Three Ways To Fix A Bad Scene

There is no torture quite so exquisite as a bad writing day.   

If you’ve written for any amount of time, you know the feeling.  A flat, uninspired scene, or maybe even a blank page.  It’s just so unsatisfying. Like eating Spam when you want a steak. Or getting a keychain for a gift when you asked for a car.  Okay, maybe not that unsatisfying, but my point is, it leaves you wanting. Something within you goes unfulfilled.  And if you string enough bad writing days in a row, it can be downright intolerable. 

I don’t know that are any concrete answers, friends.  Lord knows I’ve had my share of bad writing days.  Bad writing MONTHS…years, even.  But I do think that, as with anything challenging in our lives, there are things to be learned from bad writing days. New processes and tools that can help us better understand the problem next time we face the blank screen or notebook.

So let’s take a look at three common culprits I’ve found in bad writing days. 

Phoning it in

Let’s start with a scene I was trying to write in which the main villain of my story, Queen Ruyniah, had a lot of monologue, and she was coming across as more of a caricature than a character. It was annoying because I’d written many other scenes with her in them, and I couldn’t understand why she was giving me so much trouble now. Instead of dangerous, she was corny. Instead of deceitful, she was predictable.  Like a stubborn child who wouldn’t obey, I just couldn’t get her to do what I wanted (which is sometimes an indication that you’re going in the wrong direction with a character, but that’s a blog post of a different day).

Finally it hit me: I was phoning it in. Now, I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing wrong, but I was writing lazy, plain and simple. The Queen was a complex character, and the scene I was struggling with was one of the most crucial scenes I’d ever written her into.  I needed to get into her head the way I would have any main character, but that sounded too…well, hard.  She was a bad guy, and her thoughts and speech and actions would be very different from my own. To get into a different head space and really embody Queen Ruyniah, I would have to dig deep and go to a place I didn’t really want to go to. 

Put simply, the Queen demanded more of me.  Phoning it in doesn’t usually yield good results in any job, and writing is no different.

Plot Problems

It also didn’t help that the scene in question contained a major plot twist, one that I didn’t have a clear plotline for.  Now, I don’t care if you’re a plotter or a pantster…at some point in your story you’re going to have to sit down and figure some details out.  Some things just cannot be written on the fly, and that was the case for this particular plot twist of mine.

When you get to a sticking point like this, it’s often a clue that you need to do a little more brainstorming.  As author V.E. Schwab says, “Some days are thinking days and some days are typing days, but both are writing days.” Part of a writer’s job description is to dream.  Isn’t that lovely?  Us creatives get to hit the pause button, pour ourselves some caffeine, and just dream for a bit. It doesn’t matter if the word count isn’t huge that day, because it’s all part of the process. 

It Just Isn’t Time

I’m a big believer in writing scenes as they come to you, not necessarily in a consecutive line. Especially if you’re not a big fan of plotting your story out in great detail before you begin.  There’s not a writing law that says you have to write everything down in order; you’re not taking dictation.  You’re writing a novel; you can stich it all together later. 

Why?

Because some scenes, like a fine wine that has to age, just aren’t ready to be written yet. Either because the idea itself is still too vague, or you the writer aren’t in the right mental state—some scenes simply have to percolate before they can be written.

And that’s okay. But it does take some practice to know whether you should back off or push through. My advice is to try everything else first, and if the scene still isn’t working, set it aside a while. 

Maybe none of these things apply to you.  Maybe you’ve got your own set of issues and solutions when it comes to bad writing days.  If so, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below! But whatever you do, please don’t stop, you know, writing.

It’s just a bad day, not a bad story.