If you have a scenes that bores you to the point where you just don’t want to read it anymore, then you have a couple of choices. One is to get rid of it. The second is to bring something exciting into play. I like the idea of surprising the reader.
Make the scene unpredictable.
Say you have in your novel a detective who is approaching the peak of his game. He has solved the tough cases, putting the miscreants in jail? What next? Give him Histiocytosis-X, a very rare disease. What a blow, but it gives you the chance to explore a new and awful vista as well as a different perspective on your character. How does he react to his own untreatable and slow demise. And by the way, couldn’t there be crimes in a hospital? A lot less boring. A lot more fun to write. A lot of character exploration
A relationship between a nineteen year old boy and his twenty-five year old neighbor has gotten staid. Make him join the Air Force. Huge change in direction for the couple. What do they do? Does the older one feel betrayed? Why? Is that selfish? Why? It’s the unexpected that makes writing fun and brings the reader to the edge of their seats.
A character in a popular streaming series says “If you don’t like the way the table is set, then kick it over.”
As novelists, we are careful to build very perfect scenes as writers, but this typically means going one logical step at a time. Ensuring that every character and every prop is in place. This is a deliberate process. The problem arises in the transparent scene construction where it’s easy for the readers to put themselves there; the effort has created the foreseeable. The reader is too comfortable, maybe bored.
So, use imagination to pull the rug out from under the reader. Snap the reader to! Don’t just surprise her. Stun her. Engage her.
The following scene is from Catching Cold –Redemption with an interracial couple.
He glanced at the rearview that revealed nothing but asphalt as he slowed the car down. “What’s on your mind–” he added “Dr. Steadman.” “What am I doing out here?” He’d sensed something had been rumbling under the surface of their lives for a few days. Never fully present, but not fully absent. Leaving signs of itself in incomplete conversations. “That’s a hard question.” He looked at her. “I don’t like hard questions. I like easy ones. Let’s take an easy one first. Kind of a warm up.” “Let’s have one, then.” Clipped. Ready for a fight. “Ok. What is my role?” he said. She sat up straight for a moment. “Kevin, you may have been marketing VP, but everyone knows you as a ‘can-do’ guy. You have a contact list that extends from Canada to the Caucuses. You get things done, not because you know how to do them, but because you know how to find the right people who can.” He smiled “Let me accept your flamboyant characterization as correct for just a moment. That doesn’t answer my question.” She rubbed her hands in exasperation. “You will do what these people need to have done before they know they need it. You size up problems and solve them. That’s what I see that you offer them. What is that?” she said squinting. Kevin peered to the right where she was gazing, hand over her eyes. “Buzzard, I think.” She rolled down the window.” Sorry,” she shouted out the window. “We’re not dead yet.” “Maybe, it’s a hawk.” he said, as he touched the control, watching the window roll up, “And maybe it’s after you because you think you’re dead.” “What?” “You think that you’re useless now.” She pursed her lips for a moment. “I’m an ok regulator” “If self-condemnation is what this is about, then don’t throw in the towel by selling yourself short. You were a AAA regulator. National, repeat, national reputation. They were singing songs about you.” “Name one?” He started, but the car filled with a new, rising song. A siren.
So a scene with a couple starting to squabble in a car, a common and unpleasant event, is transformed at once by “a new, rising song” of a siren. We can hear it, and small-mindedness is at once transformed to fear.
As another example, look at the following scene from the Catching Cold-Breakthrough. Dale and Luiz had their backs to Jon, murmuring as they looked at the three cages that were all on the same table behind them. Jon walked to them and, leaning over their shoulders, peered into each of the cages. The three rhesus monkeys were scampering around their cages, teasing each other, drinking water, looking for food. “Which is Lorraine?” “The healthy infected one on the far left,” Dale said. Jon turned to face Dale. “Healthy? Titers were—” “High,” Dale finished. “Like with Bessie.” “Which cage?” Dale pointed to the cage to his left, still huddled with Luiz. “You said ‘infected,’ right?” Jon said, looking between the bars at the female rhesus, who was now on her back, playing with a toy. She turned her head, looked Jon in the eye, and reached out her hand with the toy toward him. In a flash, Jon was dizzy. His face was burning up, and the room spun as he staggered back to the table. “Hey,” Dale said, supporting him with an arm while steering him to a chair. “Have a seat.” “This is real?” Jon asked, looking into the faces of both of them. His heart was pounding, and he could barely speak. “What this means is—” He jumped up and ran halfway up the steps. “Dios mio,” Luis exclaimed. “Robbie. Robbie! Please close the basement door, Jesus.” “Oh my God.”
The three men spoke at once, six arms flailing, controlled by three minds filled with one thought. Caught up in the details of an experiment that the reader can be forgiven for not completely following, three scientists coming to the same conclusion, have a sudden, almost wild reaction. The reader doesn’t know what exactly has happened, but he does know the three scientists have observed a biological event with terrible implications. The reader is compelled to know what that is.
When bored with your scene, break into it with an order shattering change. Bring the reader back at once.
