Getting from here to there painlessly.

 

Some writers seem to have a hard time of getting their character from point A to point Z without showing everything they did in between. You know the kind of stories I mean. They go something like this:

 

Jane’s alarm clock woke her with its annoying buzz. She smacked the top of the clock and sent it sailing across the room. She threw back the covers and slid her legs over the side of the bed. She slipped her feet into her fuzzy slippers and padded across the floor.

 

She opened the door quietly and trudged down the long hallway. She turned at the end of the hall and entered the kitchen. She filled the teakettle and put it on the stove. While she waited for the kettle to heat she got out her favorite cup and dropped a teabag in it. She sat at the kitchen table and tried to decide what she should do the rest of the day. (123 words)

 

This is fine if you want to show that her life is boring and that she does the same boring things each day. The problem with this is that if your reader knows she’s drinking tea, then they would already know everything that happened up to that point.

 

However, if you want to get the action going and get into the interesting part of the story, we don’t need to know all of that.

 

You could just cut it to: While Jane waited for the teakettle to boil, she sat at the kitchen table and tried to decide what she should do the rest of the day. (27 words)

 

This is better, but again, the reader doesn’t need to be told that she waited for the teakettle to boil.

 

In fact, you could cut it down even more:

Jane sipped her tea while she tried to decide what to do the rest of the day. (17 words)

 

We’ve cut 106 words from the original and we still know that Jane is drinking tea and trying to decide what to do the rest of the day.

 

I think one reason why so many people have trouble writing an interesting story is because they don’t really understand what a writer is, or what they do.