: Re: Should I remove scenes that I myself find "boring"? Sometimes, I find myself writing a scene that does everything I think it should do: reveal details about the protagonist, drive the plot forward,

@Annie587

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I'm mostly a non-fiction writer, just trying to write my first novel now, so I don't claim to be speaking from the voice of deep experience. But that said ...

Yes, absolutely. I've gone through this a number of times on my current project. I write a scene, and then when I look back at it the next day, I realize it's boring.

As SF says, consider moving the essential elements of the scene somewhere else. Like -- and I don't want to get into a long discussion of my own project, but let me just say that I wrote a scene whose point was to reveal that the hero's motive in helping the other characters was purely selfish. I considered it a crucial revelation in the development of his character. But when I was done writing it, I realized that there was this long involved narrative of him arriving at the place where he has this conversation, explaining how another chararacter came to meet him at that place, and then getting them from there to where they needed to be for the next scene. I realized I had several pages of meandering for about two sentences of relevant material. So I sat back and re-thought the whole scene. Then I created a new scene at the same location where the main action was going on so I could eliminate all the "how'd they get there" discussion, put the exchange with him into that scene, and then built it into a larger discussion that included the motivations of two lesser characters. I ended up getting more material into one scene while making it all flow more naturally.

I just had another case where a scene just seemed way too long for the amount of interesting stuff that actually happened. It's just characters talking about their backgrounds on and on. So I'm thinking of breaking that into two scenes. Wrap up the first more quickly, so it doesn't drag on and get boring. Then take the second part and put some action in front of it, so there's something actually happening, and then after the "action sequence", the character can give some explanation.

I don't know how old you are, but I find that when personal computers came along and I switched from typewriters to word processing software, it completely changed the way I write. When you write on the computer, if you're working on page 40 and you realize that something on page 20 isn't effective, you can go back and change it and it's no big deal. You don't have to re-type the intervening 20 pages. Or if you're on page 20 and you're stuck about how something should go, you can just leave yourself a note to get back to this and push on. Take advantage of this. Be ruthless with your text. If something isn't effective, fix it. If a scene adds nothing to the story, throw it out.

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