A 5-Minute Fix for a Blah Scene

By Janice Hardy

Sometimes the best fixisn’t changing what characters say—it’s changing where they say it.

Before I dive in, I did a guest post on Monday at Writers in the Storm, on "5 Paths to Plotting Your Novel". Now, back to our regularly scheduled post…

This might be sacrilegious as a science fiction and fantasywriter, but I dislike writing description—especially settings. I’m more of adialogue and action gal, and my first drafts (okay, sometimes second drafts aswell), have a lot of “white room” scenes, where nothing about the setting ismentioned. This was a big problem in my early writing days, since SFF readersenjoy the world building and setting and all the things I had to slog throughto write.

I got feedback such as:

I can’t picture the setting

Where is this happening? Could they interact more with the room?

I feel unanchored, and there’s no sense of place

All of it was justified, and after a lot of reading,learning, and forcing myself to just doit, I found a way to enjoy writing setting descriptors.

Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com