bummer scene

I  just get stuff down on the page so that the ideas and general gist of the scene is there. But it's pathetic when I read it. It waits for the "telling detail" about the setting, a character's gesture, the smell of the place, sounds, other movement--all that stuff that makes a reader really enter the story. The last scene I wrote was especially  superficial. Funny how all the stuff about the senses changes the way the whole thing flows. Dialog without any action or expression of feeling just lies there. Once the gesture is there, the whole line makes sense. It's in my head when I first write it, but I don't always get it all down until I read back through and visualize the scene happening--like watching a play. Once I step back into that scene as a reader, not as the writer, it's easy for me to put in the things that color and animate my story. 

My main goal is to get the book finished, then go back and add a lot to the detail stuff, but when the first read-back of a scene is so boring, I really have to fix SOMETHING then. I can't just leave it there, crying for a life. And that's what makes reading other writers so valuable. Not that I want to spend too much time reading other people's stuff and not writing my own, but reading good writers reminds me where I want to go, and where I want to take my readers. And sometimes it even shows me how to get there.