Working on the first draft of your book can be quite intimidating. You will definitely end up writing mundane, boring scenes. This is an integral part of the book-writing process. There will always be low-energy scenes, info-dump scenes and reaction scenes. For the sake of your readers, you will have to make these interesting.
The question is: how to remove these boring scenes from your plot and keep your reader glued to the page?
There are many ways to make those scenes more compelling.
Here are 5 tips to transform boring scenes into exciting ones
Summarize events
The first tip to spice up a potentially bland scene is to summarize or tell the events of that particular scene. Novice writers tend to put down every minute detail and depict every character interaction or every moment-by-moment occurrence in a scene when there is no need to.
Instead of doing one or all of the above, simply describe the events and summarize them in a few sentences or a few paragraphs, to move the story along.
End the scene sooner
Avoid dull scenes by making the scenes shorter and ending them sooner than you would like to. Now, this might appear like obvious advice; however, the key takeaway is to start the boring scene as late as possible and end it as soon as possible.
For example, if there is a long scene that lacks interest, assess whether you can start it two pages after where it is now and whether you can end it in half a page. By doing so, you can keep the momentum and boost your scene.
Merge two scenes into one
Combine two tedious scenes into one. Sometimes, while editing a story, you might notice an uninteresting scene, such as an info dump, which is then quickly followed by a transportation scene resulting in two back-to-back dull scenes. You certainly wouldn’t want to bore your audience with two slow chapters in a row.
Solve this by merging the two scenes into one. If this is the first draft of your novel, you might have several questions rising in your mind. Tom Bromley’s online novel writing course will help you clear concepts, including how to draw characters and the chapters and scenes in your story.
You will feel more confident about your writing skills, creativity, and your first draft in general and complete it sooner.
Change the weather
I’ll bet you didn’t see this tip coming your way. If you have a scene where nothing is going on, and the atmosphere is just dull – one of the things to do is to switch up the weather.
Let’s say it is an ordinary sunny day. Switch it to a rainy day. You might turn a pleasant day into one with a blizzard or make it a windy day. Choose different weather conditions to liven things up.
What about different characters and their concerns about the weather? Say you have a character driving somewhere and does not enjoy driving in snow, and suddenly, the snow starts to come down heavily. This switch of weather will make things intense for them, and therefore your reader.
Or you might have a character who loves to go for walks on cloudy days. They go happily on a walk when halfway through, the sun’s out in full force. This has them frantically rummaging through their purse only to realize that they forgot to bring their sunblock. They panic.
This way, the sunny day becomes a threat and the otherwise drab scene will become an interesting one as the readers will be sensing the unfolding conflict.
Alter the point of view
In a scene with multiple characters, when you write from a particular character’s viewpoint, leverage the option of writing that scene from the perspective of a character who has the most to lose or has the most at stake.
This will turn the scene into an exciting one. For instance, in a novel for teens, there is a scene where a group of teenagers are watching a boring movie together. Now, this is a low-energy scene. Rewrite it from the viewpoint of another character narrating it animatedly rather than of a character watching the movie and feeling bored.
Or write the scene from the perspective of a character romantically interested in another character from the group. A guy sitting next to a girl he is interested in is watching the movie, but he’s going crazy about his feelings for her and wondering what to say, whether he should tell her how he feels or just crack a joke.
Or create the scene from the point of view of a character who has done something to betray another person in the group. The person in question has no idea of this. What is the character who betrayed them feeling? What is going through their mind?
The inner conflict can make an otherwise lackluster scene more interesting.
Hope you enjoyed these tips!
I leave you with a paragraph that is an outstanding example of fabulous writing from one of my favorite authors, Stephen King. He has a knack of turning boring scenes into gripping ones. This paragraph is from one of his best stories, also made into a blockbuster movie titled “The Shawshank Redemption.” In this paragraph, he describes Andy Dufresne and life in New England.
When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was a short neat little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. His fingers were always clipped, and they were always clean. That’s a funny thing to remember about a man. I suppose, but it seems to sum Andy up for me. He always looked as if he should have been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been a vice-president in the trust department of a large Portland bank.
Good work for a man as young as he was, especially when you consider how conservative most banks are…and you have to multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New England, where folks don’t like to trust a man with their money unless he’s bald, limping, and constantly plucking at his pants to get his truss around straight. Andy was in for murdering his wife and her lover.
