Some books draw the reader right in, like a host at an open doorway, and quickly become very hard to put down. Others, not so much. I analyzed two books I find riveting. (While both books had romance stories embedded, neither of these books is in the typical romance genre.) What did the openings of […]
Detailed Action Creates Vivid Description
As you may have guessed after our discussion these past weeks on ways to use action to describe people and things, it’s also important to use action when describing…well…action. That may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s easier to forget than you might think. Here’s an example: The captain swung his sword in sweeping arcs and […]
More Descriptions with Action
Last week, our examples described a person, and we saw that weaving action into a description makes it a part of the story instead of stopping the forward motion of the plot to look at the person. We can do the same with things as well as people. Here are two more examples to show […]
Excellent Descriptions Involve Action
Continuing our discussion about what makes a description excellent, today we will examine the first of the four elements posted in last weeks Writing Wednesday blog: Excellent descriptions involve action Typically, the type of description we think of is telling what something looks like. The problem with this in fiction is that it stops the […]
What Is Excellent Description?
In my personal writing blog, Write This Way, I recently posted a couple of sentences from Jan Karon’s book, Home to Holly Springs, as an example of some of the best description I’ve ever read. That made me ask myself, “What makes description excellent”? After some consideration, I came up with four elements necessary to […]