When Your Writer's Compass Starts Spinning

I suspect every writer has experienced this at least once, where you finish a scene, read it back, and something isn’t quite satisfying to you. I talk, sometimes, about the little compass every writer has that points them toward their intention, pointing where to go, and it’s not always clear to the writer which direction it’s pointing, especially in those moments where something isn’t clicking for you.

Your scene most likely has one or all of these: dialogue is more or less fine, the prose isn’t embarrassing, the characters are saying things that make sense, the emotion is there.

But something still is nagging at you, somewhere in your head.

When we find ourselves there, most of us instinctively: add more. More dialogue. More interiority. More emotion.

And the line of thinking, which I won’t disparage because I am guilty of it, too, is something like, if myself or the reader weren’t feeling enough, surely I just hadn’t given them enough.

I think, when you reach for that solution, the solution of “more”, you’re trying to solve the wrong problem.

I want you to imagine a woman whose fiancé has just ended their engagement. A perfectly reasonable version of that scene might continue like this:

She couldn’t believe what had just happened. Everything she’d imagined for the future, the children they talked about having, all of it had disappeared in a single conversation. She wondered how she’d ever trust anyone again. She thought about the years they’d spent together, the wedding they’d planned, the house they were supposed to buy. It felt as though someone had erased the life she’d been building.

There isn’t anything incorrect about that. In fact, I’d argue in the writer’s favor that it’s emotionally accurate. She probably would think all of those things.

But if I’m being honest with you, I don’t really want to keep reading that version.

The problem is that I already knew almost all of it the moment her partner ended the engagement, because of course her future feels uncertain, and of course she’s questioning everything, and of course she’s grieving. The breakup already gave me that information (without giving it to me).

Now imagine the same breakup ending a little differently.

Her fiancé leaves and she stands in the hallway of their shared apartment for a while after the front door closes. Just standing still in the dark. Then she walks into the spare bedroom. She pulls the box of wedding invitations out of the closet. She sits on the floor and opens the box. She picks up a pen and starts addressing envelopes.

One after another. To guests who are never going to receive them.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the version where I start leaning forward. It carries the same emotion but, actually, it explains far less. And suddenly I have questions. Why is she doing that? Is she in denial? Is this grief?

Is she trying to hold onto something that’s already gone?

These are discovery questions. They are open curiosity loops created for the reader which draws their investment, because they are curious questions. Whatever the answers are, I feel like the story has taken me somewhere I couldn’t have predicted, and I am genuinely invested in learning their answers.

Let’s try a completely different example.

Imagine a surgeon loses a patient during an operation because of someone else’s negligence. Again, it would make perfect sense to spend the next page deep inside his thoughts and his grief. He could probably question every decision he made during the procedure. He probably wonders whether he missed something obvious or feels his confidence disappearing.

He isn’t sure he’ll ever trust himself again.

Again...Nothing there is wrong. I’d probably think all of those things if I were him, too.

But the failed operation already told me his confidence would be shaken and the death already told me he’d question himself. The narration is confirming, in repetition, something I already understand.

Now imagine this instead.

Following the death, the next morning he arrives at the hospital three hours early for his next procedure. He walks into the operating room before anyone else and checks every instrument himself. When his resident arrives, scrubbed and ready to assist, the doctor says,

“I’ve got this one.”

The resident hesitates.

“I can help.”

“No.”

That’s all he says. The resident leaves and the doctor performs the operation alone, relying only on himself.

Again, I find myself leaning forward, because I didn’t know that’s where this was going. The patient’s death didn’t automatically tell me he’d stop trusting the people around him. It didn’t tell me he’d become controlling. Or isolated.

Or convinced that the only safe pair of hands left were his own.

Those are consequences. And, at least to me, they feel like movement, and I don’t actually think most scenes that feel off suffer from a lack of emotion, or explanation, or conflict.

I think they suffer from a lack of movement. They’re circling instead of extending, and I wonder if this is also why pacing gets talked about in a way that has never quite satisfied me.

People often describe pacing as though it’s simply a question of how much happens, but I’ve read books where something dramatic happens every few pages and the pacing is still clunky.

I’ve also read scenes where two people sit in a kitchen talking over coffee and I can’t stop turning pages.

Every time the story simply confirms what we already know, we’re standing in the same place, but every time the story extends the consequences of what just happened in a way that wasn’t predicted, we move, and movement feels like momentum.

When I hit a scene that feels strangely heavy, I try to resist the urge to immediately add to it. Instead, I ask myself a different question.

Not:

“What else does the reader need to know?”

But:

“Have I actually taken them somewhere they couldn’t have gone on their own?”

Maybe the scene is just asking to move.