Skipping over characters' major life events

It's been a while since I've read Arcadia, so while I remember the event, I don't remember how I reacted to it, or to the omission of ten years. That said, I don't always think it's a bad idea to do what Groff did.

This event seems huge, it really affects the shape of all their lives.

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Maybe that's it, right there. The event IS huge. Recovering from it, for all of them, requires such a shift in so many ways, that to go through it might have been too much for the book. Perhaps Groff felt that the initial aftermath would have overwhelmed the novel and turned it into something else. Or maybe she felt the more important thing was not how life changed immediately, but how it changed in the long term.

Here's the problem with books---they're only a slice of time in the character's life. It's the crisis of the moment. Too much exposition of the backstory can be distracting. There are events in all of our lives that shape who we become and yes, if a particular event triggers a memory of something profound that happens early in life, it should be introduced in the text. But to do what you suggest of following the chain of events thereafter with Abe would distract drastically from the main plot and get you more interested in the character's past than in their future.

Any editor worth their salt would cut such a scene and suggest the author save it for a short story or a possible prequel for those readers who would want to read about the character's childhood. Maybe such a story/book exists if it's an older release. Have you checked?

What things are important to show in a story depends on the story's focus. Major events may have unfolded in a character's backstory that do not need to be shown in the current story. Whether or not it should be shown depends on what story you want to tell and how much of the immediate fallout actually moves the story. A car accident and subsequent injuries can have severe repercussions, but watching someone lie in a hospital for several weeks and slowly learning to use a prosthetic arm is not something one needs to see in great detail if the story is about, say, the apocalypse that happens afterwards. If it is about learning to use the prosthetic arm and her emotional journey through that particular stage of her life, though, that's a different story.

I haven't read the book you're talking about, so I can't speak to that particular situation But I'm inclined to say it's not cowardice. It could have simply been a decision geared towards concision and focus. Maybe it wasn't the best-executed? Or maybe it just didn't click with you as a reader? (Again, I haven't read it, so I can't say.)

In my case, when I want to skip over things in my stories, it's because I'm sick of harping on a character's emotional state or whatever and I want to get on with the stupid thing. So--laziness or impatience, for me. ETA: (I'm not saying these are good habits, or that it should make it into my final drafts... ) Or sometimes I think I've expounded on something well enough, but I haven't quite hit it hard enough for it to have the effect I meant, which is just a failing of my writing. (Sometimes I hit way too hard, also, and go on and on and on about it...)

But I think cowardice is actually the least likely reason.

Then again, I don't really care about my characters in a particularly emotional sort of way, so. Could just be me.

The timeline of my most recent completes WIP covers four years. During that time period, both main characters have children, but I don't show the birth of either child. Why? Because the two main characters were thousands of miles apart at the time, and the story is about them, together. Instead, I show the mild discomfort each feels when he/she realizes the other has had a child with someone else.

Sometimes major life events simply aren't part the plot; they're just back story.

To the Lighthouse- Spoilers:
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Mrs. Ramsay is the heart the novel, the hinge that connects all the other characters. We spend a substantial part of that first section in her head, and when we look into the minds of other characters, their thoughts often revolve around her. Her death gets one sentence in the midsection of the novel, which abandons the stream-of-consciousness narration of the first section in favour of omniscient impersonal summary. The last part takes place years later, her family finally taking that trip to the Lighthouse they had to cancel in the first part and her friend Lily Briscoe completing that painting of her.

I f*cking love that novel. It's one of my all time favs. There are pages devoted to the measuring of a stocking, and the main character's death gets one clause in parantheses. You might say that's being precious, childishly spiteful in its subversion of expectations, trying too hard to set yourself apart, etc. (I'd think you'd be wrong, but I could see where you're coming from). You can't say it's cowardice.

Because you can't say the novel shies away from death, the awareness of life's transience, inevitable entropy. It's on every page, never far from anyone's mind - the constant fight against time, the struggle to create something - theories, children, art - something that lasts, at least for a little while, beyond your own inevitable oblivion - invading the narrative like the damp invading the family's holiday residence. It's there even in the moments of purest joy. The novel doesn't have to have its own chapter dedicated to Mrs. Ramsay's death, because it's never not about Mrs. Ramsay's death. I found it extremly effective. Probably more effective than a drawn-out deathbed scene.

Now, I haven't read the novel OP is talking about, so it couldn't say how it works there. It's certainly not inconceiveable that some writers like to throw in traumatic events for dramatic effect and then chicken out on properly dealing with the fall-out. (See my main complaint about rape as a plot device, for instance). So maybe that's what happend here and I'd agree that it's a cop-out.

But generally speaking, leaving gaps for readers to fill in themselves can be a very effective strategy. Even when - sometimes precisely when! - these gaps concern major events. Because the act of filling in these gaps can involve the willing reader more intimately in the proceedings than the best narration on the page. It's often the case with Big-L-Literature that the most important things happen between the lines, and contrary to popular belief, that's not just so that English profs can make a living of torturing their students about teasing out the subtext.

sohalt said:

But generally speaking, leaving gaps for readers to fill in themselves can be a very effective strategy. Even when - sometimes precisely when! - these gaps concern major events.

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Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna is even named for its missing part.

I wound up doing it in my current work: I decided that dealing with the aftermath was more important, and letting the reader decide exactly what had happened was probably more effective than detailing it.

kevinwaynewilliams said:

I decided that dealing with the aftermath was more important, and letting the reader decide exactly what had happened was probably more effective than detailing it.

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I think this kind of thing works really well if done right.

In German the technical term for that literary device is Leerstelle. A friend of mine wrote her master thesis on this topic, so I've heard a thing or two about it, I guess.

I originally posted a comment in the wrong thread. I thought I would come back and add my actual two cents about the thread now.

Newdaddy06 said:

You barely understand what has happened (because you see it all reflected in a puddle, and because the language is so opaque).

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I can relate to not understanding what has happened. And sometimes it requires me to read forum posts from people writing about the book to understand. And then I go back and read the passage, and only then can I possibly see what the author meant. Sometimes I think an author just doesn't clearly convey what's apparently so clear to them.

The key to making this work is making sure the reader doesn't feel the loss. If the focus of the story is on the aftermath, or on something else entirely, than large chunks of the characters' lives can be lopped off. If plot-pertinent stuff happens during this missing time, or if the author is trying to be clever dancing around the giant hole in the middle of the story just to zing the reader in the end (or if they honestly don't know what the heck happened and are trying to paper over a plot hole), it doesn't work so well.

I've read stories where things were jumped over and they worked just fine. I've also read stories where the jumps threw me clean out of the story.

Like so many things in writing, if you can make it work, do it. If you can't, do something else.

One of my characters is subjected to an intense period of sexual assault. I have him knowing it's going to happen and then it jumps to him afterwards. I deliberately omitted the actual assaults. Let the reader fill in the blanks; I'm not writing porn.

Skipping over the actual event can also make the impact stronger. In a song of ice and fire we never get to see Theons torture (he only mentions a few things here and there), but we see Theon afterwards. Completely destroyed physically and mentally. Trying to picture what must have happened to him to get him into this state had much more impact on me then then endless torture scenes in the series.