Traveling Characters

Getting characters from place to place in your story is a tricky thing. Like dialog, description must move the plot, or it risks dragging your readers along in the dust. So, as a writer, you must constantly ask yourself, is describing this trek from point A to point B worth it to my reader? Does something happen along the way to create tension, add to the conflict, or show a character’s evolving nature? If not, then just say it happened. “After four day’s travel, the group arrived” and so on. There is nothing worse than dawn to dusk story telling. Very young writers will do this. It’s called bed-to-bed writing and starts with getting up in the morning, documenting every detail of the day, and ending when they turn in at night. Readers don’t need to know every detail. They are smart enough to assume certain things happen. What they want to know is how is this story moving along? They want to know the key events that will add up to be important in the end. If, in your first draft, you’re not sure yourself – which sometimes happens – remember, it is a draft. You can always go back and eliminate things and add things.