Using descriptive writing to show the characters’ movements through the story, setting, and the world, we’re giving our readers an added layer of description to cling to and experience the story. Descriptive action has ripples you can use to show other aspects of your story’s world.
Tag: Write Better Right Now
Write Better, Right Now: Descriptive Writing to World Build
Descriptive world building is the easiest way to fall into a hole of describing information and moments not important or necessary to the flow of the story.
Write Better, Right Now: Descriptive Writing in Dialogue
Writers can show a whole world, describe conflict, and trick the reader just by fine-tuning a character’s voice to make it sing. How someone chooses to express their emotions, surroundings, and the situations they get into can convey way more to the reader in a more engaging way than simply stating it.
Write Better, Right Now: What is Descriptive Writing?
Descriptive writing is often stated as show don’t tell. But that’s kind of wrong, descriptive writing does involve telling. Writers tell the reader many things but dressed up in fancy clothing and paired with showing.
Write Better, Right Now: Inner Character Voice
Nondialogue voice or your character’s inner voice is usually done in a way that aligns with how the character speaks with the rest of the characters in the story. But sometimes an author wants to show that a character has extra depth or perhaps isn’t who they appear to be to the reader or other characters in the story.
Write Better, Right Now: Dialogue as Exposition
Using character voice as exposition may seem like a simple technique, but more often than not, writers do this in a heavy-handed way. This leaves their dialogue stilted, dry, and an obvious story function that drains their prose. Blending story exposition and important story information allow you as the writer to keep your story engaging while feeding your reader what they need to know to stay grounded in your story and characters.
Write Better, Right Now: Developing Our Characters’ Voices
Once you’ve found your character’s voice, how do you deepen it to make it memorable and engaging? This is the second biggest hurdle a lot of writers face. They’ve found that cool voice and they’re like ‘Great! I’m done.’ But going the extra step to develop, deepen, and shape that voice around your story can create an even richer voice and engaging dialogue throughout your story.
Write Better, Right Now: Finding Our Characters’ Voices
While there are tons of ways of discovering your characters’ voices, the basic idea behind all of them comes down to one thing: figuring out how your characters speak in a variety of situations related to who they are, where they’re from, and who they are speaking to. Think about it. Do you talk the same to every one you speak to? What about characters in your favorite books? Do their voices stay static throughout the whole story?
Write Better, Right Now: Physically Describing Our Characters
When we’re writing our stories, we make deliberate decisions related to not just the big story event elements but the smaller aspects story like characterization. How do we want our readers to see or know our characters?
Write Better, Right Now: Interior World of Characters
The interior world of characters or their interiority is an important part of characterization. It gives the reader insight into who the character is when no one but the author is looking.
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