Work, School, and Daily Routine Don't Belong in Your Story (More Than Once)

Not every protagonist in every story is a wandering, one-eyed sellsword, a dangerous grandson of a witch sent on a mission, or a cybernetic super soldier deployed onto an alien battlefield. A lot of our protagonists are, in fact, just regular people. They have routines they follow, and but for the events of our story their lives are pretty much the same day in, and day out.

With that said, however, the audience isn't here for that daily routine... they're here for the story. So if the tale you're telling spends too much time at the office, or in the third row of English Composition 302, it's probably time to start re-evaluating where your word count is going.

Absolutely riveting, this test-taking scene.

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Trim The Fat

A story needs to establish a character's routine; that should go without saying. However, the problem arises when the author just keeps going through that same routine time and time again when it isn't adding anything to the story.

As an example, we've all read a few YA books in our time. Some of us have read more than a few. Whether the protagonist is the new kid at a regular old high school, or they've been accepted to a super special sorcery academy, we still follow them along through their average day at least once. We need to see them in their natural environment, figure out who they're sitting near, what teachers hate them, and so on, and so forth.

But after that? We don't need to know. At all.

But... but my routine!

That is not to say that the setting of the story needs to completely change once routine has been established. Your office worker who caught the eye of the billionaire CEO will still have to clock in to keep earning a paycheck... but after that first run through we should only see them at work when it advances the plot. Whether it's chatting with a coworker about said CEO showing up around the office more, or the worker finding themselves alone in the records room with the big wig in a sexually tense scene, we should only be tuning in if the scene in question advances the story in some way.

What we should not be seeing is our protagonist just doing the same old thing. If they're just rearranging flowers on the shelf in the home and garden section, or attaching labels to the items at the auction house they work at, or even if they're a detective who's interviewing witnesses and filling out paperwork, stuff that doesn't pertain to the story you're telling should be cut.

Ask What The Audience is Learning

Every scene in a story needs to show the audience something about the world, the character, the plot, etc. And sometimes an extremely useful scene may seem like it's useless if you don't lift up the hood and ask what it's doing.

The best way to do this is to ask what the scene is showing the audience.

For example, that scene where the office worker shares lunch with their best friend from the records department may not seem like it's vital to the story. It's just two office drones eating chicken salad and trying to make it through the day. But is this scene sharing painful parts of a character's past? Is it giving the reader need-to-know information, such as that one of them has an ex who might be a stalker? Is it setting up dominos that can later be knocked down, such as discrepancies in the records that might lead to motive in a murder plot that's uncovered in chapter 11?

Sometimes the thing your audience learns is subtle. Sometimes it's blatant. But if a scene can be trimmed away without costing your audience anything, chances are good you can probably do without it.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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