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Today’s guest post is by author and writing coach Seth Harwood.

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Most writing advice tells you to cut ruthlessly. Start scenes late, leave early, trim the fat. Get to the point. Keep things moving. Don’t bore the reader.

But what if some of the most powerful writing happens in the spaces between your “important” scenes?

What if the moments you’re most afraid to write—the character walking to their car, driving across town, noticing the weather—are exactly what your story needs to come alive?

The tyranny of “Never bore the reader”

In a recent coaching session with a client working on a mystery novel, I found myself returning to Raymond Carver’s short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” Not because it’s particularly action-packed—it isn’t. Not because every line advances the plot with breathless urgency—it doesn’t.

I kept returning to it because Carver does something that terrifies most writers: he takes his time.

The story opens with the protagonist, Myers, vacuuming his apartment—talk about landing the hook!

From here, his wife calls to invite him to an office Xmas party. He declines. They agree to meet at a bar instead. Then—and here’s where most of us would cut—Carver gives us this:

Myers put the vacuum cleaner away. He walked down the two flights and went to his car, which was in the last stall and covered with snow. He got in, worked the pedal a number of times, and tried the starter. It turned over. He kept the pedal down.

Then, after a later-than-expected scene break, we get this:

As he drove, he looked at the people who hurried along the sidewalks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.

Look at that first paragraph. Really look at it.

Myers puts the vacuum cleaner away. He walks down two flights of stairs. His car is covered with snow. He has to work the pedal multiple times to start it. The car turns over, and he keeps the pedal down.

If you pitched this paragraph in a workshop, someone would almost certainly suggest cutting it. “We don’t need to see him start his car,” they’d say. “Just jump to him at the bar.”

And yet, both of these paragraphs do extraordinary work.

What novelists can learn from connective tissue

In my fiction coaching work, I often help writers see that it’s not just plot points or big reveals that hold a novel together—it’s the smaller emotional beats that create momentum.

These connective moments, where the reader feels the protagonist’s internal logic shift, are what give scene structure its weight. Whether you’re writing a twisty mystery, a high-stakes thriller, or literary fiction, developing this kind of tissue is a writing craft technique that can take your revision to the next level.

What connective tissue actually does

What Carver does here is what I call “connective tissue”—the showing that happens between your major scenes. He doesn’t jump to the next action, he connects us.

And while it might look simple, even boring on the surface, it’s performing multiple essential functions simultaneously.

First, it grounds us in concrete reality. We see Myers in a specific place (an apartment with stairs, a parking area with stalls) at a specific time (winter, snow on the ground) with a specific kind of car (one old enough to need coaxing to start).

Second, it builds character through action. Myers doesn’t just magically appear at the bar. We watch him put away the vacuum—a detail that reinforces the domestic tedium of his life as an at-home writer. We see him deal with a difficult car in winter weather. These aren’t metaphors or symbols. They’re simply what this character has to do to get through his day. And that specificity makes him real.

We don’t just see the shoppers and the winter day as he drives, we see how he sees it. We’re riding along with him.

Third, it controls pacing in a way that creates emotional resonance. By not rushing from the phone call to the bar, Carver gives us time to settle into Myers’ world, to feel the weight of his daily life. The writing has a rhythm that mimics the actual experience of living through these mundane moments.

Fourth, it does all of this visually. Every sentence contains an action we can picture. Put away. Walked down. Went to. Got in. Worked. Tried. Turned over. Kept down. These are all concrete, physical verbs that create a movie in the reader’s mind.

As my client observed during our session: “I would have left it at ‘he’s talking about you’ because it left a hook. But it turns out that’s not really what the story is about.”

Exactly.

The gun to your head

Here’s what I told my client, and what I’m telling you: If you take away the gun to your head that says, “Nothing can be boring,” you can really relax into what’s interesting about the scene.

That fear—the fear of boring readers—is often what creates writing that doesn’t engage readers. There’s not enough there to hold onto, to understand.

