: Writing Montage in Novels I have a similar question as the one asked in 'How to write montages in prose? (fantasy novel)' however, there has been no answer in this and it is far too general.

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My usual approach is a change of format to a periodical:

journal entries
newspaper headlines
computer logs
teacher's notes
emails with progress reports

Sometimes, I may go with multiple 1-2 short paragraphs * * * section breaks, especially humorous. Often using "blind dialogue" (no speaker tags, who says what, letting the reader guess the speakers from the context - recognizing them by their failures.)

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In The Internet President: None of the Above, I create the equivalent of montage as a series of short chapters to cover campaigning for president. I enter each scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible. Leave a taste and let the reader's imagination fill in the rest. This worked for me because my book was written in a terse cinematic writing style. If your pacing is slower, this technique may not work as well.

I use one chapter per scene, even if it's a one-page transition. If you're using multiple scenes in a chapter with separators, then put a number of short vignettes in a chapter. Summarize what you can. Beowulf reflected fifty years in a single sentence.

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I'm currently re-writing a story that was originally a screen play as prose. Two parts of the screen play are montages, each depicting the development of a stage in the relationship between two of the characters.

After giving it due consideration, I decided to rewrite each montage into a continuous narrative.

Now that I think about it, I suspect that montages are the live action equivalent of "telling" in prose, a way of saying, "this sort of thing happens here."

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If you are drawing a house, and you want to convey a sense of the texture and detail of the building material used, you can draw three bricks in the middle of an expanse of wall. You don't have to draw all the bricks in the whole wall.

Pick out the bricks you want to draw; talk about them. You can situate them in time rather vaguely. You don't have to spread the events or incidents out uniformly. In other words, you don't have to put one incident in the first week, the second in the second, etc. Some possible adverbs are: During this time, as time wore on, one day, one morning.

A totally different possible approach is to have separators between vignettes. The separator could be a chunk of blank space, or a little squiggle or other symbol. I've seen whole books written this way.

Even if you don't want to use this approach in your final version, you could at least use it for your first draft. Once you've written the vignettes as separate sections, it may be easier to connect them.

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