: Re: How to make travel scenes interesting without adding needless plot diversions? I have always had a problem with travel in my stories. Since I'm writing an epic fantasy novel, travel is a big

@Samaraweera193

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I've also had this problem. I think it stems from putting the cart before the horse --you're trying to start with the journey, and shoehorning in the character development. Instead, decide what situations you need for character development, and build the journey around that. For instance, let's say you need your characters to develop a physical attraction to each other. So you want them to be in a tightly confined space. But you don't want them to act on this attraction, so you want that confined space to be very public. That leads you to invent a crowded railway car. To make the situation even more acute, the railway car gets stopped on the tracks for a long time. But, why? The repressive government is conducting a search? There's a dragon building a nest on the tracks? Two trains ran into each other?

In this way, you build an interesting and compelling set of situations along the journey that "just happen" to be EXACTLY what you need for maximum character development. Then, just elide any other parts of the journey. For instance, in the movie Y Tu Mama Tambien, 90% of the movie takes place on the outward journey, because that's where the character conflicts happen. The return journey is dismissed in 10 seconds worth of voiceover.

The important thing to remember is that things happen in your book because you make them happen. Your characters aren't taking a trip the way you or I take a trip, just to get from place to place. They are taking a trip that exists mainly to create interesting situations for them to live through. If you can't find interesting things to happen on the trip, you're wasting a prime writer's opportunity. I recently watched a mini-doc on how Stephen King created "The Body", the novella that was made into the classic coming-of-age movie Stand By Me. He had been wanting to write about kids like the friends he grew up with, but he couldn't find an angle, until he came up with the idea of inventing a reason for them to be going on a journey together, but without any adults along. After that, he had a compelling narrative thread to hang all the specific incidents on. Then, part of what made the movie work is that the writers were able to easily add in their own experiences to the existing structure --conversations they had, games they played, fears and challenges they faced, and so forth.

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