Hi. I hate filler scenes, they drive me up the wall BUT i'm currently drafting one of my stories and notice that it needs a filler scene. Do you have any advice on how to make filler scenes feel less like they are a waste of words and feel more like they belong in the story?
How to Fix Your Filler Scenes
The whole reason a scene would be considered "filler" was if it offered no contribution whatsoever to plot, worldbuilding, or character development within the narrative. Filler takes up space, can make the pacing drag, and often adds quantity but not quality to your story.
You never want ANY 100% filler scenes in your work, especially if you plan on publishing traditionally and need to keep your word count down, and unfortunately, there aren't many exceptions to this.
However, a lot of people rely heavily on filler to provide a segue into the next part of their story and keep the pacing steady, so in that case, how do you make these filler scenes worthwhile?
Here are some ways to fix your filler scenes to make them meaningful (and essential) to the story!
1. Make it About The Characters and Their Relationships
A good way to make a scene not filler is if you use it to help develop your characters or the relationships between them.
Maybe you can use this time to make your protagonist and their love interest grow closer, or maybe you could use it to reveal some backstory that you weren't sure where to piece into the narrative beforehand.
Maybe your protagonist has a revelation about themselves or about the others in their group, whether through a meaningful conversation or by observing their behavior.
This could be a good time to show how your characters view the world around them, having philosophical conversation about love or death or anything in between, or to show them changing their views based on their experiences and the experiences of others.
All in all, if you make your scene an important aspect of your story when it comes to character development, then it's not filler at all, and will serve the story well in not only connecting two important events, but also allowing the reader to learn more about the people they've invested in.
2. Make it About the Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is an important part of any story, especially in high fantasy and Sci-Fi. If you need to take a break from your plot in order to make sure things aren’t going by too fast, perhaps take some time to develop the world that your characters live in.
Now, I’m not saying to use this time to infodump everything there is about your character’s world, but instead show it off in a beautiful and poignant scene that can be coupled with character development.
It’s the night before a big event. The lovers sneak out of the motel to enjoy a drink at the bar at the far edge of the intergalactic satellite they’ve docked at to refuel. Perhaps while drunk, one of the characters reveals something about their past they’d meant to keep hidden?
A character takes their foreign friend shopping in a bazaar unlike anything you’ve ever scene before. Perhaps they find an item of interest there that helps them along their journey?
These scenarios make sure that the “filler” is actually an important aspect of the story that would actually take away from the overall quality if it were removed.
3. Make it About Suspense
It's night. The sun is going down. The fire crackles and sputters.
Tomorrow, the characters will be off to battle. They know that they might be sitting in a room with people who will be dead by the following evening. They wonder if this will be the last time they see each other alive, if this will be the last conversations they ever have while they're all in one piece.
Suspense is a great way to make your filler scene important, building up the tension leading up to the next scene. Of course, this scene can only be used to segue into a very, very integral moment in the story, perhaps even the climax, so use it wisely.
Suspenseful scenes often benefit from an interesting setting and high-tension description and dialogue, and can also be paired with character development to show how your protagonists react in the face of fear.
4. Understand that Sometimes Cutting the Scene May Be For the Best
Sometimes, things just don't work out with the above ideas. Perhaps it's too late in the story to develop characters or worldbuilding, or maybe the subsequent event isn't important enough to prompt an entire scene dedicated to suspense.
In that case, it's probably best to just cut the filler scene. To keep from the timeskip being weird, have the event you want to segue into be at the beginning of a new chapter, or maybe re-work the narrative so that it weaves together more easily.
It'll be difficult to do this, especially if you've grown attached to what you've written, but I promise it'll work out all the better in the end; each aspect of the story is supposed to mean something, and I wouldn’t want you to put in all that effort and time into crafting a scene that, in the end, doesn’t really do much for the narrative.
Hope this helped, and happy writing!
