Ways to make a "slice of life" story interesting?

[Sonomi]

I want to take a mundane scene and make it fun to read. By "mundane" I mean...activities like work and household chores. Getting ready in the morning, cooking dinner, cleaning. There are high energy events, including live band performance, but I don't want them to overshadow the rest of the story (if they happen to be that interesting, of course; I personally don't know). My characters are mostly adults.

To be honest, I haven't written an overarching plot. What I have right now is a series of loosely connected events. For example, a scene showing that Bob really does care about Alice, or when being late that one time leads to XYZ happening, the characters have to tackle the episodic problem, and so forth.

The main character has an emotional goal to reach, but it's not driving the story. It's more that things occur and subtly contribute to the resolution without being the primary focus.

This genre tends to place focus on character interactions, which have to be something the reader would want to see or care about. How do I know if my characters are engaging enough on their own?

In any case, I would like to learn a good way to approach this type of writing, or little tips for what I really shouldn't do.

[Zelan]

I'm not an expert in this type of writing, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've got two tips.

One: Focus a lot on character development, making likable and believable characters, and making their interactions interesting.

You said yourself that the slice-of-life genre tends to place focus on character interaction. Make the audience want to read about these characters. Since this tends to be pretty dialogue-based, often one or both of the characters is/are witty, although this isn't a necessity. Maybe the relationship is adorable and the small moments that they share show this, which the audience likes to see.

Perhaps the characters are facing a conflict; in slice-of-life, this is generally relationship problems. I'll take this example and run with it. You wouldn't want to start off with the couple arguing; if they're doing this, the first thing that you're doing is presenting the worst side of both characters to the audience. Very few people will be endeared to the characters after this. You'll want to start with a few of the aforementioned fluffier scenes to show off their good sides and the happiness at the core of the relationship. This tends to be true no matter what genre - you don't jump right into the conflict without at least a little establishment of the norm. This helps to introduce the audience to the characters.

Two: Don't repeat yourself.

You mentioned that you wanted to make mundane activities fun to read. This is a good goal and makes perfect sense for the genre. The big thing that you need to get right here is not overdoing it. I'll take your example of making dinner. Maybe, to add in a little comedy, you're going to use the "guy is an awful cook but insists on trying to cook for his girlfriend" thing. (Alternatively, you could flip things around and make the girl the bad cook, but that's beside the point.) So the guy is trying to cook, and the girlfriend probably knows this isn't going to end well but she's humoring him. There's probably light banter between them (again, this character interaction is going to be what makes the scene interesting to read) and by the end of it his creation is so bad that they decide to just order a pizza instead. Great job! What a good scene. But just because it's good doesn't mean that you should reuse the scene over and over; it'll become boring if you do this.

However, this doesn't mean that you can never, ever have another dinner making scene. Maybe a little later on, the girlfriend is trying to cook something new and realizes partway through that she doesn't have all of the ingredients that she needs. Rather than going out and buying the missing ingredients, she and the boyfriend decide to just replace what they don't have with something similar. The way I see a scene like that going, they progress from seriously trying to make acceptable substitutions to just screwing around. Something like:

"Uhhh, oregano is sort of like paprika, isn't it?"
"I mean, they're both spices, I guess. They're really not the same thing, though."

which eventually leads to:

"Let's just scoop a bunch of butter pecan ice cream on there and stick it in the stove."
"Oh, oh, if we do that we've gotta cover it in chocolate syrup!"

Predictably, by the end of the scene, the food is such a disaster that they decide to order a pizza. (If the two scenes that I suggested were to come up in this order, you could also have the added joke of the guy getting back at the girl, who probably teased him for his earlier cooking failure. An opportunity for an inside joke between characters plus a nice callback to an earlier scene.)

Of course, these scenes don't just have to be comedic. You could also have a more dramatic dinner scene; maybe one that starts out fine but culminates into a massive argument, or one that is awkward from the beginning due to a prior event and becomes worse as the dinner does on.

