Try Writing A "plot Irrelevant" Scene

Try writing a "plot irrelevant" scene

We all have it drilled into our our literary heads: every piece of writing, every scene, every beat, every single sentence has to have a purpose or be justified for its inclusion on the plot.

I'm a big fan of justifying my narrative decisions but sometimes the writing can't have a purpose right from the moment it's being written.

So much bandwidth is allocated to the intensive brain-intensive process of putting stuff to words, I feel I should myself some slack if I can't fit them into the overarching themes or theses.

This especially becomes a problem on longer works where there's so much room for meaning and mistakes and mishaps. Worrying that everything has to be foreshadowing or pay off or symbolic can sap the enjoyment of building a scene and thus, kill the velocity of writing it.

So, how about if we just don't care for a bit?

Write a scene or sequence that you sort of know might make the cutting room floor, but has something in it for you if you write it, be it spending time with your favorite characters, coming up with lines for later, or fleshing out the tone. Imagine outlandish meetings of characters that would not meet otherwise, see how they react to situations unseen inside the plot.

You see, we know that readers need variety in a story, but the writers need the variety too. There's a point of critical saturation where chipping away at something will yield diminishing returns whose solution is often to rest by doing something different. Your brain will still be working on that plot thread you left on pause, but in a freer, open and more relaxed state on the background.

A bit of horizontal progress can go a long way for vertical progress.

life sucks

you may not be able to predict or control life's obstacles, but you can control your outlook, your response.

feminine dread

an alternate face to the renowned feminine rage

aka sad girl core or feminine torment

ROMANTICISM MEETS EXISTENTIALISM

key attributes: crying in your room, late nights spent thinking, staring vacantly at the ceiling; never feeling like enough - not pretty enough, not female enough, not smart enough, not human enough, not kind enough, not tough enough. hot-girl summer sad-girl always. loner. standing at the margins. no one sees me, gets me.

i feel nothing and the weight of everything pressing over me all at once.

i'm a void, a crater, something carved out and left incomplete, something that's lacking.

a lifelong quest for something to fill this void but nothing suffices, it all just pours right through me.

my sense of identity is fragmented such that i've never held my entire reflection - some shard's always amiss. the painful absence impales me and leaves me gasping for breath, crawling and choking. the tension of a ghost limb, but the limb is something deep within me that i can't name or palpate. instead, it rattles like a can with a single coin, the echoes mocking the vacancy. i worry the outside world can hear it as i brush shoulder with strangers.

will i ever come to know the feeling of normalcy or was I only ever mean to exist like this? to feel like an anomaly? a glitch?

*cackling*

the whole point of fanfic is to read about a guy who is literally just existing and then everything goes wrong and then everything goes wrong and then everything goes wrong and then everything goes wrong and then he fucks nasty style and then everything goes wrong and then everything gets all cute for a moment and then everything goes wrong and then everything goes wrong and th- Chapters: 35/? Updated: 2022-09-05

“I couldn’t remember falling in love with him, but I could remember looking into his eyes and realizing that they were going to haunt me forever.”

— Unknown

As much as my heart flutters, I'm worried the destiny is jealous of us

- 'Serendipity' by Jimin (of BTS)