I hate rereading my own material. I tend to edit when I am in a foul mood - or maybe it's the editing that puts me there. It is not a great feeling to go through your own work and think: "Wow. This is just awful." The scene that I had intended to be important was cheesy.
There are a few tests for cheesy:
1. Am I embarrassed for the person that wrote this?
2. Do I cringe when I read it?
3. Is the scene unintentionally hilarious?
The problem with cheesy scenes is that they are often important, or even critical, scenes. The scene cannot be cut, but it needs to be repaired, or redone. I have found a few principles that help remove the cheese.
1. Identify if the scene is important. An important scene is a necessary piece of the story you are trying to tell. If the scene is important, it should not be cut. If the scene is unimportant and riddled with cheese, you have the option of cutting it out entirely. An important scene can often be trimmed down to the critical points. Not all parts of a story need to leap off the page. Maybe the work can be done by a single paragraph.
2. Identify if the scene is supposed to be powerful. A powerful scene nudges, or full on shoves, the reader's emotion. These scenes are minefields. Good stories need powerful scenes. A book that inspires nothing isn't worth reading. So how does one inspire the correct emotions?
3. Character Perspective. The ability of people to feel empathy is your friend. Settle your third person narrative to a more personalized perspective for that scene. Have the reader view the moment through your character's eyes and empathy will do a lot of the heavy lifting. Heaven help you if your audience is comprised of psychopaths.
4. Less is more. This should be every writer's motto. Trim words, cut sentences, remove the unnecessary. Reinforcing the feeling that "this is a powerful scene" is going to hurt you. It breaks the magic of the moment. Get in, communicate the message, and propel the reader forward.
5. A Dose of the Expected. The scene needs to be true to the characters involved. It also needs to have reactions that would not be out of place in real life. Make your reader comfortable with the expected. If the scene has a different feel from the rest of your narrative, it will feel alien and forced. If the characters of the story show new sides to their behavior that are totally unexpected, it will push your reader out of the experience. The expected feel, flow and theme will keep your reader in the moment.
6. A Dose of the Unexpected. If nothing unexpected happens, do yourself a favor and limit the event to a paragraph or two. Predictable powerful moments are almost always bad. There are very few exceptions.
7. Fresh perspective. Get someone else to read your work and give feedback. Make sure this is a person that has taste. Make sure this is a person that will not try to spare your feelings.
8. Don't fear a complete do-over. Sometimes the scene needs to be scrapped and completely redone. Redo it.