The important thing in all of this is that you don't need to write out every single dinner scene. The audience expects that there's going to be some time skipping going on - every second of every day of a couple's life isn't going to be interesting. It's okay to sometimes have some exposition as simple as "Dinner that night was relaxed and blissful after the exciting day. We went to bed soon after; I smiled as she shifted to curl closer to me." This would especially be reinforced if you've already recounted the events of this "exciting day." After a day so exciting that the protagonist calls it "exciting," a dinner scene would probably be tame and boring to the audience by comparison. Plus, realistically, the couple would probably have a conversation something like, "Remember [thing that happened earlier today]?" as is common when people have just shared an experience. The audience doesn't want to read all of this - they already know what happened today - unless it adds something to the story (maybe you add a dramatic dinner scene here that stems from something that happened earlier that day, which could make an interesting contrast to a happy outing from earlier).

Well, I think that my advice was sort of meandering and I'm not totally sure that I got my points across. And of course, like I said, I'm not an expert in writing slice-of-life. I hope that you could find some of this helpful, though. ^_^ (I am looking forward to your project as I've seen you posting lots of great, thought-provoking questions, but no details yet.)

EDIT: Wow, I didn't realize how much I'd actually written. :/ Sorry for the wall of text!

[Carradee]

I want to take a mundane scene and make it fun to read. By "mundane" I mean...activities like work and household chores. Getting ready in the morning, cooking dinner, cleaning.

You might find it helpful to look up the game "The Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne". It's on Steam.

But what to do… A strong voice/point of view are probably what you're looking for. That's how you make even ordinary things interesting.

You know how stand-up comics chatter about everyday stuff and make it funny? The point of view / voice (they produce each other) are how.

[gekiganwing]

I want to take a mundane scene and make it fun to read. By "mundane" I mean...activities like work and household chores. Getting ready in the morning, cooking dinner, cleaning.

Maybe the characters' average activities help them deal with larger conflicts. Or maybe you can portray characters doing chores in order to show additional aspects of who they are and what they want.

My characters are mostly adults.

Strive to make sure the characters' attitudes make sense for their age. What problems do they have to address on an average day? What are their long-term concerns?

[Mammon]

Zelan already explained it pretty well, so I'm doing little more than seconding his opinion here, but:
If there is no uncommon source driving the plot serious, if there is no murder mystery to solve, no magical battles happening in the streets, no mastermind forcing you to compete in a Battle Royale, nothing crazy and out of this world to entice the audience with plot, then character development and interaction will probably be the scene's selling point. As the entire existence of the slice of life genre already proves, that can be just as good as an epic saga of intrigue and battle.

As you already said, you have a plot source to drive the story onwards: the band. But the romance cannot actually develop with just that, unless you're okay with giving a vibe that Alice and Bob are only attracted to one another with the trill of performing keeping things interesting and them resolving any issues through music while on stage. And I know that's not the case. The band brings them together and will eventually see to there being a climax to the story (probably), but it'll be the slice of life in between that which will make their romance fleshen out and develop. So the way to make that interesting is to make the dynamic between those two interesting.

The way people do that in other stories is rather obvious: They make the characters more outlandish and extreme(tropes), or make something seemingly mundane have much higher stakes than usual. The example Carradee mentioned for example of "The Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne" is just a girl walking to the kitchen to make a 1-minute meal, but through her anxiety and by blowing everything out of proportion narration-wise it becomes ironically high-stakes.

[Sonomi]

@Zelan

I don't mind the wall of text; the examples you gave were very insightful (especially regarding repetition). Asking myself if a scene should be cute, funny, or intense didn't exactly cross my mind. Most of the time I would just write something that I wanted to happen without thinking too much about the tone (terrible!). But taking all the slice of life I've read/watched into account, I can say characterization is absolutely what draws me to it. When different personalities clash or harmonize, it might be entertaining to see how everything unfolds. Specifically, I feel like these combinations could work well after pondering your advice: shy/confident, moody/bubbly, reserved/unrestrained, pompous/modest, etc. Or perhaps when two similar traits are paired together. I suppose it's like fitting a jigsaw puzzle together, seeing which pieces mesh well.

And thank you! It's motivating to know that someone might be interested. I apologize for the lack of information though.

@Carradee

Okay, I'll definitely check it out.

The stand-up analogy is great. I can see how taking on a stronger, more experiential voice can help colorize otherwise dull scenes and even develop the main character's personality. Letting the characters tell the story seems to be a good strategy in slice of life (e.g. opinionated description, idiomatic language).

