Shouts From Down Under

From A to B should be so simple, but there's one in every...

Sometimes I think that the Northern Territory should definitely host the Darwin Awards, as a sort of hat-tipping nod towards their city of the same name.
Blame it on the heat, and not just the cerebral malfunctions caused by brain-fry, but the coolant used in quantities to alleviate this overheating.

http://www.ntnews.com.au/video/id-15eDdpazpgKeZugpE4RboarUhyCASGRO/Boating-fool-...

You'd think there would surely be easier ways to move from here to there, from left to right, from one mode to another, and even from life to death, if that were your determined purpose. Yes, it would be the ultimate comedian's way to go, and I'm sure there'd be lots of jokes about it at the local pub wake in his name.

http://theeditorsblog.net/2010/12/16/mastering-scene-transitions/

And so it is with scenes in writing. Moving along was never so clear cut. I was helped a lot by the advice given in this essay, and my "idea" of scene changes, coupled with a spot of head hopping, seems to be not such a disaster as I once thought.

If I just separate these quick scene changes, and Point Of View changes, with a nasty looking announcement of time moving along, a fat bold digital clock showing how much the reader should be reminded of suspense ramping on up-- if I do this well, then the head hopping becomes a bonus factor, not a handbrake.

The time clock scene transition seems like a swish of the windscreen wipers, or a flashing arm across the inside of a foggy window, rag wiping away the offending condensation, so that clarity is restored, and the reader feels another blow to their brow. They know that something is coming. Something is coming at an increasing rate of knots, and the something has to be bad.

The scene swapping and head hopping should clang in Times New Roman, Normal + Bold Size 12, like the mournful, insistent tolling of a medieval church bell, ringing out the trudging steps of inescapable doom that approach; unstoppable and frightening is the intention of this technique.

Well, I honestly don't know if this works, but it seemed to for me. Strange, though, how well you think you've researched facts, spanning years, and find many conflicting records and opinions on something so basic as a time. Some of the earliest records I could find, up to the stuff supposedly verified on Wikipedia and Chernobyl Gallery.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter 1.

*****

She climbed to their apartment under stair lights that were uncharacteristically bright, her legs aching and her mind hardly registering the chattering overrun frequency of the filaments in their glass globes. The one near their door at the top of their flight had been blown for weeks. She would have to complain to maintenance for the thousandth time.

Time: 01:19

In their room, she quickly restored order, fixing the mess left by their hasty exit only minutes ago, treading on a couple of unseen pyrizhky she’d dropped in panic earlier, squashed under the table. She had forgotten to check for mail in their post box downstairs in the entrance foyer, and she put off returning there until daylight hours.
The concierge was дєрмо, a creep who didn’t meet her eyes, his stare drawn lower. They were hoping for another letter from Il’ya. Yuri was warm and asleep, and she felt so exhausted she fell into the deepest, most peaceful slumber she’d had for a long time…

Time: 01:23:58

…And the Earth changed irreversibly, eternity before and eternity after, fixed as a pylon against the tides of human life and the flickering moments of their fast-forwarded generation.

The building shuddered and Anna leapt from the bed, her mind sluggish and uncomprehending, seeing the sky flash magnesium white against the walls, and from the window she heard a muffled rumbling noise, felt the concrete floor rise and drop, surfing on an earthen shock wave that whipped across three kilometres from the direction of the power plant. She immediately pictured a thunderstorm, but the next moment, she felt the ground that wrapped around Pripyat’s foundations shake and the wide windows vibrated in their frames. There were, occasionally, noises from the plant. The thunder of storms now and then was to be expected. But this... Was this a war?

*****

So, is the time of the explosion that I used incorrect?

Here's what this link says about it;
http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/

01:23:44 – Explosion.

The reactor reaches 120 times its full power. All the radioactive fuel disintegrates, and pressure from all of the excess steam which was supposed to go to the turbines broke every one of the pressure tubes leading to an explosion.

But this site says this;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Experiment_and_explosion

At 1:23:40, as recorded by the SKALA centralized control system, an emergency shutdown of the reactor, which inadvertently triggered the explosion, was initiated
This,
A few seconds after the start of the SCRAM, the graphite rod tips entered the fuel pile. A massive power spike occurred, and the core overheated, causing some of the fuel rods to fracture, blocking the control rod columns and jamming the control rods at one-third insertion, with the graphite tips in the middle of the core. Within three seconds the reactor output rose above 530 MW
And this;
A second, more powerful explosion occurred about two or three seconds after the first;

Elena Filatova wrote about this in 2003, relating her trips through the zone that were later claimed to be a hoax. She just said that accident occurred shortly after 1:23 AM.
www.elenafilatova.com

Dad is nuclear physicist, and he has educated me about many things. He is much more worried about the speed my bike travels than about the direction I point it.

My trips to Chernobyl are not like a walk in the park, but the risk can be managed. Sometimes I go for rides alone, sometimes with pillion passenger, but never in company with any other vehicle, because I do not want anyone to raise dust in front of me

Getting back to the point I've been trying to get across here, transitions between scenes, you can see what happens over time to scenes of life, of real life and the facts relevant to these scenes. Time has an effect, and the transition only becomes more foggy the longer you wait.

We don't want the transitions in our scene changes to be foggy, but I feel we do want to have a desired effect on our reader, caused by the transition.

When reviewing other people's stories or poems etc, keep in mind that just because you think it breaks a rule, or bends "the done thing", study carefully what effect is has on you. This may be deliberate, on the part of the writer, and not a mistake.

Yes, it may bend or break the established rules, but if it makes you feel a certain way, and doesn't "wake you up" from the immersion of the story, then I think it's something to leave as it is.

I'm glad that writing is like that, and not a mathematical equation. Remember transposition? One side has to balance the other...

Well, in writing, DOES IT? How about if the writer wants to tip the reader base over apex off the page? What if they want that shocking event in the story to hit the reader like a brick between the eyes?

So think about this the next time you think a writer has stuffed up. Maybe it's subtle. Maybe its you who doesn't get it.

Or maybe I'll never get published for being such a rebel, non-conformist and rule breaker. We could be propping up our self image and self importance with false ego.

Sometimes don't you just want to shout at someone to make up their minds? Either one thing or the other, please, for goodness sake!

In case you wondered how I got the idea for this blog about transition, and making up our minds?



After searching this strange set of letters, NT ENG, in Google, I came up with Northern Territory Engineering, and hence, the news article about the crazy man on the speed boat, who thought he was so cool with his "lake transition" between scenes. Others were not so impressed. The crocodiles wouldn't have argued about his style

Whatever it is, I feel that scene transition today will probably be transitory as a flock of migratory Albatross. Here, popular, acceptable, right, correct, today...gone tomorrow.

Sparky