Your Characters Know Too Much
Two people share a kitchen, agreeing about the guests, the traffic, and what time the pie goes in. Nothing is wrong with the dialogue. Nothing is wrong with the pie. The scene is dead anyway, because they agree on everything, and they agree because they know the same things.
Scenes run on gaps. Odds are, in any scene, one character is missing something: a fact, a motive, an assumption about another person, quietly false since chapter four. When everyone at the table holds the same information, the only work left is cooperation. Cooperation is polite. Polite is flat.
The gap works without a word of explanation. She keeps reassuring him about the interview because she doesn’t know it fell through, and every reassurance lands wrong. He pitches an addition onto the house while she decides whether to sell it. Neither scene explains itself. The reader feels the imbalance and leans in.
The whole audit costs one question per scene. What doesn’t somebody know here?
Pick any scene in your draft and give each character a column. Under each name, list what that person knows when the scene starts: facts, motives, suspicions. When two columns match, cross one item off one of them, and rewrite the scene so the character keeps acting on what’s now missing.
I wrote a whole book on repairs like this. How to Fix Your Novel walks a stuck draft back to the decisions underneath it.
