What if your scenes are dragging, not because nothing is happening, but because the real action is hiding somewhere you haven’t thought to look?

In this episode of Will I Ever Finish This F#@king Book?, I tackle scenes that look like they should work—goal, conflict, stakes, banter, the whole shebang—but still feel like limp little rags on the page.

I share the two books that turned my conception of storytelling upside down, a tool for resurrecting a shambling zombie scene, and how to use the magical art of bibliomancy to make your characters more compelling.

My sexual tension experiment…

Want to read the short story where I began experimenting with stretching out the rubber band of romantic and sexual tension?

Download Falling Phoenix for free.

Episode 5 Transcript

[00:00:00] What if your scenes are dragging, not because nothing is happening, but because the real action is hiding somewhere you haven’t thought to look?

[00:00:12] If you’ve ever devoted yourself to a creative project that ended up consuming your entire fucking life, this one’s for you. I’m Aven Winslow, romance writer and Jungian witch. Join me in the final stretch of writing my second romantasy novel. Craft breakthroughs, perfectionism spirals, and all the eerie little ways that fiction can start bleeding into real life.

[00:00:34] Hey friends, welcome back. We start as we always do with our fire segment, which asks what’s our craft problem of the week?

[00:00:41] 

[00:00:43] Have you ever read a story with an intriguing premise, empathetic characters, and satisfying twist and turns, yet certain scenes still feel kind of flat, and maybe you can’t put your finger on what’s missing?

[00:00:56] I’d hit a point in draft six of my current work in progress, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, where certain scenes were sagging, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. In the interim between writing this, my second book, and my first book, I’d read a bunch of writing craft material on the topic of creating emotional impact.

[00:01:16] I’d learned things like how important it is to forge a connection between the reader and your character. Otherwise, even if that character is hanging by their acrylic fingernails from the windowsill of a skyscraper, the reader won’t really care if those nails snap off and the character plunges to their doom.

[00:01:32] I mean, they’ll care-care in the sense of, “Oh, no, a person is dying,” but it’ll register more as like a vague bummer than the gut-plunging shock that you’re likely intending. I’d learned that your character needs a goal for every scene, and you need to make it really, really hard for them to go after it.

[00:01:48] There also has to be stakes if they fail. All of these things can help keep your scenes from dragging, but it was only after my trip to Tacoma, the subject of last week’s episode, that I realized my scenes were lacking a vital ingredient, and it took a book on dialogue and a smutty novel to show me exactly what I was missing.

[00:02:08] 

[00:02:10] The Element of Air asks, “What tools am I bringing to solve this week’s craft problem?” So the two books that turned my writing process upside down were Robert McKee’s Dialogue and Charlotte Stein’s Control. And it was the first book in particular that unlocked, like, I don’t know, 10 new levels in the video game running inside my brain.

[00:02:30] There are so many things in that book worth reading, but I want to focus on the one technique to rule them all, and that is the third thing. McKee also calls this trialogue in contrast to dialogue, and he writes, quote, “Trialogue, as I define the term, names the triangular relationship between two characters in conflict and the third thing through which they funnel their struggle,” end quote.

[00:02:54] A simple example would be a couple arguing about a broken porch light. “The porch light’s still out.” “I’ll get to it.” “You said that last week.” “I’ve been busy.” “And I haven’t?” If this exchange took place in the context of a story, chances are that we, the readers, would know what’s up. Maybe they’re really talking about unequal labor.

[00:03:13] Why am I the only one who notices what needs doing? Or it could be about emotional neglect. Why do I have to ask for every scrap of care that gets tossed my way? It could be about trust erosion. Your promises have started to mean nothing. It could be about loneliness. We sleep in the same bed, but I’m handling life alone.

[00:03:34] The point is, we know with absolute certainty this ain’t about a light bulb. But let’s rewrite that exchange, this time with zero subtext. “The porch light’s still out.” “Yes, I am aware that the porch light remains broken, and I understand that this has symbolic significance in our ongoing conflict.” “You said you would fix it last week, so now I’m experiencing your failure to follow through as evidence that I cannot rely on you.”

[00:04:00] “That is accurate. I have been avoiding this task because I feel emotionally disengaged from the relationship and no longer prioritize your needs in the way I once did.” “Hearing you say that causes me emotional pain because I have been using the porch light as a proxy for my larger fear that I am alone in this relationship.”

