Brickie said:
3) "You can safely eliminate almost all greetings and goodbyes in conversation, every instance where the character is driving and thinking, or sipping tea and thinking, or taking a shower in thinking. You can skip the parts where characters are getting from point A to point B if they aren’t engaged in pitched battle or serious trouble of some sort at the same time. Mostly you can eliminate waking-up and going to bed routines."
I am reminded of how I tried to handle this in the WIP, or at least the novel that is the most in progress in the moment, having had its first 3 chaps workshopped extensively last year. Chapter 3 consisted mostly of the MC driving. It had to, because Something Important To The Plot happens during the drive, and jumping right to the Something Important with no during-the-drive build-up struck me as
Microwaving The Souffle.
Aware of the dangers of driving-and-thinking scenes, I made the MC's thoughts a series of flashbacks to the previous evening. I thought that was very clever of me. Unfortunately, everyone else thought it was unnecessary temporal distortion. And, y'know, they were
right. What's more, the previous evening was the scene of much eating-and-talking, another dangerous thing to do--except character and plot were advanced during the eating-and-talking, or at least in my
head they were advanced, and if they are not at current they will be in the rewrite, dammit.
At this point I'm thinking it'll be driving-and-cell-phoning, which is still dangerously close to doing-x-and-thinking, but it brings in an important secondary character's perspective much earlier in the novel. Which is good. I hope.
Really, I'm not sure you can get away from doing-x-and-thinking unless the novel is a cliffhanger action page-turner like, oh,
The Da Vinci Code. Humans do a lot of thinking while they do x. But I totally agree that doing-x-and-thinking scenes, should they exist, must work much harder than action scenes to justify their existence. They can't just say "I
am elephant!" They have to actually pick peanuts up with their trunks and display the sun glinting off their ivory tusks and smoosh small rodents with their dinner-plate-sized feet (because that stuff about elephants being afraid of mice is pure cartoon bunk, man, bunk I say).