This fear makes us skip over the specifics, rush through the transitions, and rely on interiority (the character’s thoughts) instead of showing what the character sees and does.

When you write afraid, you write in abstractions. You write defensively. You explain instead of showing. You deny yourself and your reader the pleasures of simply being present in your fictional world.

My client was struggling with dialogue scenes set in a police station gym. She had the conversations down. People talked. They said interesting things. But I kept getting lost. I couldn’t see the gym. I couldn’t see the characters’ bodies in space. I didn’t know what they were doing while they talked. No body language to show their emotions.

The reason? She was spending most of her time in the protagonist’s head—giving me the narrator’s judgments, interpretations, and reactions to the dialogue—instead of showing me what the character was actually seeing and doing.

The problem with too much interiority

Think of dialogue scenes as having three main modes:

1. Dialogue (what characters say)
2. Action/Description (what characters do and see)
3. Interiority (what characters think)

In scenes with characters interacting, you need all three, but the ratios matter enormously.

Too much dialogue without action/description creates what I call “the black box effect”—we hear voices in the darkness but can’t see the speakers. It’s disorienting and exhausting for readers.

Too much interiority without action/description creates claustrophobia. We’re trapped inside someone’s head, hearing their running commentary on everything, but we can’t actually see anything.

Think of it like making a salad. Dialogue is your romaine—substantial, crisp, essential. Action/description is your spinach—equally substantial, packed with nutrients, grounding the whole dish. Both are the greens that give your salad its body and substance. If you have only romaine, you’ve got a one-note salad. If you have only spinach, same problem. You need both greens working together to create a satisfying mix.

But interiority? That’s your dressing. A little adds flavor and ties everything together. Too much and you’ve got a soggy mess where you can’t even taste the greens anymore.

Let’s look at how this plays out in Carver’s story:

As he drove, he looked at the people who hurried along the sidewalks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.

Count the ratio here:

• Action/description: “As he drove, he looked,” “people hurried,” “He glanced,” “filled with flakes,” “snow in the crevices”
• Interiority: “He tried to see everything, save it for later,” “He was between stories, and he felt despicable”

The paragraph has roughly five or six clauses of showing to two clauses of interiority. And notice where the interiority appears: buried in the middle of a longer paragraph, surrounded by concrete visual details.

The interiority is the dressing, not the greens. It adds flavor, but sparingly.

The double duty principle

Here’s what makes Carver’s connective tissue so effective: everything does double duty.

When Myers looks at “the people who hurried along the sidewalks with shopping bags,” we’re getting:

1. A visual detail that grounds us in the scene (people, sidewalks, shopping bags)
2. Information about the time of year (Christmas shopping season)
3. Characterization through word choice (“hurried”—this is Myers’ perception, his judgment of these people, which tells us something about his emotional state)
4. A contrast (people hurrying to engage with the commercial, social world while Myers drives alone through the gray afternoon)

He could have written: “Myers felt disconnected from the bustling holiday preparations around him.” That would be pure interiority—and it would fall flat.

Instead, Carver shows us what Myers sees, and we infer his disconnection. We feel it without being told about it.

This is what’s meant by “show, don’t tell,” though that phrase has been so overused it’s almost meaningless. Showing is the use of action—and action includes looking, glancing, noticing, driving, walking.

You don’t need knife fights and car chases. You need people doing things, even small things, even “boring” things, because those actions reveal character and create the visual field that allows readers to inhabit your story.

Building scenes through ratios

During our coaching session, I had my client start tracking the ratios in her dialogue scenes. We looked at paragraphs and asked: How many lines of dialogue? How many lines of action/description? How many lines of interiority?

In one passage, she had:

• Dialogue: 3 lines
• Action/description: 0 lines
• Interiority: 2 lines

That’s a ratio that leaves the reader floating in space, hearing voices and thoughts but seeing nothing.

