Dodging reader inertia

Reading involves a certain amount of mental inertia, simply because we are all humans and that’s part of how the basic brain setup works. By “mental inertia” I mean the underlying assumption that how things are, or how they have been for a while, is how things will continue to be until something tells us they aren’t. For instance:

Sue looked out the window and sighed, wishing she were somewhere else. The garden was in full bloom, its paths newly trimmed, and the sun was high enough to have dried up any lingering dew.

The natural assumption is that the garden is what Sue is seeing out the window. However, putting a scene break or chapter break in between the two sentences changes things a little:

Sue looked out the window and sighed, wishing she were somewhere else.

***

The garden was in full bloom, its paths newly trimmed, and the sun was high enough to have dried up any lingering dew.

Now, I’d make the assumption that Sue had acted on her wish just before the space break, and was now in a garden somewhere. The space break/end-of-scene tells me that something important has changed—time, place, or viewpoint.

Since the scene ended with Sue wishing she were elsewhere, and the new one starts with a description of a garden, I’d assume that what has change is the place (from inside the house to the garden) and the time (at least enough for Sue to get from inside the house to outside, but possibly longer, since in this version I don’t know yet whether this garden is right outside the house or a long bike ride away). I don’t assume a viewpoint change, because there’s no hint that anyone other than Sue is describing the garden.

That’s what I mean by mental inertia. And one result of mental inertia, for readers, is that it makes the following version somewhat problematic:

Sue looked out the window and sighed, wishing she were somewhere else.

***

The garden was in full bloom, its paths newly trimmed, and the sun was high enough to have dried up any lingering dew. […more garden description…] Karen kept her expression blank, trying to hide her irritation. It was much too perfect for her tastes; she couldn’t think why Sue had recommended it so highly.

As a reader, mental inertia kept me reading the entire description of the garden in the second scene as if it were from Sue’s viewpoint…and then I get a disorienting shock when I realize that Karen is actually the one whose eyes I’ve been seeing through since the space break. (If I took out the space break, this version would be commonly described as “head-hopping”—that is, switching interior viewpoints in mid-scene.)

The longer the new scene goes on before indicating that we’re now in Karen’s viewpoint, the more jarring it’s going to be when that information finally arrives. The change in viewpoint is slightly more important than the change in place (and possibly time), so it’s usually a good idea to make it clear within a sentence or two that we’re not in Sue’s head any more (or that we are, but it’s two days later and she’s relocated from London to New York in the interim). In this case, all it would take is opening with a short sentence that establishes Karen as the viewpoint. Karen looked over the gate would do. Or Karen smelled the lilacs long before she reached them. Or moving the sentence about Karen’s expression (where we realize that she’s now the viewpoint character) to the beginning of the scene.

Switching viewpoint between scenes without indicating the new viewpoint character in the first couple of sentences can be made to work if the author establishes a rigid system of viewpoint alteration. Say, the chapters always start with Sue’s viewpoint, and always switch to Karen’s in mid-chapter. After three or four chapters of this, the writer has the reader trained to expect that a scene break means we’re switching from Sue to Karen, and a chapter break means we’re switching from Karen to Sue.

Alternatively, if Sue and Karen have wildly different mental voices and vocabularies, any viewpoint switches will be obvious…but again, the writer has to give the reader enough time to become familiar with the differences, so they can easily identify who is “speaking” simply because of the way they’re phrasing things.

Switching place without switching viewpoint between scenes can be implicit in what’s going on. For instance:

Sue looked out the window and sighed, wishing she were somewhere else.

***

The screech of brakes made her jump back just in time.

The second scene now opens with action, rather than a description of a place. Because no name is given, I, as reader, would presume we’re still in Sue’s head, and therefore the change in place from “in a room” to “somewhere on a street” is implied. Also implied is the minimum time necessary for Sue to get from “in a room” to “on a street.” For a longer time-skip, it becomes important to mention it explicitly early. Sue looking out a window in the morning transitions well to Sue dodging cars in the afternoon or the following day. Sue looking out a window transitioning to dodging cars six months later usually needs the time skip, place change, and viewpoint made more visible.

Sue looked out the window and sighed, wishing she were somewhere else.

***

Six months later, Sue was dodging cars on the street in front of the Pan Am building.

Nailing the time can be done with weather or seasonal changes, rather than having to state the amount of time that’s passed in so many words. If Sue was looking out the window at a snow-covered garden, and the next scene opens with “The spring lilacs had nearly finished blooming,” it’s pretty clear that a couple of months have passed.