Writing Montage in Novels

Question

I have a similar question as the one asked in 'How to write montages in prose? (fantasy novel)' however, there has been no answer in this and it is far too general.

The question I wish to ask is; Are there any specific techniques that you can use to write a montage, or a short sequence of events that take place over a period of time, in a novel?

For example, how would you write a piece of fiction that skims over a period of time but has scattered pieces of important information that is necessary for the future of the plot, may it be in the form of a work montage, training montage, or just an acceleration in time that would be too tedious to explain in detail due to repetition, but still have significant events that occur that are out of place?

Edit: To elaborate more on my specific issue; one of my characters is residing in a village to raise funds - and during this period, he sees injustices performed on villagers such as unfair extortion of taxes, bullying by more powerful beings, etc. How would I be able to string these in, as I don't want to include tedious events such as him going around helping out with farming, learning how to hunt, etc.? I've been considering including short chapters only a few paragraphs long in a sort of diary format, however I don't feel as if this would fit the third person style of writing I'm going for.

Answer 1

I really think people are much too obsessed with not telling. Many of the novels I enjoy most, tell. Lots.

If you have, for example, a group of characters recovering from a fight, just friggin' say so:

For the next three weeks we stayed in camp and recovered from our wounds.

Really, please don't show me three weeks of recovering! I don't want to know what they ate and whether they brushed their teeth. Make it one sentence and be done with it. Thank you.

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Re: Your edit

If something happens during the three weeks, you summarize ("tell") the week until that something happens, then narrate what happens as expansively as you do the rest of your novel ("show") and then summarize the remainder again.

Think of it this way: You constantly summarize uninteresting periods of time, but you probably don't notice it yourself. For example, when your characters are sleeping you don't "show" that but simply leave it out: The next morning.... But if a character wakes up during the night you continue your narrative in the middle of the night in stead of the next morning: I woke up around midnight....

Your problem, as I see it, is that you think of that long period in your novel as a whole that you want to summarize, but have some things happening during this "summary" that you want to show in more detail, but don't know how. The solution is to stop thinking of the whole period.

Your think:

--------------long period of time------------------
    event A                           event B

You should think:

---period A---event A---period B---event B---period C---

What you have is not one long period that you summarize and have to break out of, but a normal narrative with three unimportant periods (like nights) that you summarize.

Like this:

For the next three weeks we stayed in camp and recovered from our wounds. In the second week, one morning John was torn from his lazy revery by... The next week all was quiet again, until finally everyone was healed and itching to fight.

If your characters do not act (that is, do not break their inactivity) but only observe certain things, then you don't need to break your summary ("telling") and can simply tell what they saw:

For the next three weeks we stayed in camp and recovered from our wounds. During that time we saw the villagers raise unfair taxes and many other injustices, and they all served to steel our resolve to overcome Lord Dark. So when we were finally healed and ready to fight again, we...

Of course this is just a quick example, and you can go into much more detail in such a summary. There is nothing wrong with a few paragraphs of it. That's no different than taking some time to describe the setting or to provide a character's backstory.

Answer 2

In The Internet President: None of the Above, I create the equivalent of montage as a series of short chapters to cover campaigning for president. I enter each scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible. Leave a taste and let the reader's imagination fill in the rest. This worked for me because my book was written in a terse cinematic writing style. If your pacing is slower, this technique may not work as well.

I use one chapter per scene, even if it's a one-page transition. If you're using multiple scenes in a chapter with separators, then put a number of short vignettes in a chapter. Summarize what you can. Beowulf reflected fifty years in a single sentence.

Answer 3

I'm currently re-writing a story that was originally a screen play as prose. Two parts of the screen play are montages, each depicting the development of a stage in the relationship between two of the characters.

After giving it due consideration, I decided to rewrite each montage into a continuous narrative.

Now that I think about it, I suspect that montages are the live action equivalent of "telling" in prose, a way of saying, "this sort of thing happens here."

Answer 4

If you are drawing a house, and you want to convey a sense of the texture and detail of the building material used, you can draw three bricks in the middle of an expanse of wall. You don't have to draw all the bricks in the whole wall.

Pick out the bricks you want to draw; talk about them. You can situate them in time rather vaguely. You don't have to spread the events or incidents out uniformly. In other words, you don't have to put one incident in the first week, the second in the second, etc. Some possible adverbs are: During this time, as time wore on, one day, one morning.

A totally different possible approach is to have separators between vignettes. The separator could be a chunk of blank space, or a little squiggle or other symbol. I've seen whole books written this way.

Even if you don't want to use this approach in your final version, you could at least use it for your first draft. Once you've written the vignettes as separate sections, it may be easier to connect them.

Answer 5

My usual approach is a change of format to a periodical:

• journal entries
• newspaper headlines
• computer logs
• teacher's notes
• emails with progress reports

Sometimes, I may go with multiple 1-2 short paragraphs * * * section breaks, especially humorous. Often using "blind dialogue" (no speaker tags, who says what, letting the reader guess the speakers from the context - recognizing them by their failures.)

Answer 6

I approach it as if it were a film montage, literally. My protagonist is a firefighter who just got divorced and is reorganizing his life and getting ready for a legal battle over the child custody, while preparing an exam for another job, so he can spend more time with his kid. The thing is, usually a couple of months pass between the demand for a divorce and the first meeting with the judge (at least in Spain). I cannot just skip those two months, as there are scattered events that do matter. So I ended up with something like this: "...he studied for the exam; he fought against a forest fire for 3 nights, he presented himself to the exam exhausted and went out no sure if he would pass it; he dedicated his day off to visit flats to rent, but found nothing suitable for raising a kid; he studied for his next exam; he looked for a layer and met one, he blablabla..." As you can see, it leaves the feeling that time is passing, that weeks are passing. NOTE: I have only included plot related elements!

Answer 7

Do a time skip to a later point in time where a summary of the events that happened during the skipped period come up naturally.

You can do that in form of an internal monologue where a character muses about the events of the past years, or you can do it in form of a dialog between two characters where they talk about the past events.