Key scenes are easy and exciting.  They flow off the page without much effort. But the quiet scenes, the in-between scenes…these ones take some work.

I am one of those authors who lives for the moments when I get to write key scenes. These are the scenes that live rent free in my head, calling to me. And striving to reach those scenes is what keeps me going.

Honestly, the first draft of my novel read more like a movie script, because I was often racing between key scenes, without relishing in the world building or adding details to support character development. It was during the rewriting phase that I went back through and got really into the nitty gritty stuff, and had fun expanding everything.

Ideally, if I’ve paced my novel well, there will be a good balance of key scenes with quieter, connecting moments in between.

So, how do you make a connector scene interesting?

First, I’ll say that connector scenes should not just be filler scenes. If a reader can skip past them without missing something important, then you have a problem. Connector scenes are great moments to expand on your characters and your world, to build tension or ambiance in your story and give the reader more clarity about the story.

In my first draft, my connector scenes were often dull, bland and skippable, because I had no goal for them. But now I try to ask myself: what happens in this scene to propel the story forward? What does the character learn about themselves or about others?

In essence, what is the goal of this scene?

If I don’t have a goal yet, that’s when I struggle the most. Sometimes, I discover the goal as I write. Other times, I cobble together something passable and come back to it during rewrites. Sometimes, during rewrites, the scene gets chopped out—so why did I bother writing it in the first place? Gah! Well, I try not to think like that. All writing is important for the process. It’s how I dig into the story, and uncover what I’m truly trying to say.

I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to write filler scenes in your first draft. As long as they don’t derail your momentum. Sometimes these filler scenes are so boring that I lose my excitement for the story. This is definitely a problem.

I’m still working on resolving this problem. Honestly, I think the crux of the issue is incomplete planning at the beginning. When I plan my stories, key scenes are very detailed. But filler scenes are often as basic as “Chapter eight: they go their separate ways for a while…”

…ok…

But…

What does that MEAN, Kathryn?!

I don’t have a solution for this yet. In an ideal world, my planning would be perfect from the beginning so every scene feels like a key scene in my mind. Then every writing session would have that magic flow, and I’d never lose momentum.

But I’m a mixture of a planner and a discovery writer. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to plan my novels perfectly from the start. So maybe I just need to give myself permission to phone it in on the connector scenes and then I can fix them in the re-writes.

Or maybe I should skip these scenes during the first draft. Like questions on an exam I don’t know the answer to. Skip them and come back to them at the end…

Hmm…

You know what, I think I might go try that. I’ll let you know how it goes!