Speaking of writing, one piece of advice stuck out to me from years ago. It went something like - “What is the most interesting part of your character’s life? Are you writing about that? If not, why not?” And there may be suitable reasons, such as that you already wrote that story, but…

I recently read another piece of writing advice where the author was talking about increasing her writing speed, and how she shifted from writing in the moment to graphing out scenes relatively quickly before writing them - but the interesting part was that if she wasn’t enthusiastic about writing a scene, it meant something needed to change in the pre-writing sketching out.

So I was thinking about this in synthesizing, and I was thinking, do we ever actually need an uninteresting scene?

Not to communicate setting information, or setup things we need for later, to lower or defuse tension (so we can ramp it up again later), or to create within the reader a sense of the passage of time. All those can be interesting, even if they aren’t viscerally exciting.

And I think sometimes we may think we need an uninteresting scene so that we can set things up for later - but I think perhaps we don’t. We can change the scene. If that doesn’t work, there are ways to include the setup information in one of our interesting scenes.