Back in 1984, the British pop duo Wham! released a snappy little song with a chorus that began thusly: “Wake me up before you go, go. Don’t leave me hanging on like a yoyo. Wake me up before you go, go. I don’t wanna miss it when you hit that high.”

Not the most eloquent of lyrics, but between those bubblegum lines dwells a note of wisdom. When stuff is going on, people don’t want to sleep. Seems only logical then that in a story, where lots and lots of stuff should happen, the last thing we want to do is fill it with snoozing people.

Let's say our lead character, Mabel Lou, has just encountered a problem. But we decide, for whatever plot reason, she can't deal with this problem until, say, tomorrow. Yet we still have several hours of daylight left. What do we do? End the scene? Or hang out? Maybe she grabs a bite. Picks up her dry cleaning. Exhausted, she then goes home and dons a nightgown, flosses and brushes her teeth, rinses with mouthwash, shuts off the light, crawls into bed, pulls the covers … zzzzzzzzzz ...

Sorry, I just dozed off. 

This character is practically saying, “Yeah, I have a huge dilemma looming, but I don’t know what to do about it tonight. So watch me go to bed." Well, readers could do that. Or they could do a load of laundry or mow the lawn or put on a kettle of water and watch it come to a boil. They all hold about the same level of excitement.

This is what I call weirding off. Focusing on insignificant behavior simply to bide time. Talk about slowing our pace to a mind-numbing crawl! This will do it every time. By including this scene, we're telling readers our character's first reaction to a problem is to sleep on it. A totally passive response. No action means no conflict. No conflict means no sense of urgency. No sense of urgency means no reader curiosity. And you know what that means: this entire scene has to go. 

There’s only one valid reason to devote a lengthy amount of time to sleep or any other mundane activity, and that’s to introduce subtext. On the surface, nothing special appears to be happening, but underneath, something BIG is unfolding.

For instance, let’s go back to Mabel Lou in the midst of beddy-bye time. She enters the bathroom and spreads minty fresh paste on her toothbrush. Big whoop, right? But what if ... as she brushes her teeth, she feels sharp stabbing pains in her chest and arm? Or she overhears her husband on the phone with his lover? Or she glances in the mirror and sees a shadowy figure behind the shower curtain? (The last one conjures images of the shower scene in Psycho, the ultimate example of subtext.) Tension has just quadrupled. Readers are positively riveted to the scene not because she’s brushing her teeth, but because while she performs this mundane task, her life could fall apart!  

Now compare this scene, thick with substance, to the former one, thick with toothpaste. Which would you rather read?

We all need to sleep and floss and shower and shave and dress. But no one particularly cares to watch these things unless they have a point. When we show characters knee-deep in mundaneness, we’re asking readers to focus on those acts alone. To view them as something important. 

Happy to oblige, readers will watch for a while. But at some point they begin to squirm. Why has the writer gone to all the trouble to show me this? Why not just leap to the next day when Mabel Lou starts to deal with that problem?  

What soon follows is the sound of fingers flipping past unread pages.

IN A NUTSHELL
No sleeping on the job.