Today I woke up before my alarm, waited for the alarm to go off, swiped so it went to snooze, daydreamed, swiped again, debated getting up, swiped again, finally got up to go to the bathroom. Debated crawling into bed again when the alarm went off, annoying me enough to get dress. I had laid out the clothes the night before.
***
I arrived at work on time.
So … too much description? Did I need to list all the swipes?
Or was there too little description? After all, eating breakfast, starting the car, backing out of the driveway, and the commute are all missing. They won’t have anything to do with the story or character development, but they do get me from bed to work. How else would I show that?
The magic of three stars for a scene skip.
The plot written by an author highlights the manuscript. Like extracting a story out from child. What did we do first? “We went to the zoo.” Then what? “We got cotton candy.” Anything else. “Monkeys!!!!” All that other stuff, grandma (or the reader) doesn’t need to know.
But how to indicate the scene jumps?
Magic three stars.
A great, great article on the topic is “Skipping Time” by Carrie Ryan (Magical Words 3/10/2011):