Tag Archives: description
What does a character look like?
Whenever I’m reading a book, it’s hard for me to put a face to the character if the writer doesn’t describe anything. I know there’s a crowd that says to leave it off, leave it up to the reader’s imagination or imagine herself. I don’t imagine myself in the character’s place. If I don’t get a …
Writing Mis-Advice Reported as Facts #2
This is the second part of some of the writing Mis-Advice I’ve heard all over the years. The scary part about all of these is that sound absolutely reasonable if you don’t dig deeper. Check out Part I. All description is boring. Usually when I heard this one, it was accompanied by another piece of …
Visualizing the Setting
A couple of writers and I were talking on a list serve about describing setting — in this case, having trouble getting it into the story. Right up my alley. One of the writers said she didn’t get a visual image of the setting, so she had a hard time even remembering to get it …
4 Links for Awesome Description
Description is one of those great things that can enhance a story and make it stand out. Doing it can be tricky, but there’s some good information out there. Check out the links below. Denise Robbins: Description in Fiction. This is a great list of tips, many of them going further than typical ones. When …
4 Tips to Building Setting: Guest Blog for Sue Santore
Today, I’m dropping in for a guest post on Sue Santore’s blog. A sneak peak: In a movie or a TV show, the camera pans across the scene in an establishing shot and the viewer gets an instant impression of the setting. The opening sequences in Hawaii Five-0‘ show beautiful beaches, surfers taking on the waves, …
Describing Clothes in a Novel
I attended a Civil War Fashion Show this morning, as part of research for my next book, Masks. I know I’m going to need to come up with a second plot for the story, and since the modern day part of the story ties into the Civil War, I’m playing with the possibility of the …
What does a man sound like when he’s being turned inside out?
Years ago, I was in a broadcasting class, and the teacher asked that question. It had been done on early radio show when there were no CGI effects, and they were limited to sound and imagination only. I’m thinking of this question now because I’m writing a scene in Miasma where Keymas, the main character, …
How to Juggle Jellybeans
One of the things I thought when I was revising this novel last year was that it was like a juggling act. I had all these plates in my hand, and I was trying to keep them in the air–but I kept losing track of what was what. This was one of the reasons I …
A Pot of Details
As someone who is decidedly not detail-oriented, I sometimes struggle with getting the right kind of detail into the story. On a first draft, that’s especially a challenge because sometimes putting in a detail in Chapter 2 suddenly unveils itself as being important in Chapter 14 and zooms to major story status where it needs …