@gekiganwing

Well, I suppose chores could function as another means of showing their personality traits. As far as demonstrating what they want...I'm not sure how to accomplish that just yet. Short-term problems might arise in the form of arriving at work on time, whereas long-term issues would be things like rent and each individual character's goal in the story (which a character arc may bring to fruition).

@Mammon

Relying too heavily on the band aspect could be disadvantageous in the long run, for sure. I want their relationship to be more than music, and the only way for that to happen is to put a lot of thought and effort into the offstage parts of their relationship. A good chemistry is absolutely what I'd like to achieve, all things considered. I'm off to compile a list of everyday things to start, so I can (attempt to) deconstruct what makes my characters work as a couple.

[arisan]

One way you might think of this is removing the conflict from that overarching plot and locating it somewhere else. In a discussion I had sometime back about "conflict-less" stories, what initially appeared as an absence of conflict was usually a twist on it: either the conflict was scaled down enough that it evaded notice, or it arose from expectations in form, rather than subject matter.
Examples:
One form of scaled down conflict occurs quite naturally in conversations. In every conversation, each person has their own agenda to pursue, which is usually as innocent as following up a topic that's interesting to them. At each sentence or reply, there might be something new to latch onto, something that either detracts from what a person wants to talk about or builds up on it. Miscommunication also comes about in this way, when two people appear to be following the same thread of discussion, but end up diverging at an opportune (for the audience/reader) moment.
Applying this to everyday scenes, you might come away with a "conflict" as it were of how a character is trying to do something and how that thing is normally done. The cooking example Zelan mentioned earlier is one such example of this, and I've had a real life parallel in which someone I know assumed French Toast could be made just as handily with olive oil as it could with butter. Less than ideal results.

This leads to the next possibility, which is messing with expectations. In this regard, you might consider borrowing from comedy. Using structures, patterns, tropes and subverting them at just the right time allows you to carry a story forward without relying on earth-shaking events. 4-komas, tsukkomi - bokke duos, and setups like "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" use this technique in varying ways, often by taking phrases or actions and placing them in a context where their meaning changes--for those in the story, for the audience, or for all taken together.

It would be wrong to assume, of course, that slice-of-life stories are made up of montages of skits like this. Part of the genre's appeal is in its relaxed pacing and the moments in which it lets its characters and audiences breathe. In this regard, remember that part of appreciating stories is in vicarious living--and that's not always about living lives that are grander than your own. Think of the moments in life that you enjoy almost without noticing and try to bring those sensations into being in your story. Though perhaps you can think of this as a twist on a conflict of expectations, too: that routine situations, which in practice are glossed over, are instead rendered in painstaking detail so as to evoke the exact same feeling they would if experienced firsthand.

[Larry Jones]

Some good posts here!

Another way to think about the same thing

Set up a routine (e.g. Making dinner)
Break it (they run out of ingredients)

You need to establish the routine for long enough so that when you break it, it's clear what the routine was and that you've broken it,, but not so long it becomes boring

The drama is somebody being changed (esp by the other person)

E.g. If they run out of ingredients and neither of them care, so what

If one says they've run out of ingredients and the other starts crying and saying they'd been looking forward to this dinner for the last month and now it's ruined ... and they can't believe how disorganised the other person is ... interesting

Or if they could find it funny and say it reminds them of when they used to try to cook as s teenager

Whatever. Make it personal, have people being changed and reacting to stuff, including emotionally

Set up routines and break them

And make stuff connected. Everything happens for a reason. If they run out of ingredients, that will be made important later. Otherwise why the hell was it in the game? Maybe it could turn out somebody is STEALING the ingredients. Whatever, just make stuff important and reincorporate it. Have the characters care about it.

[Zelan]

Set up routines and break them

This is a very clear and concise way to say what I was basically trying to say with my long-ass post back up there.

[Sonomi]

One form of scaled down conflict occurs quite naturally in conversations. In every conversation, each person has their own agenda to pursue, which is usually as innocent as following up a topic that's interesting to them. At each sentence or reply, there might be something new to latch onto, something that either detracts from what a person wants to talk about or builds up on it. Miscommunication also comes about in this way, when two people appear to be following the same thread of discussion, but end up diverging at an opportune (for the audience/reader) moment.

