The gorgeous Cleveland weather got me thinking scene. I’ve recently learned a couple of scene don’ts. Don’ts are easy. You can take them out if you happen to have them in your manuscript. (Says the queen of strikeouts. I never met a phrase I couldn’t pare.) Do’s are harder, as is creating new scenes for the deleted ones.
For the driving-in-the-car-while-thinking scenes that had to go, I put the thinking in the destination. Viola! For the kitchen table scenes (also a no-no), I put the talk where the people first saw one another, which was in my protagonist’s backyard firing range. Much more exciting than coffee at the kitchen table, don’t you think?
A caveat I can think of for don’t do table scenes would be cozy mysteries. They’re so food-centric, where else are they going to talk dead bodies, etc.? But I do think more food could be eaten at places besides a table, even in cozies. Here’s to taking your interior monologues out of the car/bus/train and your conversations off the table.
KL Griffiths 
Hmm, I can’t say that I agree. Depending on the genre, especially if the genre if very real life, dinner scenes and driving scenes are realistic and relatable. People often come together over food and discuss their day, etc. People often have internal monologues when driving. While a person can have an internal monologue while walking in the woods or at the beach, it may not work for the story. I’m much more likely to internally monologue in my car, as I don’t walk in the woods or go to the beach often. I can see the merit in mixing up the scenes, so you don’t have redundancy, but this rule feels more like an opinion. Was it from a podcast?
I always appreciate diversity! I, too, do my best thinking at the wheel. Perhaps the takeaway isn’t that you can’t ever do those things, but that we should try to find other places to keep things fresh. I found the advice in Writing the Breakout Novel – the book, not the workbook. As to whether or not it’s opinion…writing is so subjective, and there have been entire movies/plays done at the kitchen table. Somebody thinks tables rock as scene settings. Oh, and Jesus used it, so it can’t be all bad.
Interesting…I’m off to rework the last short story I wrote. 🙂
I hope you, like me, feel like it amps your tension. It’s worth the work!
Shucks, I just started another dialog over the kitchen table…
It was totally my go-to…
And bars! I often have my characters talk over a drink–not sure if that says more about me or my characters! The best rule of thumb my mentor gave me early on in my writing: show your character at work–avoids many of the thinking-while-driving, etc., scenes. Thanks for the great tips!
Ha! I have an enormous bar scene I’m still trying to figure out. They’re drinking IPA’s. I think I just wanted to write about drinking an IPA, since I couldn’t actually be drinking one.
Well, enormous bar scene sounds fun. And, boy, do I love an IPA! The fun about a bar is that there’s a lot of room for the unexpected!
Shows you how lame I am. I had to look up IPA–got it! Okay on the cozies. The characters might be cooking, eating, and yes hashing over a particular event as they putter around the kitchen. Lots of scenes in the pub. I do get annoyed when I’m reading a cozy and they rehash everything you’ve already read in every other chapter. I think that is just a way for writers to get their word count up. Grrr. I like to keep the action going. I don’t create tension on every page, but I do have things happen and I put warmth. That’s what cozies are all about. Warm, fuzzy, murders. Ha!
I read you, so I KNOW it’s cozy on every page…and often yummi, too. 🙂