Today’s guest post is by author and writing coach Seth Harwood.
I’ve written before about the three kinds of transitions that require connective tissue and how connective tissue builds character through the in-between moments. Both of those posts focus on the same core skill: recognizing the jump and building the bridge.
But there’s another question that comes up constantly in coaching sessions: How often can you make those jumps? Because here’s the thing. Even when you build a beautiful bridge, crossing that bridge still costs your reader something. It costs attention. It costs cognitive effort.
Do that once, and the reader barely notices. Do it three times in five pages, and something starts to break down.
We don’t talk enough about how many transitions a reader can absorb in a given stretch.
In my experience, one major transition every four to five pages is a lot. That’s not a hard rule. There are writers who can manage more, and there are stretches of a story where the pace demands it. But as a baseline, if you’re asking your reader to make a significant jump—a shift in time, a change in location, a switch in point of view—more frequently than that, you’re spending reader capital faster than you’re earning it.
And the reader may not be able to tell you why. They won’t say “there were too many transitions.” They’ll say the chapter felt choppy. Or they couldn’t settle into the story. Or they lost track of what was happening. The symptom shows up as a vague sense of being unmoored.
This is why some chapters feel restless even when nothing is technically wrong with the writing. The sentences are clear, the transitions are bridged, the content is strong. But the chapter has seven scenes in twelve pages, and the reader never gets to live inside any of them long enough to care.
The Settling In principle
If a scene is only a page or two long, the reader spends most of their time orienting and very little time inside the scene. The ratio of setup to payoff is off. They’re doing more work for less reward.
Longer scenes—three, four, five pages—give the reader time to settle in. Time to forget they’re reading. Time to connect with the character through physical action, dialogue, and the accumulation of small, vivid details. That settled-in period is where empathy builds, where tension develops, where the reader starts to care about what happens next.
I recently finished Abraham Verghese’s beautiful novel The Covenant of Water. Wow! What an epic! But to cover over seventy years of multiple families’ history, he had to make a lot of transitions and summarize a lot of events. That’s fine.
But what I took away from this book—the parts I remember and can picture in my mind and loved—these were the scenes, the pages where I could see the characters together talking, touching one another, birthing babies and mourning one another’s deaths.
Not to give away any spoilers, but there are some surgery scenes where he really showed some incisions and operations. He stayed in scene! I can now picture some things I don’t even want to. And they made me feel something.
How this shows up in drafts
There are a few common patterns I see in coaching:
- The first is the montage draft. The writer has a lot of ground to cover—maybe a memoir spanning years, or a novel with a complex timeline—and they try to fit it all in by writing short, punchy scenes that jump quickly from one to the next. Each scene is a page or less. Each transition is handled well enough. But the chapter reads like a highlight reel, not a story. The reader is watching from a distance instead of living inside the narrative.
- The second pattern is the anxious draft. The writer is worried about boring the reader, so they keep the pace high by cutting away frequently. They leave a scene the moment the core event has happened, jump to a new location or time, deliver the next piece of information, and jump again. The story moves fast, but the reader never connects and feels something. What makes the anxious draft especially costly is that the damage is double. You lose the scene you left too soon but you also weaken the scene you jumped into, because the reader arrives at it still spending cognitive effort on the transition. So instead of one strong scene, you get two thin ones. I see this often when a writer has a scene that’s actually working—good dialogue, vivid details, real tension building—but they don’t trust it to carry weight, so they cut away to deliver backstory or context before the scene has had time to pay off. The scene was doing its job. The jump interrupted it.
- The third pattern is the structural draft. The writer has a clear outline—scene, flashback, scene, flashback—and they’re executing it methodically. Each flashback is relevant, each scene advances the plot. But the alternating structure means the reader is jumping every two pages, and the rhythm becomes predictable and tiring.
In all three cases, the issue isn’t the quality of the transitions but the quantity.
What to do about it
The revision strategy is straightforward: look at your chapter and count the major transitions. A major transition is any shift in time, location, or point of view that requires the reader to build a new mental model. If you’re making more than one major transition every five pages (double-spaced), ask yourself: can any of these scenes be omitted? Or saved for later? Does the reader really need all this here? Is there a scene here that could be expanded—given more room to breathe, more physical detail, more dialogue—so that the reader gets to settle in and see more?
Often, the answer is yes. A short flashback that takes half a page could be pushed to much later in the story or cut entirely, or quickly referenced by a line of dialogue. Two short scenes in the same location could be combined into one longer scene with a time-skip handled in a sentence rather than a full transition.
One of the most common fixes is folding backstory into the scene you’re already in. If you’ve got a strong scene—characters in a room, tension building, dialogue working—and you feel the urge to cut away to a block of exposition about the character’s history, ask whether that information could come through instead as a glance, a thought, a small detail woven into the action. A character at a family gathering doesn’t need a three-paragraph detour about her marriage to show the reader something is wrong. A single observation—the way she watches her husband from across the yard, or the mechanical way she prepares food she doesn’t care about—can plant the same seed without ever leaving the scene. The reader picks up on it. They start asking questions. And those questions pull them forward through the scene rather than pulling them out of it.
This is the difference between telling the reader the backstory and letting the scene do the work. When you stay in the scene and let the details accumulate, the reader discovers the history through the character’s behavior. When you jump out to explain it, you’ve interrupted the scene’s momentum to deliver information the scene could have carried on its own.
The goal isn’t to eliminate transitions. Your story needs them. But you want each transition to be worth the cost—worth the reader’s effort to let go of one scene and build a new one. Build your bridges. But don’t build so many that your reader spends more time crossing them than standing on solid ground.
Seth Harwood is a writing coach and the author of Jack Wakes Up and The Maltese Jordans. He teaches craft through his Show, Don’t Tell course and works one-on-one with fiction and memoir writers. You can find more of his writing craft content at writewithseth.com and sign up for his free newsletter here.