[00:04:17] “That fear is valid. Perhaps we should have a direct conversation about my emotional withdrawal and the growing erosion of trust between us.” “Yes, let’s stop discussing the porch light, since the porch light is clearly not the real issue.” Okay, so I’m fairly certain we can agree that this dialogue is a pile of shit.

[00:04:33] And to be fair, it’s highly unlikely you’ll run into something that absurd in a book. But what I do see all the time is dialogue that just means what it means, and that’s that. For instance, “The porch light’s out.” “I’ll get to it.” But in this case, there’s no buried marital grievance, no symbolic cry for help.

[00:04:52] It’s just a burnt-out bulb. That dialogue probably doesn’t need to exist, unless later that night, the aliens land, and as it turns out, the only thing that keeps these particular aliens from entering a human dwelling is a working porch light. Since no one changed the damn bulb, the aliens are free to skitter up the steps and lay eggs in your face while you sleep.

[00:05:15] In this case, you get to keep your porch light dialogue Whenever I read a book, I mark interesting passages with sticky tabs. When I’m done, because I’m a total nerd, I type those passages out, both to give me a searchable document, but also to remind me of all the cool things I just learned but have likely already forgotten.

[00:05:35] So in reading over my notes from Robert McKee’s Dialogue before this episode, I came across a few passages that approach this idea of using the third thing in your dialogue from a few different angles. Here’s the first. Quote, “As you compose dialogue, I think it’s useful to imagine character design as three concentric spheres, one inside the other.

[00:05:56] The innermost sphere churns with the unsayable. The middle sphere restrains the unsaid. The outer sphere releases the said.” End quote. Here’s another passage. Quote, “To write intriguing, layered, credible dialogue, first study the difference between the two motors for human action: motivation and justification.

[00:06:17] Then see if masking your character’s subconscious drives with their conscious efforts to excuse or at least make sense out of their unexplainable behaviors adds depth to their words.” End quote. And finally, here’s a passage that really maps out those concentric spheres of character design that McKee mentioned above.

[00:06:36] Quote, “When first spoken, a line of dialogue conveys a surface meaning, the meaning the reader hopes other characters will believe and act on. This first meaning seems logical in its context. It conveys a sense of character, purpose, and tactic, and arouses curiosity as we glance across the scene to see its effect.

[00:06:55] The language itself might also delight us with tropes or wordplay. In the second moment, however, this solid speech seems to dissolve, and we sense a second deeper meaning hidden behind the words. True to character talk lets us read past conscious thoughts and sense unspoken feelings down to a character’s subconscious urges.

[00:07:14] This effect is so powerful that the fullness and depth of insight we have into fictional characters often surpasses what we glimpse in the living people around us.” End quote. So I had these Robert McKee passages bubbling in my brain, but I mentioned that I took a second book on my flight to Tacoma, and that is Control by Charlotte Stein.

[00:07:35] Control is an erotic romance centered on Maddie, the owner of a romance bookstore who meets two guys who respond to her job posting for a shop assistant. There’s buttoned-up, tweed-wearing Gabe, and tattooed, potty-mouthed Andy. I shall give as few spoilers as humanly possible, so go read the book to find out what happens.

[00:07:54] But for our purposes here, I’m gonna share a short passage from page six. The scene takes place after Gabe shows up at Maddie’s bookshop for his job interview. But her last interview ran a little bit late. Translation: she and tattooed Andy are going at it in the store, and tweedy, bespectacled Gabe walks in and catches them in the act.

[00:08:13] Gabe is out of there so fast, Maddie isn’t entirely sure he wasn’t just a figment of her imagination. Now, in the scene I’m about to share, Maddie is back at home and she is, shall we say, reflecting on what happened at the shop. “I have a secret streak of needing to be spied on, and my mind won’t stop going there, to him in his too-thick glasses and his tweediness and his hunched shoulders and Jesus, that’s a good image.

[00:08:37] Oh, that’s so good. I bet we really shocked him. I bet he couldn’t walk straight all the way home. I bet when he got home, he did just what I’m doing right now. The thought is enough to send me right over the edge so fiercely that it shocks me.”

