on Jane Friedman site:

If we wrote novels that were hyper-accurate to the “real lives” of our characters—even those that populate fantasy and science fiction novels—they would be thousands of pages long and span a series too big to fit on any single shelf. Reality is full of uneventful, unremarkable, lackluster moments that, on the page, are about as tense and exciting as gray Play-Doh.

Creating tension is as much a function of what you leave out as it is what you put in, but often we can’t see those extraneous parts until someone points them out to us or expresses boredom with parts of the story.

The following tips will help you identify some of those mundane parts of your characters’ lives, and bad habits or techniques that don’t serve the tension of your novel, no matter its genre.