What do you do if your scene is kind of bland?
Spice it up!
Let’s go over how to make boring scenes interesting, look at some examples, then fix up a viewer’s scene together.
Category: Scene/Tone
For the last stream, we went over how to fix one of the most common writing mistakes: setting the scene/tone at the beginning of your story.
As opposed to movies and video games that are visual mediums, written stories only have the words on the page to get across the pictures/feelings into your head. So while stories and video games can use images and music to help set the scene/tone, for a story, you have to do it manually.
This means while it’s tempting to start off a story with action, it’s not always the best choice. Usually it’s better to start by taking some time to establish the who, what, when and where, so that the reader can visualize what’s going on. You could have the most heart-pounding opening ever, but if we can’t see it/feel it, then we’re not going to care.
To show this, we wrote the beginning of a story two ways: (1) where we set the scene/tone poorly, and (2) where we set the scene/tone better. Here’s what we came up with:
For the last stream, we did something during the exercise portion that I’d wanted to do for a while: talking about setting the scene/tone at the beginning of a story.
One common mistake that beginning writers do which I’ve seen a lot during freeshare, critiques online, and during workshops in real life is that they tend to front-load their stories with backstory and history. But, unfortunately, we don’t care about history at the beginning of a story, because we don’t know who the people are yet.
So for the exercise, we came up with a prompt and then wrote the very beginning of the story, setting the scene and tone and hooking the reader, all without giving any sort of backstory or history.
Here’s the one the chat voted on: An Elf that’s the last of her kind due to war with Humans, disease, and other elves refusing to reproduce.
Here’s the beginning we came up with: