Flogging the Quill

Something Has to Happen

Friend of the blog Tony DiMeo sent a link to In a post titled Something Has to Happen by author Alexandra Sokoloff.  She offers choice observations, insights, and tips on what’s needed in your novel’s opening to keep the reader reading. You’ve heard much of this from me, but I thought a fresh perspective might help.

Although her blog is titled Screenwriter Tips and she is the author of Screenwriting Tips for Authors (and Screenwriters), Alex is also the Thriller Award-winning and Bram Stoker, Anthony, and Black Quill Award-nominated author of supernatural thrillers and other fiction.

In reading through a bunch of thriller ebooks, Alex noted this:

There was something I was noticing in book after book that I started and then discarded last night that was just a structural error that could so easily have been fixed to - I think - increase the number of people who would want to keep reading. It's pretty simple, really.

I couldn't figure out what the book was about.

Or why I should care, either.

Sound familiar? She notes the following (there’s a lot more about each item on her post, this is just a  listing of the things she discusses):

Reading a bunch of first chapters in a row points out a lot of common errors, actually. 

1. Inexperienced writers almost inevitably START THEIR STORIES IN THE WRONG PLACE.
2. NEVER MIND THE FUCKING BACKSTORY!!!!!
3. IDENTIFY THE SENSATION AND EXPERIENCE YOU WANT TO EVOKE IN YOUR READER – AND THEN MAKE SURE YOU’RE EVOKING IT.
4. USE ALL SIX SENSES.

5. SHOW, DON’T TELL.
6. DETAIL THE INTERNAL DRIVES OF YOUR CHARACTER AND SET THE GENRE.

You may find her discussion useful. I did.

Ray

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Free sample chapters—click here for a PDF

“Flogging the Quill teaches true lessons about different aspects of writing, but in a way that is at once humorous and informative rather than a dry statement of facts. There are plentiful examples all throughout the book, as well as a place to practice what you've learned. In all, I highly recommend this book for people wanting to begin writing, or those who simply wish to learn how to improve their craft.”   Arwen

© 2013 Ray Rhamey

Using "bookmarks" for fast, efficient navigation in your ms

I'm just starting the edit of a manuscript, and the author thoughtfully asked me before sending it if I wanted all of the novel in a single file--she had it as individual chapters. I said YES!

Which leads me to this post, a reprise of a chapter from my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells that you may find helpful.

First, keep the entire book manuscript in one electronic file—it’s a huge time-saver. I know writers who use a separate file on their computer for each chapter of their book. Each of my novels is in one file—the whole thing. It would drive me nuts to have to open up, let’s say, a file for chapter 9 in order to check on information I needed for a scene in chapter 22—for example, maybe I need to make sure where I stashed a clue back in chapter 9 that now needs to be discovered in 22.

A file-per-chapter writer friend didn’t see how I could do it. The key is using bookmarks to navigate quickly and easily around a complete novel manuscript.

With the Microsoft Word and WordPerfect Bookmark tools, wherever you are in a manuscript you can insert a bookmark and easily come back to it from any other place in the manuscript. I used it frequently in putting this book together to jump from where I was writing to a previous section to check on something in another section. I’d insert the letter “a” as a bookmark where I was, go to where I needed to go, and then just use the bookmark to hop back. I use “a” because it comes up at the top of the bookmark list. And you can use it over and over—when I needed to do the same thing further on in the manuscript, the “a” was at the top of the list and it was simple to just select it, click “insert,” and have the “a” bookmark located in the new place.

Another use for bookmarks is when you’re deep into rewriting or polishing your book and it’s time to hang up your brain for the night, your eyes having become loose in their sockets. If you’re on, let’s say, line 16 on page 174 out of 263, the quick way to return to that exact spot is insert a bookmark—the letter “a” will do, or perhaps “here,” or whatever is easiest—save the file, and shut down. Next day, you can return to the exact spot you left off with a couple of keystrokes.

In Word you click Insert; click Bookmark; type in a letter or word in the Bookmark name box, then click the Add button. For some reason, you can’t use words separated by spaces—which leads me to sometimes insert bookmarks such as “describebarn” or “describe-barn” so I’ll know what it’s about. In WordPerfect, you click Tools, then Bookmark, then Create, which lets you type in a name and say OK.

When you next open your document, to go to a bookmark you type control+g (PC) or apple+g (Mac), select Bookmark in the dialogue box that pops up, select the bookmark you want (there’s a little arrow button to show a list of all bookmarks), click okay, and you’re there.

Many uses

Let’s say that you’re really struggling with a passage, or maybe just chugging through the narrative, laying track, and you know what you’ve just written will need more thought. You can bookmark it and move on, knowing you can return with ease. Using bookmarks, I will revisit material that needs honing a number of times until I’m satisfied with it. With a bookmark, it’s easy to go back and keep at it; without a bookmark, I suspect it would get far fewer visits and less thought.

Here’s another one: deep into the umpteenth rewrite of a novel, it came to me that I needed to add a key visual and emotional element to a character’s scenes in several places in the story. First, I inserted bookmarks at each scene where the new material was to be added (necklace1, necklace2, necklace3, etc.). Later, I jumped easily from one spot to another to make sure I had kept things consistent yet varied and had done all I needed to make the new material blend with the old. Because my first drafts tend to be on the lean side, bookmarking those additional bits of narrative enabled me to visit them after they’d cooled a little to see if they needed more work.

Because you can give each bookmark a different handle, another handy use is the ability to check back to important passages. This is especially useful for continuity checks. Let’s say that early in the novel you created a detailed description of a room, and the things in that room are important to your story when they come up again. Put a bookmark there (“the-murder” or “crimescene” or some such) and it’s easy to refer back and keep later references to that place accurate. This could be darned handy for clues in a mystery novel.

Bookmark the first page of each chapter to hop to one instantly. If you know you had Heather shoot the green bunny in chapter 4 but can’t quite remember the sequence of events when you’re referring to the shooting in chapter 16, it’s easy to check.

Marking a passage for later use or change is another bookmark use. In one of my novels, I planned to move the description I’d written for a character to an earlier chapter during the rewrite. I bookmarked that passage so that when I got to the new description point in the rewrite, I could jump there, cut the description from its page, then jump back to where I was (because I inserted a “here” bookmark before I left that point) and paste it in. No hunting, no searching for keyword strings, etc.

For what it’s worth

Ray

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“A wealth of advice backed up by numerous examples and explanations. Ray doesn't just give you the "rules" of writing, but also gives you an understanding of why you shouldn't break the rules . . . and examples of times when it's a good idea to break them. Ray's book deals with storytelling, description, dialogue, techniques, words to avoid, and workouts that help writers to understand how to critique their work and others. He also delves into how to hook your readers and make them care about your story and its character through building tension, raising story questions, perfecting your narrative voice, writing with clarity, setting the scene, and developing your characters. This book is well worth the price of admission.”   Joseph

Opening a story with a dream

There is an often reflexive opinion “out there” that opening a story with a dream is not a good thing to do. Ever.

I’d rather subscribe to the “no rules” rule—there are no rules in writing fiction if what you write works to engage the reader and tell the story. I’ve read dream openings that failed miserably—primarily because they went on for a long time and seemed to be the real story, and then came a rug-pull.

And I’ve seen some that worked just fine. There’s a poll after this:

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I offer here the opening page from my novel, We the Enemy. The first few lines are a dream. The dream is slowly revealed through the course of the novel and relates directly to the character’s inner conflict.

I don't have a poll for this opening page, but please comment if you have a thought.

The young woman laughed and swung the child back and forth.

Words came from Jake, but he couldn’t make them out because they were muddied and slow, as if made of molasses.

The woman frowned at him. She pulled the child in and said underwater words that made no sense. The look on her face was angry. Wild.

A nasty mechanical buzz blasted him—his alarm clock yelling at him. Jake groped and turned it off, then realized that he was holding his breath, his jaws clenched.

Why?

As he did every morning, he turned to a snapshot in a plain black frame on his nightstand—Amy in her favorite flowery party dress, forever five years old. He touched the tiny silver crucifix hanging from the frame by its chain. Amy wore it in the picture.

Why could he see her face in the photo but not in his memory? The crucifix glittered, and he couldn’t look at her picture any more.

He swung out of bed and his foot came down on an empty wine bottle. God, his head hurt—the price of self-medication. He scowled at all the damn sunshine coming in the window.

Should he blow off his meeting with the attorney general of the Unites States? After she’d come all the way to Chicago so she could keep the meeting secret? Should he stiff a (snip)

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How do you feel about opening a story with a dream? You can make more than one response.

Ray

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© 2013 Ray Rhamey

Too much

I’m completing an edit in which the writer did a couple of things that reduced the effectiveness of the narrative—a case of “too much.” Let me add that it’s a fascinating story with plenty of good writing.

The first too much is an overuse of adjectives. One character is a very large man, and every time we are shown him using a hand it is always a “massive hand.” And he is always—always—referred to as the “massive man.”

A woman has very black hair, and she is described as “raven-haired woman.” Again and again. And again.

A young wizard is referred to over and over and over as “the young wizard.”

A younger brother is repeatedly identified as “precious brother.”

Coupled with that “too much” is a second one: using those descriptions repeatedly instead of the character’s name or a suitable pronoun. Over and over.

I once fell prey to spraying different labels for a character in my first novel, thinking that the reader would get tired of seeing the same name over and over. Not so. Pick a name and use it consistently (along with pronouns). It eventually becomes “invisible” like the word “said” can and slips the character into the reader’s mind easily. Constantly switching names forces the reader to adjust over and over, and that pulls her out of the story, even if ever so little.

The problems with the constant repetition of descriptive identifications such as these include:

1. Slowing the pace. It’s a lot easier to read “his hand” instead of “his massive hand,” especially when you got it the first time the hands were described that way. No need to tell me again, I already know this. In fact, it can become irritating.
2. Break in point of view. When you’re in a close third person point of view and the character is dealing with the young wizard again and again, the character would naturally think of the wizard with either his name or a pronoun—in your thoughts, you never describe another person over and over. This is the author intruding on the character’s experience and narrative.
3. Confusion/lack of clarity. Sometimes sticking a distant authorial description into the midst of close third person action caused me to be unsure if the descriptive phrase referred to the person being dealt with or perhaps another one.

Let me add that I think there is one exception to the “one name” guideline above. In one of my novels, when in the point of view of the character he is referred to by his first name in narrative description: Jake. That’s how he would think of himself.

For other point-of-view characters who are either antagonists or protagonists who are just meeting him and not close, I used his last name in narrative description: Black. It seemed to fit with the points of view that they would naturally think of him by his last name. I was consistent in this inconsistency, and it seemed to work because it helped to distance the characters from each other, which was what I wanted.

Ray

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© 2013 Ray Rhamey

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Free sample chapters—click here for a PDF

“I'm a rank newbie with just my first draft under my belt and a bad case of "Now what?" I've read many books on writing and editing, but Flogging the Quill is the first to give me hope that I may indeed be able to whip my creation into a novel-like shape. I especially recommend it for NaNoWriMo. FTQ makes an excellent read in December after the chaos of November fades. Ray shows you, very clearly and with humor, what needs to happen after 'The End.'”    Elizabeth

Adjectivitis

I’m in the midst of editing a 150,000+ novel (have you any idea just how LONG a manuscript of almost 600 pages is?) by a writer who suffers from what I’ll call adjectivitis.

Luckily for me, the story is fresh and the characters interesting . . . but it’s gonna be a whole lot tighter when I get done. Here are some of the things I’ve encountered in the midst of a lot of good writing:

Massive

Once character is a very large man, and every time his hands are referred to they are not “his” hands, they are always “the massive hands.” Every time, which is a lot in this story.

Small

I’ve encountered “the small boy” a couple of dozen times—luckily he grew up. But once we knew he was small, there was no need to remind us over and over.

Another thing about “small” (and large): it’s a relative term. I am small compared to a professional basketball player, but I am large compared to my 2-year-old grandson. If you want the reader to see something as small or large, it’s not going to actually happen unless there is context or comparison to give it dimension.

Raven-haired

One character has black hair, but she is described at least thirty times as “raven-haired,” as in “raven-haired beauty” and “raven-haired woman.” Most of that is going to go, replaced by "she."

Beautiful

Beautiful makes its appearance more than thirty time as well, as in beautiful woman, beautiful mother, beautiful eyes, beautiful food . . . In my view, because beauty is in the eye of the  beholder (the character), just the use of the adjective doesn’t get a description very far.

I wrote about this in Flogging the Quill (the book)—author Barbara D’Amato once wrote in a post for The Outfit about what she called “conclusion” words. Beautiful is one of them. It’s not a description, it’s a conclusion. Here’s the example I give:

Allyson was beautiful.

Any picture of Allyson has to be reader-generated, and may have nothing to do with what the author intends. Beauty is subjective. You may think an anorexically thin Allyson to be beautiful while I think she should see a doctor. Steve may think that a woman with a good extra fifty pounds of love handles is beautiful while Roger thinks she should call Weight Watchers. And so on.

The difference between telling and showing usually boils down to the physical senses.

If the author wants us to think Allyson is beautiful, she needs to give us pictures that illustrate beauty, not labels.

Allyson moved with a ballerina’s grace, and her slim figure made any clothing look good. Hair the color of dark chocolate framed a face that made Johnny think of a princess in a fairy tale, and he wanted to be the one to kiss lips that smiled and pouted and invited, all at the same time.

That’s not to say that you should avoid the word beautiful. It can be quite useful in characterizing. For example, here’s a descriptive passage in which two teenage boys are going to work on a ranch for the summer and go to a small log cabin that’s to be their summer quarters.

