This article originally appeared in my Periphery Drafts newsletter, issue #7.

Most novels shouldn’t include a waking-up scene. And yet, as an author, you probably need to write it anyway.

You might well need to know what your character’s mornings look like, how they move through a normal day. To really understand that, you could write a wake-up scene, a lunch scene, a nap scene, a dinner scene—an entire day.

Write It, But Don’t Publish It

But that stuff usually doesn’t belong in the book unless the scene serves the plot in some specific way.

Instead, make passing references to those things you wrote in those scenes—just enough for the reader to feel the shape of that life. The rest stays in your head, doing its job quietly, so you can focus on what matters: the story.

At least until things stop being normal.