Smoothing out the story

This week I've started on the edit of my recently-rewritten novel, and I'm finding that I need to do a fair bit of smoothing out of the story.  We're often told to bring a story alive by writing a scene through the eyes of the viewpoint characters.  This is a good idea, but we're also told to think of the story as if it was scenes in a movie, and that advice isn't so good.

Visual storytelling makes regular use of jump-cuts between scenes.  That makes sense in a movie, where the running time needs to be kept to a reasonable length and there's pressure to keep the pace up.  But in a novel, which takes several hours to read, it doesn't make such good sense.  The pace of reading a novel is slower, and we often do it in several different chunks.

Movies can't go deep into a character's thoughts easily, but often that's what we want to do in a novel.  Especially if we have a character who completely changes their thoughts, beliefs, or actions by the end of the story.

To make that kind of change plausible we need to show how the character thinks and feels, and that involves writing that character's internal dialogue. The reader wants to see a logical progression from the character at the beginning of the story to the person they've become at the end.  If we have too many jump-cuts in our novel we risk leaving the reader feeling dissatisfied.

The other kind of smoothing I always need to do is to work in enough description of the setting and the situation which the characters find themselves in.  I have a bad habit of jumping right into a scene without explaining how the characters got there.  I'll show a scene, then jump-cut to the next one.  

Often a large chunk of time has elapsed between the two scenes, which isn't accounted for.  I often leave my characters at the end of a scene in one location, then jump-cut to a completely new one.  This can be very jarring, and what I have to do is smooth out the story by adding a brief tell section to cover that change in location.

I'm getting better at spotting when I've done this, but even so every edit of one of my novels includes a substantial amount of smoothing out the story.