.

My friends who are editors end writing professors have a new favorite game: lamenting the death of the transition. They wail about the World Wide Web, where an interview is often translated into hypertext, and the audience--not the writer--decides how to move from one idea to the next. They bemoan the influence of the 6 o'clock news, where segments on mothers losing their children to drive-by shootings are segued into Brian with the sports by the happy patter of tinny announcers. They gnash their teeth over a new generation of writers, many of whom barrage readers with idea fragments and "factoids" instead of creating solid, seamless stories that deliver meaning and context.

My friends may be whiny, but they're right: Transitions do seem to be taking a bashing these days.

The problem is, you can't have good magazine writing without transitions. Readers rely on magazines to create order from the chaos of life. As connectors of ideas, transitions provide the context and meaning our readers seek. Further, transitions are an important weapon in the battle for the busy reader's time because they keep readers moving through the story, and the book.

How can magazine editors resurrect the dying art of the transition? Here are a few strategies to consider and use.

Transitions can be structural clues

When a story is well organized, transitions are easy to write. That's because the copy flows logically from one idea to the next. But when a story is poorly structured, getting from here to there is a stretch. After all, even the best transitions can't patch over gaping holes left by iffy organization and fuzzy logic.

"Words do not create transition," writes Peter Jacobi in The Magazine Article: How to Think It, Plan It, Write It. "Ideas do."

You can use Jacobi's wisdom in the editing process. Find the illogical leaps in the story you're editing. Chances are, each will be like a red flag flapping on top of a poor linkage of ideas. These forced transitions are clues that can lead you to weak story design, stream-of-consciousness thinking and less-than-logical logic. Before you waste valuable minutes finessing the transitional symptom, work with the writer to fix the underlying structure that's causing the problem.

Do that, and your magazine won't suffer from what 10n Franklin, author of Writing for Story, calls the "River City"--a reference to the illogical leaps the main character in The Music Man makes when he sings: "Ya got trouble, folks, right here in River City. Trouble with a capital `T.' And that rhymes with `P.' And that stands for pool!"

Choose the right transition

Once you feel comfortable that the story you're editing is back on firm structural ground, you can analyze and, if necessary, tweak the transitions themselves. The key in this stage of the editing process is to understand the two kinds of transitions, internal and external, and how to handle them to pull the reader through the story.

The internal, or small, transition moves you from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph, from idea to idea. These are the now's, the later's, the after that's; the however's, yet's and but's; the thus's, the still's, the nevertheless's. These copy connectors keep your story from feeling like a series of fits and starts. They help information flow seamlessly as sentence merges into sentence, paragraph into paragraph, idea into idea.

As an editor, you may need to work on these internal transitions. There are several ways to do the job:

* Mend the rifts. To make sure the story you're editing flows smoothly from one point to the next, search the copy for abrupt pivots and jarring shifts. Then help the reader navigate these twists and turns with transitions. You can compare and contrast ("However/Yet/Still"), or you can move chronologically ("In 1985/A few years later/In the future"), geographically ("In the capital/Meanwhile, back in Little Rock") or sequentially ("First/Second/Third").

Repeating a key word or phrase also makes an elegant connection. (From Time: "'In a national election, I would expect abortion to be one of the second-tier issues, not a top-tier burning one.' On the lower tiers, where the daily life of the nation is conducted, abortion is sure to remain a burning issue.")

To strengthen that repetition, take the advice of writing guru Don Ranly and use an adjectival pronoun (this, that, these) followed by the repeated noun. ("The CEO has become known for a get-out-there-with-the-folks management style. That style is coming in handy these days as ...") Ranly points out that using the pronoun alone makes it more difficult for readers to follow the writer's train of thought.

You might also use a one- or two-word paragraph to pivot the story neatly from one idea into the next.

Try it.

* Keep it conversational. I work with editors who "However," "While" and "In addition to" copy to death. But I remain a big believer in starting sentences with "And" or "But." It's casual and conversational. It's the way we communicate in real life. And it can sap the stuffiness right out of a subject or publication.

* Make it invisible. Many magazine writers consider the internal transition an opportunity to show how creatively they can write. Because the transition itself doesn't need to carry a lot of information, it leaves a little wiggle room for literary cartwheels. Problem is, the best internal transitions are nearly invisible. If readers notice internal transitions, they may become distracted from the substance of the story or its narrative line. And a reader's attention, once lost, isn't easy to reclaim.

A structured whole

Holding the reader's attention is the job of the second kind of transition--the external, or large, transition. These help move the reader from section to section, from big theme to big theme. They need to be more dramatic and creative than internal transitions because they have to work harder. They must thrust the reader from a natural stopping point--the end of one section--into the next section.

The best external transitions conclude what has gone before but--and this is the key--hint at what is to come. They should have a feeling of forward movement because they're designed to propel the reader into the next part of the story. To do so, external transitions promise the reader that something intriguing is just around the corner. (It goes without saying, I'm sure, that the story must make good on that promise. Cliffhangers followed by nonevents lose reader interest--and respect--in a hurry.)

Here's how it works, from a rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story published in Ingram's Magazine:

"Russell had found fortune. Now he wanted fame. Don Keough's call couldn't have come at a better time."

One of the best ways to polish external transitions like these is to study the last sentences in chapters of mystery novels. These are the "But that was before we found the body in the bathtub" lines. The idea is to write something that's so provocative, the reader can't stop reading. Readers should respond to external transitions by saying, "I'll just read until they find that body in the bathtub."

Small promises from you ("A body in the bathtub is just around the corner") and small commitments from your reader ("I'll just read until they find it") might get that tired, busy reader to stay with your story to the very end.

And that, after all, is one goal of good transitions.

ANN WYLIE president of Kansas City, Missouri-based Wylie Communications, is a trainer who helps writers and editors polish their skills.

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