When I flew to Seattle last week for the Maven retreat, I intended to spend the 7 or 8 travel hours working on a particular scene in my WIP. I did not. Instead, I spent one leg of the trip (I had a layover in Minneapolis/St. Paul) reading craft articles I’d saved on my laptop. As it turned out, that’s the best thing I could’ve done. Here’s why:

First, I’ve been struggling with the next scene to come. I knew when the scene would take place (first thing in the morning) and who would be on-screen (hero/heroine) and why they were present (rage/guilt) and what each hoped to get from the meeting (forced compliance/forgiveness) and how that was going to turn out (badly, of course *g) but something was missing. I had no idea what was missing, just that “something” was, and that “something” was keeping me from writing. I actually wrote a few pages that ended up zapping into that great recycle bin in the sky because they simply didn’t work.

That annoys me. I like things to work. I want the scenes to come out of my fingers the same way I envision them in my head. This one refused.

Enter Peggy Moreland, in the form of an article about putting the five senses into your scenes.

Did I read this article because I was incapable of including sensory descriptions on my own? No. I read it because a) you never know where you’ll find an ah-ha moment, and b) if I wasn’t going to work on my story, I wanted to do something more productive than Spider Solitaire. (It was tough, though. Spider Solitaire sings a siren song all its own.)

Before crafting each scene, Peggy does the following: *
1) Determine where the characters are
2) Brainstorm everything that exists in that location
3) Brainstorm how those items look/sound/taste/smell/feel
4) Determine which of those items the characters would interact with
5) Write the scene keeping the above firmly in mind

(* this is my paraphrase from memory, not a direct quote)

As presented, this exercise relates to the inclusion of the five senses. However, my ah-ha moment related to something completely different, a basic tenet I’d known all along in the back of my mind but had somehow forgotten in all my why-isn’t-this-scene-working angst:

Give your characters a task.

What are the characters doing? Yeah, the heroine wants to apologize–that is, until the hero pre-empts her apology by blackmailing her to do something she doesn’t want to do–but those are both snippets of dialogue, not action. What are they doing while they’re getting verbal?

My CP Darcy emailed me a crit of a section of my WIP that night. As I scroll through her comments, I see on one scene she indicates too much “talking heads” between the heroine and another character made it difficult to follow the dialogue. Instantly, I scan for the tags. Heroine frowns, stands, stares at the fire. Her friend sits, nods, glances at the heroine. Uh, boring much?

I’d concentrated so much on the content of the dialogue itself that I’d lost sight of location. Why were the characters where they were? Why did they stay there instead of going elsewhere? How were they interacting with their environment? Staring at the fire for six pages doesn’t count. They need something to do, and they need to have a reason for doing it. And then once I determine that, the rest of the details will fall into place. Not just the sensory descriptions of the room and the room’s props, but also the spatial description of how the characters move in relation to each other and their surroundings. How on earth would a reader be able to visualize a given scene if the writer can’t visualize it herself well enough to convey it on the page?

In fact, I recently read a book in which much of the interaction between the hero and heroine took place over the telephone, typically without either character doing much of anything except sitting around, receiver pressed to the ear. Despite the content of the dialogue, I found the scenes extremely distancing, from both the action of the story and the characters themselves. This, too, illustrated for me the importance of grounding the reader into the scene.

YOUR TURN: As a reader, have you ever read a scene (or, god forbid, an entire story) you just couldn’t picture? How about one that sucked you in so well you swore you experienced every nuance right along with the POV character? What elements made the scenes work or not work? As a writer, how do you integrate physical action with description and dialogue?