Author Janet Fitch has an excellent post on 10 Writing Tips That Can Help Almost Anyone. Every single tip is worth reading and taking into your own writing space.
My favorites are No. 7, Smarten Up Your Protagonist:
"They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering."
And No. 10, Torture Your Protagonist:
"The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story."
Her blog is worthy of reading as well. The short stories she posts, based on a randomly chosen word of the week, are not just entertaining but worth studying if you're a young or aspiring writer. Even in these short snippets, she crafts wonderful, three-dimensional characters and sets a scenes that make you feel like you're living them.
For some, description comes easy. For others, not so much.
In his book On Writing, Stephen King elaborates on the descriptive process he uses by telling us: "For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else. . ."
Details. But sometimes, the details are what stumps a writer. Which details to use? Which sense to convey?
Below is a picture that, at first glance, might evoke several kinds of emotions and descriptive words. Collegiate, barren, gray, and whatever else comes to mind. The choices to describe it are limitless.
A good guideline is to make description personal to the character as often, and whenever, appropriate. Description can be beautiful, haunting, gross, passionate on its own. Make it personal to the character, and it becomes part of the whole that uplifts a character to unforgettable.
Straightforward: You could see glimpses of the tower through the bare branches of the old beech tree, eyeless windows reminding you of the house three doors down from where you grew up. The house where your death began.
Poetic: Light sifts in tangled shades of dusk and rose through the wizened arms of the beech tree. It echoes your shifting mood, shadow and gray, luminous and soft, as you walk slowly to the meeting place.
Humorous: The beech tree's limbs were out of control, like an alien race who grew one arm too many and got tangled up in itself. The tower behind it glowered like I knew Mama Jo would glower, only with death ray eyes, if I didn't get myself home in time.
Succinct: Red tower. Bare winter tree. Cold and gray. Ugh. . .
How would you describe it?
