Written fiction is comparatively unique among art forms. Why? Because it isn’t visual. Unlike theater, dance, painting, sculpture, and photography, writing offers no inherent visual images. And yet, as any reader can tell you, reading a good story is a tremendously visual experience. This means you, as the writer, bear an important responsibility to make […]
February 17, 2016 by 55 Comments DescriptionHack Your Readers’ Brains by Describing the Five Senses
“It was a dark and stormy night…” Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s the Snoopy-at-his-typewriter iconic opening line of melodramatic English literature. But read the whole paragraph from Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and then let me ask you a question. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except […]
May 27, 2015 by 25 Comments DescriptionDiscover the Simple Trick for Creating Vivid Story Descriptions
This week’s video offers a super-easy rule of thumb for always finding the best and most evocative details for your story descriptions. Video Transcript: In some ways, story descriptions are kind of the bane of the writing life. Descriptions of character and setting are integral to bringing to life any story. But there’s also a […]
October 8, 2014 by 25 Comments DescriptionThe Power of the Senses: How to Fire Up Any Story Description
As writers, it is our job to give our readers a powerful emotional experience, via story description. Many emotions come about because one or more of our five senses has been stimulated, so one way to elicit emotions is to “awaken” your readers’ senses. Sight is probably the easiest sense to incorporate, because when you are […]
September 10, 2014 by 93 Comments DescriptionHow to Write a Gut-Wrenching Tragic Scene–Thanks to One Surprising Detail!
This week’s video contains a confession from me, slightly counter-intuitive advice on how to write a tragic scene, and an absolutely spot-on example from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Video Transcript: I have to start off this video with a confession. Within the last month or so, I stumbled across a fantastic quote of writing advice, […]
January 8, 2014 by 84 Comments Description5 Reasons Not to Describe Your Character in a Mirror
This week’s video offers five good reasons you shouldn’t describe your character by having him look at himself in a mirror. Video Transcript: Today, I want to discuss a simple but important “don’t” of how to describe your character. And that’s simply this: Don’t describe your character by having him look at himself in […]
August 19, 2012 by 16 Comments DescriptionAdd Muscle to Your Fiction With Unity and Contrast
Our eyes see the world in shades of light and dark. Without one or the other, details fade into invisibility. The painting technique known as chiaroscuro (which as Lemony Snicket would say, is a big, big word meaning, quite literally, “light-dark”) makes full use of the contrast between light and dark to pull details into […]
June 20, 2012 by 11 Comments DescriptionHow to Improve Your Story With Specificity
Today, I want to ask you a question. What is the single greatest contributing factor in bringing your prose to life? Since you’ve probably already read the title to this post, you probably already know the answer is specificity. So specificity—what exactly am I talking about, and why is it so great? What I’m talking […]
May 18, 2012 by 20 Comments DescriptionVisceral Reactions: Emotional Pay Dirt or Fast Track to Melodrama?
Are visceral reactions emotional pay dirt or a fast track to melodrama? The answer of course is: both! But let’s back up the cliché truck. The word “visceral” is thrown around quite a bit, but not everyone understands what it means. A visceral reaction is an instinctive, gut-deep bodily response to a stimulus or experience. Without getting too complex, neurotransmitters (chemical […]
April 20, 2011 by 40 Comments DescriptionHow to Bring Your Writing to Life With the Telling Detail
In fiction, authors aren’t always able to sketch every detail of a character’s actions, feelings, appearance, and surroundings. Particularly in the current trend of minimalistic descriptions, we’re lucky to get away with even two paragraphs of description. This can present quite a problem for authors who want to paint a vivid picture in their readers’ […]
