The working definition
A transition is the narrative material, however brief, that carries a reader across a gap in time, place, viewpoint or scale, answering her implicit questions of when, where and whose vantage in as many words as the gap requires. It comprises the last words before the gap and the first words after it, and it may be a paragraph long, a clause long, or absent.
Four phrases do the work. However brief means that a transition of no bridging words is still one: white space followed at once by new material hands the whole job to the new unit’s opening sentence, which is a choice with costs. The last words before the gap means that a join is a departure problem as often as an arrival problem, since the final sentence of the outgoing unit decides how much the incoming one has to supply. When, where and whose vantage are not an arbitrary list; with two additions they are the dimensions that readers can be shown to track, which How It Works sets out. And as the gap requires places the requirement in the gap, not in the writer’s habits.
A join is this book’s general word for any point at which one narrative unit ends and another begins: a paragraph break that changes the subject, a scene break, a chapter break, a part break. The same logic governs joins at every scale, from a paragraph break inside a scene, which usually needs no orientation, to a new part, which may cross decades. The chapter treats the scene-to-scene and chapter-to-chapter scales as primary, because that is where drafts most often go wrong. For revision, the serviceable unit of size is the number of words spent before the new unit’s own business begins: none for a hard cut, six to twenty for a light bridge, a paragraph for a summary, and above about three hundred words a bridging passage that has become a small unit in its own right and should be judged as one.
The term most often confused: the scene break
A scene break is a typographic device: a blank line, or a visible mark such as a dinkus (three spaced asterisks, or a printer’s ornament) or the older asterism (⁂). A transition is a piece of writing. The break is the signal that a gap exists; the transition is what pays for crossing it; and inserting the signal does not discharge the obligation. Confusing the two produces two opposite errors in drafts. In the first, the writer inserts white space and believes the work is done, so the new scene opens on an unnamed pronoun in an unnamed place and the reader has to go back; the failure patterns call this the orphaned cut. In the second, the writer inserts white space wherever anything changes, including gaps of ninety seconds, and the manuscript fills with marks announcing discontinuities the story does not contain. The mark is a claim about size, and a mark that overstates the gap misinforms the reader.
There is a third relation, which competent writers use and rarely name: a transition can cross a large gap with no mark at all. A sentence of habitual summary — All that winter she went in on Thursdays — moves a paragraph from one Tuesday to the following spring without a break on the page. The mark and the transition are independent variables.
Adjacent terms
A bridge is the informal word for explicit connective prose; here it names one technique among six. A cut, from film, is an instantaneous change of vantage, and How It Works explains why the word misleads when taken literally in prose. Anachrony, Gérard Genette’s term for any discord between the order of events in the story and the order of their telling, covers the flashback and the flash-forward. Simultaneity is two threads occupying the same story time, which prose has no grammatical form for and which readers, unless told, read as sequence.
What this chapter leaves to others
The chapter assumes that each gap is where it should be and asks how to cross it. Where to place a break, and how to end a unit so that the reader turns the page, belong to The Chapter Break (Chapter 6). Which minds a novel may enter, and on what terms, belong to The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13); here the change of viewpoint is treated only as a transition with a high cost. A transition backwards in time incurs a second cost, the reader’s reluctance to invest in material whose relevance is not yet established, and the cutaway therefore has its own chapter, Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7). The architecture of a whole book built on more than one timeline is Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture (Chapter 8). The book’s first transition, from the world into the text, has no near side and belongs to The Opening Pages (Chapter 9) and The Prologue (Chapter 10); the last, out of the text, belongs to The Ending (Chapter 16).
See also: the Reference definitions, with a table of scales and a fuller list of adjacent terms; The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1), on the continuum from scene to summary.