One thing I’m consistently guilty of in my fiction drafts is “White Room Syndrome.” I’ll have pages and pages of dialogue with nothing to give it color or movement or sense of place. My scenes lack sensory details, leaving my characters floating in some sterile void. (I blame my playwriting background. Unfortunately, novelists are their own set designers, costumers, lighting designers, and directors.)
If this challenge resonates with you, here are four revision strategies for eliminating white room syndrome and grounding your characters (and your readers) in space and time.
Add Sensory Details
If the purpose of overcoming “white room syndrome” is to make your scene an immersive experience for readers, then it makes sense to start with the sensory details that will ground them in the environment. For instance, in The Henna Artist, Alka Joshi could’ve said, “Just like every morning in Jaipur, the road Malik and I hurried along was crowded and smelly,” but instead she said this:
On the way to our first appointment of the morning, Malik and I nearly collided with a man carrying cement bags on his head when a bicycle cut between us. The cyclist, hugging a six-foot ladder under his arm, caused a horse carriage to sideswipe a pig, who ran squealing into a narrow alley. At one point, we stepped aside and waited for a raucous band of hijras to pass. The sari-clad, lipstick-wearing men were singing and dancing in front of a house to bless the birth of a baby boy. So accustomed were we to the odors of the city —cow dung, cooking fires, coconut hair oil, sandalwood incense and urine—that we barely noticed them.
The incredible sensory detail—evoking sight, smell, and sound—drops readers instantly into the hustle and bustle of Jaipur while giving them a sense of what kind of person the narrator is by illustrating her calm amid the chaos.
One strategy I like to use when I’m escaping my own “white room” is the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 technique. This is a grounding technique that’s often used to combat anxiety by bringing us back fully to our present moment by tuning into our senses. Identify the following:
5 things you can see
4 things you can feel
3 things you can hear
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste
Try it yourself a minute, and feel how it situates you firmly in your current environment. You can do the same for your characters as they float in their white rooms. Of course, you won’t list each sensory element one by one, but identifying them for yourself will clarify the environment for you and make it much easier to put on the page.
Choreograph the Scene
In a play script, stage directions (and the director’s blocking decisions) add movement to a scene, making it feel more true to life and highlighting its emotionality.
Next time you’re having an important conversation, pay attention to the way you and the person or people you’re talking to move around the room. More than likely, you aren’t standing stock still as you talk, like a white room scene would have you believe. You’re likely using your hands for emphasis, hopping up mid-point for a glass of water, crossing and recrossing your legs in frustration or impatience, touching your conversation partner in some way, etc.
Gestures, and body language give an indication of the space and, more importantly, add depth to dialogue by conveying the emotion and dynamics behind the words. Show readers what your characters are doing while they talk, and you’ll see that white room take on vivid color and shape.
Treat Setting as a Character
I was riding my bike home from an appointment the other day. It was about 55 degrees out, a slight cloud cover producing perfect, diffuse light, and the residential streets I was riding through were quiet except for the very occasional car or pedestrian. I was kicking myself for not having headphones on me, because it was perfect All Too Well (Taylor’s Version) weather.
You’ve been there. A different backdrop can completely change the vibe of an everyday activity. A trendy, crowded restaurant is a totally different dining experience from a quiet hole-in-the-wall. A brisk, sunshiny hike is different from a rainy hike, which is different from a 100 degree slog.
Let your setting impact the mood of the scene. Atmosphere can elevate what’s happening between characters, or it can provide an interesting contrast. The stereotypical “dark and stormy night” could make a murder mystery even creepier, or it could be a poignant contrast to a beautiful marriage proposal.
Show Characters’ Interaction with Setting
As you add all this information about the setting to your scene avoid the trap of simply providing a list of details. Instead, weave descriptions into the narrative by showing how your characters interact with what’s around them. This reveals the setting organically and allows readers to discover the scene gradually, the way they would observe their surroundings in real life.
Here’s a modified version of an example I used in a blog post on what it really means to show versus tell:
Let’s take a worn-out couch and a nervous character, for example:
You could tell us about the couch like this: The couch Sophie sat on was worn out. There were tears in the cushions and the stuffing was saggy. Sophie was nervous.
But what if, instead of simply describing what the scene looks like and telling us how the character feels, we could show readers both through the way Sophie interacts with what’s around her?
Sophie perched on the edge of the couch, crossing and uncrossing her legs and picking at a bit of stuffing that had poked through one of the many tears in the faded leather.
See what happened there? That second iteration gave readers the same information, but rather than relying exclusively on adjectives to clue readers in, we did it through specific actions. Imagining Sophie crossing and uncrossing her legs, “watching” her pick at the torn-up couch, readers can start to place themselves in the room with her and feel her anxiety themselves.
Immersing readers in your story means treating every scene as an opportunity to build a rich, sensory environment. If you find yourself struggling with white room syndrome, the first step is to keep writing. Get that story down on the page, floating dialogue and all. As you work through your second draft, use these strategies to anchor every scene firmly in place.
What strategies would you add to this list? What’s holding you back from building an evocative world in your novel?
For more world-building strategies, check out my journal series, Writing Prompts to Drive Real Progress on Your Work in Progress. I think you’ll find the e-book 20 Prompts to Build Your World especially useful.