It's an arduous, difficult process. Especially so when writing a fully-fledged novel with several hundred pages worth of content that you have to sit down and somehow create something from nothing. Even though one of the laws of science is that you...
Look, after your protagonist got shot in the leg means they can't leap over a wall and onto a building. Even if your characters are demi-gods, they still feel pain[unless they can't for some reason] and their physical ability will be hindered.
No, you cannot dodge bullets. As soon as the trigger has been pulled and the bullet is travelling out of the chamber of the gun, it becomes too fast for the human eye to perceive. And no, you cannot see faster. That is not physically nor scientifically possible. Believe me, I checked.
You know what they call the "suspension of disbelief"? You essentially want to avoid breaking that.
That means a character who is shy and has crippling social anxiety cannot become a social butterfly overnight. A character who has a fear of spiders cannot be completely fine encountering arachnid monsters.
Character traits are attached to the character, and cannot simply be changed on a dime or at the drop of a hat— those things take time for the reader to experience and for you to tell the story.
Additionally, your characters aren't characters, but people within the setting of your story— your world. Other fantasy realms would have laws of magic that would function similarly to how the laws of science work in real life.
Your people must actually act like people. They are not omnipotent, and they sure as hell cannot bend the reality of your world.
Meaning that your mage cannot somehow muster more magical power through sheer willpower and beat out an Undead Lich-King who has been harvesting magic from the essence of dead souls over a thousand years. There must be some kind of system that governs your world in order to make it believable.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
No matter how you look at it, a young adolescent boy stands no chance against three elite-trained veteran assassins. But the writer will somehow make them mess up in a way that allows him to escape or defeat them.
—Unless the boy is a genius with an IQ of 150+ and devises a cunning trap out of house-materials, but even then, he can't just be a genius 'cause why not. He's got to have a history that backs up that intelligence.
Maybe he's gone through traumatic incidents, and his main method of coping with stress was to bury himself in knowledge, leaving his emotional side untamed and as a result, he'll have an extremely underdeveloped sense of personality. No good character goes without flaws.
Your character can't heal from a bad wound overnight, unless they're a mutant with regenerative powers or have healing magic that depletes their mana/magicka, the wound will remain and they will bleed. They will grimace in pain. Tendons would be ruptured, muscles would cease to function the way they're supposed to.
Remember that in a fight scene, there must be some form of tension. It can't just be "character A is just so much more skilled and doesn't take a single hit," and have it be like that.
Even a trained martial artist when caught off guard in his sleep, or someone who's fighting for the first time will have their fighting capability at 50% capacity or less. Their muscles haven't been warmed up, or they have some mental limiter impeded on them. So unless your character has a history of being an armed soldier who's been trained to deal with that sort of stress, that is a no-go.
Be consistent in your characters, and your world, and just how you write. You cannot world-build a setting focused on technology then bust magic out of nowhere. Incorporate it somehow. Create systems, create rules in the very world you've created, so it's not just some playground sandbox— just do what you can to make your story at least somewhat realistic.
Even dreams have their own self-imposed rules.
Consistent quality I feel like is a given.
Even if a book has the best introduction to any piece of fiction in history, if the rest of the book is sub-par or terrible, it won't be a good book. And that's that— Just like even if you've got an IQ of 150+ and you're literally a genius, you can't become a valedictorian if you're wildly inconsistent.
Think of your story as a full-course meal. Let's say that you've a godly appetizer and an amazing desert, but the entrées don't taste good and were haphazardly slapped together— would you still say it was a good full-course meal?
'Course not. Because overall, the full-course wasn't consistently good enough to be deemed as such.
If you've finished writing all the exciting scenes you were dying to get to, and now you feel demotivated because all that's left are the boring transition scenes, then don't write them. If you feel that writing them will be boring, then your writing will translate as such to the reader. Come back later and make it interesting to write, so that it will be interesting to read.
Just as the reader must remember certain things in the story to understand what's going on, the writer must also remember things about their characters, and what has happened to their characters in order to more vividly portray the story you want to tell.
Chances are, if you cannot remember something relating to one of your characters, such as a wound they took in a fight or a character trait— chances are, you didn't place enough emphasis on that part when you wrote it.
So unless you have a bad case of short-term memory loss, if you can't remember something in your own story that you wrote yourself, then the reader likely won't be able to remember it either.
Go back and make some changes to it. Play around with it and experiment. See what works and what doesn't. That's what drafts and edits are for.
Maybe take a break for a week and refresh your creative juices so when you come back to it, you'll have the inspiration to make the scene interesting.
