Behind the Curtain: Scenic Transportation

In my Reading Life series, I’ve been focusing on narrative transportation on the book-wide level. But what about the scenic level? How do you ensure narrative transportation occurs in every scene in your book?

Scene entry is absolutely critical for maintaining narrative immersion.

The end of a scene or chapter is a bit of a danger zone with a reader. If they were fully immersed in that previous scene, it’s over now. They’re having to shift to a new scene in a new location with potentially a new set of characters and a new set of stakes. During this shift, they’re in danger of losing that immersion in the fictional world and drifting back up to the surface, entering the real world again.

Photo by Alexandra Smielova on Unsplash

And once they’re in the real world, this is an easy place to pull away from the book completely.

So how do you maintain narrative transportation during that scene shift? And how do you immediately immerse your reader in the very first scene of the book? Arguably the most important scene of all?