[00:08:52] So in this passage, this is the first time Maddie admits to herself that she’s attracted to Gabe, really attracted to him, and this is such a saucy, skillful way of conveying her feelings to the readings, much more effective than Gabe walking in for his interview and Maddie thinking to herself, “Gee, what a handsome guy.”

[00:09:11] It creeps up on her, surprises her even, and the reveal is all the more fun because of it.

[00:09:16] 

[00:09:19] There are many different ways to do a close reading of a text, but my plan for Charlotte Stein’s Control was simple. I would read until I hit a passage that grabbed me, I’d copy that passage into my notebook, and I’d let it serve as a springboard for whatever thoughts wanted to come through. I treated this kind of like I do bibliomancy, which is the practice of opening a book to a random passage and treating that as the answer to your question, kind of like pulling a tarot card.

[00:09:44] So after reading that passage where Maddie realizes she has the hots for Gabe, the first thing that came to mind was this: in the previous draft of my work in progress, Ev, my main character, is fully aware that she’s attracted to Matt before they ever meet. Matt is absurdly famous, and Ev has seen some of his films, so she has copious evidence of his abundant hotness.

[00:10:06] None of this was supposed to matter, though. Matt was just an innocent celebrity crush until he gets cast as the lead in the film adaptation of her book, and she’s to live with him in a haunted castle for a month. In the previous draft, it had never occurred to me that Ev would try to hide her attraction to Matt from herself.

[00:10:23] I mean, sure, she was hell-bent on hiding it from Matt, but in draft five, I had her privately mooning over him in her thoughts. But a combination of McKee’s dialogue and that Charlotte Stine passage sparked this idea, and once it was sparked, the fire would not go out. So I rewrote a scene where Ev is on her way to Harrowfell Hall, and she’s stalking Matt online.

[00:10:46] She comes across pictures from some of his movies, and wow, oh, wow, are these pictures ever getting her flustered. But this time, I introduced the constraint of Ev refuses to admit her attraction, and I was forced to reroute her attraction into something else. I’m not going to spoil what that something else is, but I will say this.

[00:11:04] It made Ev, in my opinion at least, much more endearing and relatable, and her interiority was so much more fun to write, which translated into, I hope, being much more fun to read. And this is just one example of how the one-two combo of McKee’s dialogue and Stine’s control changed how I approached my scenes.

[00:11:23] This perspective shift felt enormous, like, genuinely enormous. It wasn’t just, “Oh, neat, here’s a cool trick I can use in dialogue.” It felt like I’d been trying to light my scenes with a Bic lighter and suddenly somebody just, like, flipped on the sun. Before, I could make scenes work, more or less. I could give characters a goal, I could make sure there was conflict, I could add banter, I could up the stakes, but sometimes the scene still felt like it was just lying there on the page, barely breathing.

[00:11:50] But when it clicked, when I felt in my gut how much energy is generated, not simply by what characters are doing, but by what they secretly want and what they won’t let themselves admit, I swear to God, it was like upgrading my writing crayon box from a measly 12 colors to the deluxe 64 with that built-in sharpener in the back.

[00:12:10] Now, I wasn’t restricted to coloring the lines with plain old anger, but anger pretending to be logic, fear pretending to be irritation, longing disguised as a joke, loneliness funneled through an argument about a porch light. And now, when a scene sagged, I wasn’t just standing over it like, “I don’t know, maybe add more banter?

[00:12:30] Maybe throw in a ghost?” I had a new question to ask: “What is this scene really about, and what are the characters using to avoid saying it?” That question changed everything. Scenes and the dialogue within them were no longer about moving character chess pieces from plot point A to plot point B. They were bubbling cauldrons of unspoken fears and hidden longings.

[00:12:53] Often, the pressure, the energy, it was already there. I just needed to find ways to bottle it up and to push it to the breaking point.

[00:13:00] 

[00:13:02] Our water segment asks, what do these craft insights reveal about me personally? When I started revising scenes with my shiny new subtext cram box, I remember journaling one night after a long day of revisions, and I asked myself, “Why wasn’t I doing this before?” With, like, three question marks. Because it’s not like I don’t love subtext.

[00:13:24] I’ve read tons of books and watched tons of movies where my favorite scenes are the ones where I, as the reader or viewer, get to sift through what’s being said and root around for what’s really being said. I love that shit. So why wasn’t I letting myself have that same fun in my own work in progress?

