Few things capture the swelling adventurousness found in both reality and fiction as a journey, a trek, a voyage, etc. Baked into the concept is a well-defined ultimate goal shown visually and expressed emotionally. In the remaining distance lays tension. The pace per chapter measured by physical progress. The overall setting established as each location changes the scenery and tone, each with its own conflict for the adventurers to tackle. All this makes it far too enticing to truncate the travels between these points with the brief aside, “They went from [here] to [there].” Tell the audience the characters entered new location without fuss at the expense of everything gained during that leg of the journey. There in lays two forces to weigh: How much should you show of the journey and how fast should you get on with the story?
Starting with the latter, the central argument is pacing. In film it’s known as “Back at the farm” where you exit one scene after it can no longer advance the plot and jump into the next scene directly where it begins to advance the plot. The audience has missed nothing of substance and the story continuously advances. It’s a vital tool that will be used in almost every story because most can’t follow a character’s or characters’ every movement, thought, word, breath, and blink. Contrary to The Truman Show, watching someone’s every waking and non-waking moment gets tedious pretty fast. It’s a simple guideline that crashes onto a rocky shore if applied incorrectly.
Strictly jumping from one location on the pathed map to another is a common contributor to slideshow syndrome. Here the audience loses interest due to the adlib sense to each scene. It starts with arriving in a new location. Then external conflict is introduced. The protagonists resolve the conflict. They take one step out of the location towards the next and chapter ends. You can play around a bit in the middle but the openings and endings will feel repetitive before too long. That is to say nothing of issues with character progression when there’s no downtime. If two romantically involved characters get into a spat in one chapter and pop up in the next in the same state it breaches the suspension of disbelief to accept they didn’t talk or interact with one another the entire time and the relationship is no better or worse for it. If these circumstances do change from one chapter to the next, then what did the audience just miss out on when the story went back to the farm?
This is where it’s important to show the journey the characters are taking. The downtime, the passage between point A and point B where the external conflict takes a backseat to the characters’ internal conflict and interpersonal relationships. It’s difficult to ignore these scenes for in them characters are fleshed out and made relatable and likable. The characters, for the benefit of themselves and the audience, get to talk openly without the plot shoving them out of conversation.
This travel spell also allows exploration of the setting. Ask yourself how different the travelling would be if it were carried out by car, RV, horse drawn wagon, plane, spaceship, boat, or submarine. Just with that information you get a general time period but you can also explore the culture and shape the type of story told (RV road trip, large van for the unknown touring band). I was surprised to learn that dirt roads back in the horse and cart days were often neglected and weathered to where the wheels didn’t travel atop the road but rather several inches down into ruts, like railroad tracks, carved out by previous carts. Sometimes diverted rivers leave completely vertical drops in the middle of the road. Imagine the travelers trying to make their way through a mist and spontaneously falling six feet back onto the road. Or, have the demarcation between two countries be where a dirt road meets a cobblestone road to foreshadow their wealth disparity. Maybe the nearest cobblestones are defaced with knife scratched graffiti. That adds color to the setting.
However, these scenes drag down the story when the audience doesn’t get anything out of them. The worst-case scenario is to intersperse the point A to point B legs and have them be just a series of events that happen in a sequence. When the characters solve a logistical problem, the focus shouldn’t be on the problem but how the characters respond. Do they panic? Does one attempt a brute force solution while another sketches a plan in the dirt? Does the optimist find opportunity in the conflict? Likewise, if the characters are just talking without immediate conflict ask if what they’re talking about is interesting? Is it favorite flavor of ice cream levels of hack? Does the conversation match their level of familiarity at the given point in the story? Are lingering questions about romantic relationships at least acknowledged if not conveyed? Does the conversation match the tone? What people want is to better know the characters by their actions and speech while being entertained. For example, let’s say the characters need to narrow the wagon wheels to fit into the road’s ruts. Even if they hop out and immediately form an assembly line to fix the issue, no fuss, no muss, you can make that comedic by having a newcomer or fish out of water play drop jawed witness and hapless helper to their well-oiled machine.
Remember if it doesn’t advance the plot, develop the characters, or expand the setting, cut it (and hopefully you can do at least two of those simultaneously when the plot takes a backseat). That said, here’s a few quick rules of thumb to apply in these stories. Don’t have two or more travel scenes in a row unless you’re writing a travel log like Lewis and Clark (although those have lost pull in an interconnected world) or the entire story lays in the themes offered by travel (i.e., something akin to Easy Rider). Save the travel chapters for after large crests of rising action to offer breathing room and when there’s value in the characters talking such as after a dramatic revelation. When you want to explore a troubled character, few things offer as much introspection as an open, lonely road. Have different physical challenges plague the traveler(s) rather than them dealing with rain at three separate points in the story. First rain, then mist, then a fallen tree, a river, a mountain, a heard of elephants, bandits, pirates, and so on. Good luck and happy trails.
Colin Klawans 