Niche Ramblings

Now, obviously you could just write the scene. Character A could just step into a car that defines her in some way - a beaten-up Toyota Corolla missing two hubcaps, an ancient white-paneled van from her mariculture farming job that still smells faintly of oysters, the minivan emblazoned with her school's mascot and name, typically used to transport teenagers to track meets.

She could steal it, hotwire it, borrow it, put in a formal request for it, or not have to do any of these things. She could just take her keys off the kitchen counter, walk out, note that the tank is half-full, and start driving. Maybe any of that is enough to prompt an actual scene that you would like to write. But here is the magic phrase, which collapses the scene into a sentence:

By midnight, she's just past the neon-lit husk of South of the Border, the indicator on her dashboard having insisted for the past three hours that she's due for a break, the tank almost empty.

The trick is that you don't need to know what her car is. You don't need to know how she got into it, how she procured it, what she did. Your outline requires her to be a thousand miles from her starting point, just past the North Carolina state line. Here she is.

Too specific - you just need her far enough away to take a phone call and not be able to get back in time to stop something from happening?

She drives all night, stopping only for gas and similarly-flavored coffee. By the time her phone rings, she's just outside of Richmond.

Think about the tactical purpose the scene-that's-giving-you-trouble serves. If it's pure logistics, if there's no major character or relationship change to accomplish, all you need is the movement. Start or end a chapter with a consolidating phrase.

For nearly six months, the medication actually seems to be working.

A year passes in much the same way.

She hardly sleeps on the train, and the next eight hours are all lapses into fitful dreams and bruises when the cabin jolts her awake.

Julia makes it to Biloxi by morning.

After hours of debate, the consensus is less ironclad than she'd hoped, but the chamber is resolved and the vote passes: capital punishment is off the table, but nothing else is.

As I've been editing various hulking manuscripts into something publishably 'tight', one of the greatest resources at my disposal has been collapsing slow or repetitive or just not-quite-as-delightful scenes into what are effectively summaries. This is equally effective when it comes to cutting something down as it is to spurring you past something. Instead of -

"I still object to the insinuation that the harm Commissioner Green may have perpetrated was deliberate," Commissioner Slaughter insists. "She laid out her plan of action very clearly, and by all reasonable parameters, it should have worked. We voted to approve the very same measure we now condemn her for completing to our specifications. The failure of the sea-bridge was out of her control." "You understate the role the Commissioner's incompetence had in the failure of the bridge. An incompetence she withheld in her proposal," Commissioner Cortado replies dryly. "You judged her competent when you voted in favor - " Slaughter begins to argue, only to be cut off by the tap of the Parliamentarian's gavel, as Commissioner Cortado remains standing, arms folded over her narrow chest, shaking her head in evident reproach. "Without Green in your coalition, you won't have the votes to delay our peacekeeping deployment any longer," Cortado continues. "I would ask that the Parliamentarian license a thirty-minute recess to examine the role of the National Jurisprudence Coalition in licensing Commissioner Green's ownership of this proposal at outset."

it is equally possible to write,

The Commission held court for a full day, punctuated with both fact-finding recesses and increasingly heated intercoalitionary debate, none of which firmly established Green's innocence or guilt.

Which one you do write depends largely on the kind of story you are trying to tell. If the next high-relevance, high-drama scene you want to write is an interrogation of Commissioner Green by Commissioner Cortado, you certainly should establish Commissioner Cortado's precise issue with Green and her coalition. If the next high-relevance, high-drama scene involved Commissioner Green being broken out of diplomatic holding by a team of anarchists, questionably to be ransomed or to rejoin them, and segues into her time with said anarchists, there's likely no reason to go much further into depth than establishing the Commission's deadlock and the fact that she would otherwise remain in holding indefinitely.

Writing and scenes should serve the story you are telling. You, as a writer, should not chain yourself to any specific drawn-out scene that is making it impossible for your to proceed. Instead, take a moment to ask yourself:

What do I really need to establish in this scene?

What am I trying to build towards?

What is the next thing I am excited to write, and what still needs to be set up in order to write that thing?

Similarly, looking in the rearview mirror as you edit, you may want to ask:

What are the most important beats established in this scene?

Is anything being shown that, reading back through it, feels arduous in showing and just needs to be established?

Am I bringing the narrative forward or just expanding outward in this scene?

Keeping in mind that the further outward you expand, the more effort you will have to invest to keep the story moving forward. More moving pieces = greater difficulty dragging each into climax and denouement. The more you develop Commissioner Cortado, the more you will have to drag the carcass of Commissioner Cortado along to the next scene, and the next. And unless you are writing a story that runs on Commissioner Cortado and her incisive politicking and fervent desire to involve peacekeeping troops in a conflict (this could raise stakes, she could meddle or help the protagonists, depending on how their goals align, etc), you really don't need to "zoom in" on her when what you really want to write is a bunch of anarchists kidnapping and deprogramming a troubled civic leader.