Transitioning

Over the holiday weekend, my husband and I went to the high school graduation party of a good friend's daughter. And it got me to thinking about transitions. Just one year ago, we were hosting such a party for my younger son--he's now home from his first year at college and he's different. Not better or worse, just different. He's made the transition and it shows. (This picture is from last August when we moved him into his dorm. You don't want to see what it looked like when I picked him up two weeks ago.)

And that's what transitions do--move people forward or towards a new beginning; sometimes forcibly, sometimes painlessly. And at some point, when we're going through such a change, we realize there's no going back.

I've been thinking about this with my novel-in-progress. Sometimes, I move my characters forward very incrementally--from day to day, for example, and other times I'm leaping them forward by weeks or months (or, in the case of one of my two narrative lines, anywhere from 1958-1971 and not always in chronological order). And the transitioning is mostly by instinct, by feel (or leap of faith!). And while I worried some about this, I'm finding, as I reread and edit, that the transitions work. Sometimes the two narratives are very closely linked, other times not at all, but in the big picture, the connections become clear and the characters become who they are going to be --both for themselves and for the reader.

And by the end of the draft, I know that, just like my son in his freshman year of college, the characters will have changed; they'll be further along on their way to becoming who they were meant to be, and I'll have had the pleasure of watching it all evolve. And, as I edit and revise and rewrite, I'll help polish them (sort of like I'm hoping to do with my son this summer).