Write the Fun Bits. Or Don’t.

We’ve probably all seen this advice in one form or another: write the fun bits. If it’s boring, skip it.

This is dangerous advice because it gives the impression that writing should always be fun. Clue: it’s not.

What this advice means is that if you’re bored, the reader will be bored. But a story needs breaths. It needs lulls and calms to make the ramping tension and climbing stakes that much more real, that much more vital.

Where this advice is the most useful – for me, at any rate – is in the rough draft.

I recently realized I was stuck. Not because I couldn’t write, but because even when I did, my characters weren’t going anywhere. They were just talking, and it felt like they were repeating themselves. (They probably were. This is why revision matters.)

They were in one of those lulls that follows a period of tension. A perfect spot for developing backstory and subplot.

Except in order to write that, I would have needed to develop backstory for the sake of filling the space. And I don’t have a subplot for this setting. (Yet. This is still the rough draft, after all.)

So I made the note, “Backstory/subplot development can go here,” then sat down to figure what’s the next movement, the next action that can happen.

The main character was avoiding . . . many things. So I made those things happen. And when I followed that progression, everything lined up like dominoes. Which means I’m doing something right.

My process is messy. Often inarticulate. But this is what “write the fun bits” means.

At least to me.

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