I hope you enjoyed my confusing and provocative title, am I Internetting correctly? So, recently on the Writing sub over on Reddit, a writer was stressed about the feedback they’d been getting, specifically that they had a “White Room Problem.”
If you’re not familiar, the “White Room Problem” is what happens when a scene doesn’t feel like it’s anchored in any particular space. Characters are talking, or fighting, or getting up to the shit characters get up to, but the reader can’t imagine (or have forgotten) what physical area the characters are supposed to be occupying.
It’s a real problem, and it can be disorienting for the audience, especially when they get information that conflicts with what they’d spun in their minds. Maybe they assumed a conversation was happening in a bedroom and then someone turns on the coffee pot, or they pictured a safe setting and actually half the room is on fire, etc.
But even small details can pull a reader out or tweak their perception the wrong direction: a dialogue scene in the middle of the night is gonna have different vibes than one taking place over breakfast.
Description Good, Interaction Better
A classic bit of writing advice is to think in terms of all five senses when describing what’s going on in a scene. At an outdoor cafe, the character is smelling the fresh croissant and the strong coffee, they hear the grumble of cars puttering by, they feel the delicate heat of the autumn sun swept away by an incessant breeze, etc. Sight is usually a gimme, but that can get skipped too.
But description isn’t enough to avoid a White Room. It helps, and it must not be ignored, but if a passage starts with a great description and the rest is talking heads, the reader can forget all that cool scene-setting pretty quickly.
The key is in the interaction. How does the character exist in the space? What are they doing in the space? How does the character being in a cafe affect or enhance the dialogue being spoken? Is bird shit a problem, does the smell of gasoline put the character off their breakfast? Does the server interrupt, giving us a peek at how the character talks to wait staff (perhaps one of the most important green flag/red flag situations out there).
The solution to painting that White Room goes beyond “five senses, description, etc,” and into how the characters are interacting with their environment, and what that says about them (and the place, and the theme, etc).
If your scene can be moved to any other space in the world and nothing changes, you probably have a White Room problem.
Your Characters Need to Get Busy (See I Did it Again)
In theater and acting in general, there’s a concept called “business.” Basically, it’s giving actors something to do while they’re talking during dialogue-heavy scenes. Doing the dishes, fixing a car, sharpening a sword, etc. It helps ground the scene in a place, but it also helps the actors feel more natural and perform better because they can be physically present as their character and not just be a dialogue machine.
It works in writing, too.
Give your characters business. Why are they in the location they’re in? If you just picked a random room and that’s where they are, give it a little more thought. How do the surroundings reflect or contrast what the character is going through at that moment? What do they need to be doing there? How are the characters they’re talking to react to this action?
Maybe Amanda is trying to angrily do the dishes during an argument, and Pete keeps turning off the faucet to get her to talk to him. Or a kid is copying his dad, pretending to fix his tricycle while his dad fixes his car. Or Blade is sharpening his sword while Moon Knight is sorting his pills out on a dirty workbench, moving Blade’s tools out of the way.
The talking is happening, but you can use the space to add characterization and depth.
In the examples I just mentioned, there’s another band of data the audience can pick up from seemingly innocuous business. If Amanda is the kind of person who starts doing the dishes when they’re angry instead of talking it out, we can assume they’re a bit avoidant, task-oriented, or maybe passive aggressive. We don’t know for sure until we see more, but we start asking these questions (even if we don’t realize we’re thinking about it). Maybe Amanda is a bad communicator, or maybe Pete is the bad communicator and Amanda is tired of arguments with him that go nowhere.
For Pete, we see someone who is desperately trying to communicate with an apparently closed-off person, but we also see someone who seems a little too comfortable getting in other people’s spaces and physically restraining their actions. Which could explain why Amanda doesn’t want to argue with him right now.
For the “dad fixing the car scene,” having his kid copying him tells you maybe the kid admires his dad, or alternatively, doesn’t get enough attention from him and is trying to mirror his interests. With Blade and Moon Knight, Blade is obviously more focused on the next mission than talking, while Moon Knight laying his pills out on a greasy bench tells you he cares about his mental health to an extent but he’s still a mess. And that he doesn’t particularly care about Blade’s meticulous tool organization system.
Maybe *none* of this comes up in the scene’s dialogue, which is actually about forgetting to schedule the kids’ dentist appointment, or why the fixing dad never got along with his own father, or how New York needs to be saved from werewolves, but we’ve picked up so much intel about these characters just from their business.
In a White Room devoid of business, you’d miss all of that. And as a writer, you’re skipping the chance to create a more layered scene.
But Wait, There’s Less (or, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff)
It’s possible, like the author in that subreddit I mentioned, that your White Room Problem is overstated, too. It’s a fairly popular “critique” right now, I’m gonna assume this is TikTok’s fault (because it’s usually TikTok’s fault).
So before you go thinking you have to rewrite all of your scenes, consider this: some critique can be unhelpful or ill-informed. Or, to put it profesionally and with great dignitude and high vocabulix: some people don’t know shit.
Now, it’s not good to get in the habit of thinking “it’s the kids who are wrong” when it comes to editing. Accepting that someone sees a problem you don’t is a cornerstone of the writer/editor relationship, and will improve your writing (even if you don’t always take every suggestion). But, alternatively, take the person’s advice as seriously as their writing/editing skill level. Especially for someone who is a reader but doesn’t write or edit professionally.
If they say “I feel bored during this part,” take that criticism seriously. Readers may not be as familiar with the working details of craft, but they sure as Hell know when something sucks. But if the reader think every time you don’t dive into the physical details it’s a “White Room Problem,” that criticism might be taken with a grain of salt.
A lot of readers and writers are influenced heavily by movies and TV, and see a book as the same thing. But every moment in a book isn’t a “scene.” You may spend pages in the character’s head, thinking about their day, or even imagining and musing as years or even decades pass. Someone might call you on “telling not showing,” or not knowing where the character is physically present during these musings and yell “White Room!”, but the character isn’t always *in* a room.
Hell, sometimes the character isn’t even a character. There’s a part of IT where Stephen King follows the perspective of a paper boat in a storm gutter. Writing is weird, man, dig it (*finger snaps*).
If you’re grounding your scenes in a time and place, but sometimes skipping over boring parts with summary, or expanding the character’s interiority, or working in more abstract sequences, that’s normal. That’s how a book works, and it’s how pacing works.
As long as your important scenes avoid the dreaded White Room, you should be good. And even then, rules are meant to be broken. Sometimes divorcing dialogue from context forces the reader to focus only on what the characters are saying, and that’s a great technique too (though one to use judiciously). I used it myself in my final DEADGIRL book, where we see an eye-opening transcript of an interrogation of the main villain by a Shadowy Government Organization (SGO), with no physical or sensory details at all.
I guess my point is, sometimes White Rooms are okay, but if you’re not doing them on purpose you may need to add some thoughtful and character-expanding interaction to ground your scenes. Now that I’ve sat proudly on the fence, uh, have a great day.
Here’s Commander Riker to play you out:
B.C. Johnson 