You finish a draft, you're reading it back, and you hit a scene that just feels flat.

Now, maybe the dialogue's fine, the line-by-line writing might even sound pretty good,

but for some reason it doesn't have the same pull as all the other scenes around it,

and you can't figure out why.

So you do what most writers do, and you start tinkering.

You sharpen the dialogue, you trim a paragraph, and you try to make the

prose punchier. But the scene just still feels flat. Well, in this episode, I'm going to show you

why that happens, why flat scenes are almost never a prose problem, and give you a single

question you can ask that tells you whether a scene is actually doing its job or whether it's just

taking up space.

Welcome to the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. My name is Savannah Gilbo and I'm here to help you

write a story that works. I want to prove to you that writing a novel doesn't have to be overwhelming.

So each week I'll bring you a brand new episode with simple, actionable, and step-by-step

strategies that you can implement in your writing right away.

So whether you're brand new to writing or more of a seasoned author looking to improve your craft,

this podcast is for you.

So pick up a pen and let's get started.

I was talking to a writer recently who was feeling super frustrated with the scene in her manuscript that she'd written and rewritten multiple times.

She knew exactly what needed to happen in that scene and she'd been told by her critique partners that her line-by-line writing was lovely.

But she couldn't figure out why this particular scene was giving her so much trouble on the page,

and she couldn't quite figure out why the way she'd written it didn't match what she saw in her head.

But when I read through her scene, I knew exactly what the problem was, and I knew what she could do to

...