The Art of Connective Tissue: Building Character in Fiction

Thank you to Jane Friedman for sharing an earlier version of this post on her blog.

Most writing advice tells you to cut ruthlessly. Start scenes late, leave early, trim the fat. Get to the point. Keep things moving. Don’t bore the reader.

But what if some of the most powerful writing happens in the spaces between your “important” scenes?

What if the moments you’re most afraid to write—the character walking to their car, driving across town, noticing the weather—are exactly what your story needs to come alive?

The Tyranny of “Never Bore the Reader”

In a recent coaching session with a client working on a mystery novel, I found myself returning to Raymond Carver’s short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” Not because it’s particularly action-packed—it isn’t. Not because every line advances the plot with breathless urgency—it doesn’t.

I kept returning to it because Carver does something that terrifies most writers: he takes his time.

The story opens with the protagonist, Myers, vacuuming his apartment—talk about landing the hook!

From here, his wife calls to invite him to an office Xmas party. He declines. They agree to meet at a bar instead. Then—and here’s where most of us would cut—Carver gives us this:

“Myers put the vacuum cleaner away. He walked down the two flights and went to his car, which was in the last stall and covered with snow. He got in, worked the pedal a number of times, and tried the starter. It turned over. He kept the pedal down.”

Then, after a later-than-expected scene break, we get this:

“As he drove, he looked at the people who hurried along the sidewalks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.”

Look at that first paragraph. Really look at it.

Myers puts the vacuum cleaner away. He walks down two flights of stairs. His car is covered with snow. He has to work the pedal multiple times to start it. The car turns over, and he keeps the pedal down.

If you pitched this paragraph in a workshop, someone would almost certainly suggest cutting it. “We don’t need to see him start his car,” they’d say. “Just jump to him at the bar.”

And yet, both of these paragraphs do extraordinary work.

What Connective Tissue Actually Does

What Carver does here is what I call “connective tissue”—the showing that happens between your major scenes. He doesn’t jump to the next action, he connects us.

And while it might look simple, even boring on the surface, it’s performing multiple essential functions simultaneously.

First, it grounds us in concrete reality. We see Myers in a specific place (an apartment with stairs, a parking area with stalls) at a specific time (winter, snow on the ground) with a specific kind of car (one old enough to need coaxing to start).

Second, it builds character through action. Myers doesn’t just magically appear at the bar. We watch him put away the vacuum—a detail that reinforces the domestic tedium of his life as an at-home writer. We see him deal with a difficult car in winter weather. These aren’t metaphors or symbols. They’re simply what this character has to do to get through his day. And that specificity makes him real.

We don’t just see the shoppers and the winter day as he drives, we see how he sees it. We’re riding along with him.

Third, it controls pacing in a way that creates emotional resonance. By not rushing from the phone call to the bar, Carver gives us time to settle into Myers’ world, to feel the weight of his daily life. The writing has a rhythm that mimics the actual experience of living through these mundane moments.

Fourth, it does all of this visually. Every sentence contains an action we can picture. Put away. Walked down. Went to. Got in. Worked. Tried. Turned over. Kept down. These are all concrete, physical verbs that create a movie in the reader’s mind.

As my client observed during our session: “I would have left it at ‘he’s talking about you’ because it left a hook. But it turns out that’s not really what the story is about.”

Exactly.

The Gun to Your Head

Here’s what I told my client, and what I’m telling you: If you take away the gun to your head that says, “Nothing can be boring,” you can really relax into what’s interesting about the scene.

That fear—the fear of boring readers—is often what creates writing that doesn’t engage readers. There’s not enough there to hold onto, to understand.

This fear makes us skip over the specifics, rush through the transitions, and rely on interiority (the character’s thoughts) instead of showing what the character sees and does.

When you write afraid, you write in abstractions. You write defensively. You explain instead of showing. You deny yourself and your reader the pleasures of simply being present in your fictional world.

From Theory to Practice

So how do you actually apply this to your own work?

First, identify your transitions. Where does your story move from one time period to another? From one location to another? From one perspective or point of view to another?

Second, instead of cutting rushing through them, ask yourself: What does my character see? What does my character do? How can I connect these two points for my reader?

Don’t ask: What does my character think?

Don’t ask: How can I explain this?

Ask: What specific, physical, concrete actions is my character performing right now? What does she see?

Third, make your verbs work harder. Look at the verbs in your action sentences. Are they linking verbs (the eight forms of the verb “to be” that I’m sure you’ve memorized, seemed, felt, appeared) or active verbs (walked, glanced, opened, tried)?

Carver uses: put away, walked, went, got in, worked, tried, turned over, kept down, drove, looked, glanced, tried to see, found, parked, sat, carried, came in, said, got up, gave, held, picked up, drained.

These are simple, concrete verbs. Nothing fancy. But they create a constant stream of visual action that keeps us anchored in Myers’ experience.

Fourth, practice on the masters. Take a short story or a chapter from a novel you admire.

Find the transition scenes—the parts between the “big” dramatic moments. Study what the writer does there. What do they show? What do they skip? How much time do they take?

I guarantee you’ll find that the writers you love most are giving you more of this connective tissue than you realized. You just didn’t notice it because it felt so natural, so effortless.

That’s the goal.

Don’t Cut Before You’ve Written

As I told my client: “You’re sculpting out of clay, not metal. You have to make the clay first—put in all the stuff, the visual details, the actions, the descriptions of what your character sees—and then you cut away to create your sculpture.

“But you can’t cut away what you haven’t created yet.”

Right now, if you’re anything like my client, you’re probably trying to create the sculpture directly, skipping the clay-making, and just trying to build with the leanest materials you can construct.

But you’re subtracting before you’ve added. You’re cutting before you’ve created.

So take away that gun to your head. Stop worrying about boring the reader. Start asking: What’s interesting about this room?

What does my character see when they walk in?

What does it feel like, physically, to do what they’re doing?

Put yourself in your character’s shoes.

Then show us what you see.

If you’re looking for the next steps in the connective tissue process, check out these two posts on the three kinds of transitions that require connective tissue and how many transitions a reader can absorb in a given stretch.

Whether you’re in the early drafting stage or deep into revision, noticing the connective tissue in your scenes can help you identify what’s working—and what’s missing. These moments of showing and description are where your characters come alive, and your reader’s emotional investment grows.

Want to take this further? I coach novelists working in mystery, thriller, and literary fiction to improve their scene structure, deepen emotional resonance, and finish strong.

Explore my writing coaching programs
Learn more about how to revise your novel
Or get my course on showing vs. telling, based on exactly this kind of technique