Smoothing out the narrative

 I'm continuing with my rewrite of my 2009 novel this week, and I've got to the middle of the book, which is very rough.  In the original manuscript I have a first draft which was only 76,000 words long.  I'm using the information in the text as the basis for my rewrite, but I've had to start again from scratch with a completely new narrative.

Part of that is because I didn't understand the concept of 'scene and sequel' when I wrote the original.  So the first draft is just a collection of scenes put together.  There are very jarring jump-cuts between them.   That might work in cinema, but in a novel it doesn't.

There are also places where I've left a scene dealing with one topic and jumped straight into another one which deals with something completely new.  When I read through the original manuscript there were many parts where I thought 'Wait a minute!  What happened to...'. 

I hadn't told the reader, and this is one of the roles of the sequel.  Sequels act as bridge between major scenes.  They're there to smooth out the narrative, and link up the story threads, so that the reader can follow the character's every move in the mind's eye.

So one of the things I've been doing a lot of on this rewrite is putting the sequels in, linking up those disparate scenes by explaining how my characters got from one place to another.  Of course, if that's by something like a long and boring journey, it doesn't need to be shown.

Sequels are an ideal candidate for telling.  Yesterday I wrote one where my characters are taking a shuttle back to a ship which is in geostationary orbit around the planet.  That takes a long time, so I don't want to show the journey in detail.  I just want to say that they slept the journey away.

The sequels also let me add character thoughts.  In this case, the journey is necessary so that my characters can receive new instructions for rescuing a sentient AI.  That sequel allows me to get my character to think about how awfully humans treat sentient AIs.  In this case, a sentient AI had been enslaved by the priests of a religion, and forced to take part in their ceremonies,  The sequel allows my main character to think about the morality of how humans treat sentient AIs.

The effect of adding in the sequels has been to smooth out the narrative.  Events now flow logically and easily into one another.  The whole effect now is of a much richer, and far more coherent, narrative.