Here is my problem. How do you transition between scenes when days or weeks have passed without POV violation?

I don't want to use an author voice-over saying someting like: "Two weeks passed since...." So I have been starting at the scene and weaving how much time has passed since the last scene into the narrative. The problem is that sometimes it takes three or four paragraphs until I find a place to orient the reader. As a reader, would you find that annoying?

Taken as a given, an effective setup at the end of one scene naturally jumps forward, or even backward, in time related to a story's timeline. That's one type of in-the-cut transition. That type of transtition ends a scene with a viewpoint character in dramatic motion, in actual physical motion, or determined on a causal course of action, etc. Then the new scene begins with an effect of the previous scene's ending cause.

An improvident young gallant determines to ride to the tavern and confront his rival who publicly slandered him. Next we see the gallant in a paddock stalking his horse. Never mind that a ten-minute walk would see him at the tavern, he spends a half hour clumsily catching his horse. No, not for him the ignominy of traveling without his noble steed. Anyway, there's no need to show the time spent walking from his lodgings to the paddock.

Longer transitions of time can be effectively done similarly. The one need is orienting readers on who and where and when the scene transitions to. Longer gaps in in-the-cut time require the when feature. Showing a change in the setting, i.e., a seasonal transition from spring foliage to fall foliage, is one method of depicting a long transition. A change in a character's apparel or appearance is another. Perhaps the improvident young gallant says to his fellow boarders at the end of the previous scene that the transatlantic voyage he embarks upon on the morrow will take him six weeks to complete. Then the new scene might open with him debarking from an ocean liner and then posting a letter to his comrades.

More complex transitions follow the same basic parameters. A plot juncture from an interrupted causal chain and posed questions propels readers forward to experience the next link in the causal chain and find answers to the immediate questions.

I use that sort of thing, and "later that same week," or what have you in my 3rd deep (also I think using free indirect discourse, although that's one of those things I didn't know had a name/I was doing it until that thread, LOL.)

The scenes I am writing now are setting up the story (the act I of story structure). The scenes are all important; they are building to something, but to the MC, at this point, they are just random events in her life. She would not still be thinking about about what happened in the last scene two weeks later until she sees something to remind her of it.

For example, two weeks after you had a fight with a co-worker, you would not be thinking of the fight until you ran into the co-worker. The simple answer is to start the scene when she runs into the coworker, but that doesn't work for this scene, because important things happen before she runs into him.

In this situation it feels like a POV violation to me to start the scene with "Two weeks after the fight, Jessica was going shopping..." because she wouldn't be thinking about the fight while shopping.

Opening with Jessica's perspective and skipping around to other character's perspectives in other scenes, if needed, is one freeing part of free indirect discourse. Then switching to a narrator's perspective can be jarring, like panning back outside the frame of a story to see a picture frame, a television screen, or a theater screen.

One-character viewpoint in free indirect discourse allows depicting the sensations of the viewpoint character without the disruptive effects of he saw, she saw, she looked, he glanced, Jessica felt, etc., which is another power of free in free indirect discourse. Free to vary psychic distance and take in the landscape in indirect address. The angry-red sun settled below pill-bottle cotton clouds streaking across the horizon. Tears crept down her cheeks. Just like the sun to leave her alone in the dark with the same sick feeling of abadonment that began the day, its indifference like her boss's.

Skipping Jessica went shopping and opening the new scene depicting her sensations and introspections in the grocery store places her squarely in the grocery store, accomplishes a transition without time being important. If time management is important, a bruise might be bothering her less than when it first developed two weeks before. Like she picks through first aid supplies and decides she doesn't need more aspirin. She needs understanding or forgiveness or meaning or rediscovering her self-identity, and she's not going to find it in the grocery store, though it tells her she needs a new emotional center.

Prop objects draw her forward into the unfolding scene. She can pick up a product from a shelf and think that the price of generic brand instant coffee used to be much cheaper than brand-names, for example. Connecting the meaning of the price change to a change in her life makes her action, sensation, and thought relevant. Like how she didn't previously think about prices before she lost her job, her spouse, or lost whatever that's driving her internal conflict and connects it to her fight with the coworker.

quote:

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Skipping Jessica went shopping and opening the new scene depicting her sensations and introspections in the grocery store places her squarely in the grocery store, accomplishes a transition without time being important. If time management is important, a bruise might be bothering her less than when it first developed two weeks before. Like she picks through first aid supplies and decides she doesn't need more aspirin. She needs understanding or forgiveness or meaning or rediscovering her self-identity, and she's not going to find it in the grocery store, though it tells her she needs a new emotional center.

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This is exactly how I want to transition into the scene, and I try to use props to orient the loss of time as soon as possible. But they are difficult to work in naturally in the first paragraph. Sometimes it takes me three or four paragraphs to finally orient the reader to the time change. I just wanted to know if that was annoying to readers to be left in limbo for that long.

You say if time management is important, isn't it always?

Yes, how much time has elapsed, if important, and I don't know that it is, doesn't need to be in the new scene's opening sentence. If putting it in three or four paragraphs later is timely relevant to Jessica, it's timely relevant to readers. One of the many writing principles on a deeply empathizable viewpoint character is what matters most to the character will matter most to readers.

I experience the trials of conciseness in composing transitions too. What I do is find the pivotal point of the scene and write from it. Jessica going shopping is a routine of daily living. What makes it poignant? There's where she meets the coworker who she fought with two weeks before. What does the fight mean to her situation at the time of shopping? Is running into him again a growing complication? Does it make her shy from him, confront him, ignore him? Does she let him know nonverbally that she's aware he's there but doesn't want him to approach her, or wants him to make the first move. Is she unconsciously aware he's going to be there and unintentionally positioning herself to be noticed by him. Then does it matter to the scene that two weeks have passed before it comes up or is alluded to in their conversation? if it matters at all?