Oh wow. I didn't think of conversational conflict that way. You do raise a good point. It's odd how I do that every day, yet I never applied that to my writing at all. I was wondering how to handle dialogue so that it doesn't feel awkwardly tacked on, so I feel this mindset could certainly improve that aspect of the story.

On the note of comedy...I have zero sense of humor. Not even kidding about that, but here's to hoping research will suffice.

And make stuff connected. Everything happens for a reason. If they run out of ingredients, that will be made important later. Otherwise why the hell was it in the game? Maybe it could turn out somebody is STEALING the ingredients. Whatever, just make stuff important and reincorporate it. Have the characters care about it.

Awesome advice. This particular bit makes me think of what I refer to as a "callback." It's a programming term that speaks to the idea of mentioning something that already happened elsewhere.

I never really had a way of describing it as well as this though!

A while back, I read something I believe OokamiKasumi wrote about stories, and I believe the rule of thumb was that every scene should be mentioned again at least twice. Whether it's brought up in dialogue or if it happens to affect later events, it shouldn't be lost in a conundrum of random scenes. Suddenly everything becomes relevant.

Like, if a student loses his pen, a pop quiz might happen where he has to borrow one from his crush who sits beside him, or his friends could tease him about being so clumsy. That mention of clumsiness in turn could lead to a bigger mistake down the road.

I think I understand....

Set up routines and break them

This is a very clear and concise way to say what I was basically trying to say with my long-ass post back up there.

You gave lots of helpful examples.

[SundownKid]

In my opinion, what makes a slice of life scene interesting is if the characters have interesting interactions. With nothing interesting about what they're doing, it falls to their personalities to break the monotony, just like in real life.

[Katy133]

My top 3 list of slice of life writing pitfalls to avoid:

1. No plot.
Even if it's slice of life, something should happen. It may not be a life or death situation, but a slice of life still needs a story. A (probably) scaled down story, but a story nonetheless.

2. The characters go through no changes.
There are some examples of characters who stay the same after an emotional/literal journey (Sam and Max for example). But normally, a character (usually the main character) needs to go through an arc of some sort. They learn a lesson. They become a better/worse person. They gain something (treasure, a love interest, etc).

3. Lack of setting research.
If you are going to write a slice of life story, choose a specific location the story is set in and do your research on that place. To paraphrase a quote from video game critic Jim Sterling, don't place American mail boxes next to British telephone boxes. A lack of knowledge can really irk players who are from the location your game is set in. It also stops you from giving the setting proper life and makes the backdrop of your visual novel feel dull. Treat your setting like a character.

[Boomsickle]

I think the important thing to consider when writing these types of scenes is that it needs to leave an impact. Even if it's just them preparing their lunch for later, the scene should evoke character and help you learn more about them. Filler scenes can be nice depending on what outcome you want but it can also be used to deepen the connection to the characters so you're emotionally invested in their goals.

Having the character go through their morning routine can help understand them and if something goes wrong or changes it's nice to have seen what it was before the change happened. Maybe early on in the story, the guy wakes up, showers, eats and goes to work. After meeting his new crush he wakes up, looks in the mirror, showers, eats, brushes his teeth, goes to work.

As the writer, you have full control of what goes in the story so having small things while obviously intentionally placed they do help develop the characters personality.

[Hazel]

I think my favorite slice of life game that I've played is Depression Quest. SOL as a genre is basically about normalcy, but what makes it interesting is that "normal" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. "What's normal for the spider is chaos for the fly" as you might say. In DQ this becomes obvious as the protagonist struggles to perform simple, everyday functions that most people don't even think about.

Like if you're playing a game that's made in another country, you learn a million little ways in which day-to-day life is different from what's familiar to you. You grow up watching US-made domestic comedies, you end up with two different versions of "normal" in your head: what's normal for you, and what's normal on TV. As Katy133 said below, setting is actually a hugely important part of a character-driven story, because it's a major component of what makes your characters' normal.

This is my personal perspective. A bunch of people have given some good examples through this thread (which I am absolutely bookmarking because it's super useful). I'm emphasizing this part because it's important to me as a reader/player.