[00:13:41] After a lot of journaling, I came to two interrelated answers. The first is that letting tension boil and bubble is kind of uncomfortable, not just for my characters, but also for me. Go figure. So in countless little ways, I’d vent the pressure too early. I’d have a character say exactly what was on their mind, so the other characters weren’t left rudely hanging, and neither was I.

[00:14:03] Which brings me to the second answer. I didn’t want my characters to come off as unlikable. There is so much discourse online about unlikable characters that even I, a person who is not on social media, still managed to hear about it. And this seems especially loud in romance, where there are all kinds of rules about what characters can and can’t do before readers write them off as irredeemable.

[00:14:24] But what I’m realizing is that if I try to obey all of those rules, I don’t end up with more lovable characters. I end up with flatter, safer, bore-me-to-tears characters, characters who explain themselves too quickly and please and think their way through scenes, stamping out every potential spark before it has a chance to land.

[00:14:45] You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Depiction is not endorsement,” which seems more widely accepted in literary fiction, but can get kind of slippery in romance. If I write a character acting like a jackass early in their arc, I’m not saying, “Hey, reader, you should tolerate jackassy behavior in your real-life relationships.”

[00:15:03] I’m saying, “Here is a messy human at the beginning of a transformation.” After all, if I don’t let them be messy at the beginning, there’s nowhere meaningful for them to go. Do you see where this is going? Yep. As in fiction, so in life. No matter how much I outline, no matter how many craft books I read or courses I take, writing is going to make a mess.

[00:15:26] And that’s precisely where the magic is.

[00:15:29] 

[00:15:31] Earth asks, “How did the fix go? And what does this craft discovery ask of me in real life?” So how did it go? In one sense, amazingly, truly. Once I started waving my sparkly subtext wand over all my scenes, many of them came alive in ways they simply had not before. But, and here’s where Earth comes in, because Earth is where our beautiful ideas crash into time, energy, deadlines, and the fact that I am tragically not an immortal witch with unlimited revision hours.

[00:16:00] This breakthrough also extended my revision process, because once I saw it, I could not unsee it. Scenes that had seemed basically fine suddenly had the emotional equivalent of fluorescent lighting. I could spot every exchange where I’d vented the tension a little too early, every place where a character said the thing to bonk you on the head directly.

[00:16:22] This was simultaneously thrilling and fucking inconvenient. Thrilling because, oh my God, I finally understood why some scenes that should have been exciting on paper felt like limp little rags. Inconvenient because now I had to go back and fix them. And so draft six became a lot more involved than I’d originally planned.

[00:16:39] But in the end, I do think it was the right call. Sometimes a craft breakthrough is not a shiny distraction. Sometimes it really is the missing piece, and for this book, subtext was the missing piece, or at least one of the big missing pieces. The haunting subplot matters, the romance matters, the group dynamics matter, but without that undercurrent of things half said, misdirected, and bottled up, the whole thing just wasn’t jumping off the page like it needed to.

[00:17:06] So yes, I let this breakthrough change the book, but that does not mean every breakthrough gets to change this book. I’m saying this partly as a reminder to myself, because this is one of the most dangerous parts of leveling up your art. You learn something new, and suddenly you want to go back and retrofit everything you have ever made since your kindergarten finger paintings.

[00:17:28] But if I do that, I will never, ever publish this book. I will simply become a better writer in private while the manuscript sits there aging like a wheel of cheese. So this is what the subtext breakthrough asks of me in real life: discernment. Some insights are for the book in front of me, some are for the next book, some are for the next 10 books, and finishing is learning to make that call.

[00:17:53] Finishing a book means letting it be the artifact of who you were while you made it, not the perfect monument to everything you will ever become. Choose the breakthroughs that get to make this book better without letting every new breakthrough move the finish line.

[00:18:09] ​

[00:18:14] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? If you wanna read a short story where I began my little experiment in stretching out the rubber band of romantic and sexual tension, download Falling Phoenix for free at twinflames.life/freebies. Next week, we’re gonna explore how refined taste can become a very convincing disguise for sucking the joy out of your creative process and what you can do instead.[00:18:41] I’ll see you next time.