What she needed was something more like:

• Dialogue: 4–5 lines
• Action/description: 3–4 lines
• Interiority: 0.5 lines

You don’t need perfect fifty-fifty splits. You don’t need to count every sentence. But if you start paying attention to these ratios, you’ll quickly develop an instinct for when you’re spending too much time in any single mode.

From theory to practice

So how do you actually apply this to your own work?

First, identify your transitions. Where does your story move from one time period to another? From one location to another? From one perspective or point of view to another?

Second, instead of cutting rushing through them, ask yourself: What does my character see? What does my character do? How can I connect these two points for my reader?

• Don’t ask: What does my character think? 
• Don’t ask: How can I explain this?
• Ask: What specific, physical, concrete actions is my character performing right now? What does she see?

Third, track your ratios. Go through a scene—especially a dialogue scene—and mark:

• D for dialogue
• A for action/description
• I for interiority

If you’re seeing patterns like D-I-D-I-D-I, you need more action. If you’re seeing D-D-D-D-D with no A or I, you need to ground your speakers in space. If you’re seeing I-I-I-I-I, you need to get out of your character’s head and show us what they’re doing.

Fourth, make your verbs work harder. Look at the verbs in your action sentences. Are they linking verbs (the eight forms of the verb “to be” that I’m sure you’ve memorized, seemed, felt, appeared) or active verbs (walked, glanced, opened, tried)?

Carver uses: put away, walked, went, got in, worked, tried, turned over, kept down, drove, looked, glanced, tried to see, found, parked, sat, carried, came in, said, got up, gave, held, picked up, drained.

These are simple, concrete verbs. Nothing fancy. But they create a constant stream of visual action that keeps us anchored in Myers’ experience.

Fifth, practice on the masters. Take a short story or a chapter from a novel you admire. 

Track the ratios there. What do you find?

Next, find the transition scenes—the parts between the “big” dramatic moments. Study what the writer does there. What do they show? What do they skip? How much time do they take?

I guarantee you’ll find that the writers you love most are giving you more of this connective tissue than you realized. You just didn’t notice it because it felt so natural, so effortless.

That’s the goal.

The real story

Near the end of “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” one of the characters—Edgar Morgan, the hostile host—has a meltdown and screams at Myers about what the “real story” is. While living abroad for a year, the Morgan family had allowed a friend to secure a suitable couple to housesit—the Myerses. Furious in the belief that they failed to treat his home with respect, Morgan insists the real story isn’t the dramatic anecdotes they’ve been telling but rather the mundane betrayal of Myers misusing their personal possessions.

It’s a darkly comic moment, but it’s also Carver being sly. Because the real story—the story we’ve actually been reading—is in the mundane details. It’s in Myers vacuuming his apartment. It’s in his car that won’t quite start. It’s in the gray sky and the shopping bags and the snow in the window ledges.

The real story is always in the showing, in the connective tissue, in the moments between the moments you think are important.

The real story in Carver’s piece is the writer’s: how he observes his day, what he goes through, how he finds the story he wants to write.

As I told my client: “You’re sculpting out of clay, not metal. You have to make the clay first—put in all the stuff, the visual details, the actions, the descriptions of what your character sees—and then you cut away to create your sculpture.

“But you can’t cut away what you haven’t created yet.”

Right now, if you’re anything like my client, you’re probably trying to create the sculpture directly, skipping the clay-making, and just trying to build with the leanest materials you can construct.

But you’re subtracting before you’ve added. You’re cutting before you’ve created.

So take away that gun to your head. Stop worrying about boring the reader. Start asking: What’s interesting about this room? What does my character see when they walk in? What specific machine are they using in the gym? What does it feel like, physically, to do what they’re doing?

Put yourself in your character’s shoes.

Then show us what you see.

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Note from Jane: If you found this post helpful and seek one-on-one help, Seth coaches novelists working in mystery, thriller, and literary fiction. Or check out his course on showing vs. telling, based on techniques in this article.