Excitement grew in Jesse as they approached the cabin. A place all their own. No grown-ups.

Inside, they stood in a main room just big enough for a double bunk bed, a four-drawer dresser, two chairs beside a small table, and a little space left over to walk around. A battered old radio sat on the table, and an easy-going breeze wafted through the screened door and out the single side window.

A doorway into the bathroom revealed an old-fashioned tub with feet; a metal bar suspended from the ceiling encircled it with a shower curtain. Jesse stepped to the door and looked in. The toilet had a seat but no lid, the sink a medicine cabinet above it, but the mirror was cracked.

Beautiful.

So “conclusion” words can be useful when you use them to describe just that: a conclusion.

Adjectivitis ultimately has the opposite effect intended by the author—instead of enriching the narrative with visuals that bring the experience to the reader, over-use of adjectives soon becomes tiring and the eye skips over them to follow the action, and that’s not what the author wants. If you notice symptoms of adjectivitis in your writing, I advise the surgical application of your delete key.

Okay, I’ve had my rant. Back to the edit.

Ray

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“This book has some of the most helpful writing advice I've encountered in quite a while, illustrated by copious--and I mean copious--examples. Ray doesn't pull punches, and his illustrations have real-world wording at times, but it's truly like having an editor on your bookshelf. I definitely recommend it.”   Richard

© 2013 Ray Rhamey

Characterizing with experiential description

I teach a workshop at writers’ conferences that includes a focus on experiential description and a writing exercise for the class. I always see a light go on in a number of writers, and they almost always do well on the writing exercise. I thought I would share that with you today. If you’d like to do an aspect of the exercise in Comments, please do.

Briefly, on Experiential Description

Simply put, it is describing a scene, person, or action through the filter of how a character experiences it. It is narrative description that comes from deep within the perceptions of a character. The result can be description that not only gives you what the character sees or does, it can characterize the players in the scene, particularly the point-of-view character.

This is in contrast to what often serves as description, an objective “snapshot” that a camera might see. An example:

Snapshot: Sheila’s dress was blue.    

Experiential description: Sheila’s dress was the same sleazy blue Steve’s mother had worn whenever she went out to get drunk.

Here’s another quick example that I used in my last workshop:

Snapshot: Tony, a tall, handsome man, his hair slicked back, enters a room. In the room are two women:

Judy is Tony’s lover.

Ashley was Tony’s lover, but he jilted her.

If we were in close third person with these women, here’s how Judy’s narrative description might read with experiential description:

Tony strode into the room, looking every inch like an old-time movie star, a real hunk if there ever was one.

Ashely’s experience with Tony would yield a different description, something like this:

The greasy son-of-a-bitch pranced into the room, a real dick if there ever was one.

So here’s the workshop exercise:

Following is the exercise that workshoppers do in class. What would you do?

The snapshot:

We’re in a courtroom in Illinois. It’s an old-fashioned one with a high oak desk for the judge’s bench, oak railings that define the jury box and separate the audience. Oak tables serve the prosecutor and the defendant in front of the railing. The judge is a massive Black man who peers over his reading half-glasses at the courtroom. Seated at a small table before the judge’s bench is Amanda, the court stenographer, a slender Asian woman in her mid-forties who wears a gray suit with a mini-skirt.

The characters:

Earl, the defendant, dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit. He’s twenty-four and comes from the deep South. He hates all people of color. While he did what he’s accused of—beating a 12-year-old boy—he feels that it was justified because the boy sassed him. He has no respect for the law or the people who enforce it.

Richard, the prosecuting attorney. He’s fifty-one and fairly trim, though there’s a little paunch. A widower, he is dating Amanda and likes the way she looks. He doesn’t like the way Earl looks, his hair tousled and a 3-day beard. He’s eager to convict Earl and get the maximum sentence for what he views as a terrible crime.

Your assignment:

Write a brief paragraph of experiential description of the snapshot of the scene first from within Earl’s point of view, and then from Richard’s.

Remember that each character’s personality flavors or colors the things he sees, and that should be the experience you give your reader.

Include in your experiential description:

• The judge
• The stenographer
• The oak judge’s bench
• For Earl, include how he sees Richard
• For Richard, include how he sees Earl

This approach works as well for description of action as well. We’ll look at that next Monday.

For what it's worth.

Ray

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Free sample chapters—click here for a PDF

“Flogging the Quill teaches true lessons about different aspects of writing, but in a way that is at once humorous and informative rather than a dry statement of facts. There are plentiful examples all throughout the book, as well as a place to practice what you've learned. In all, I highly recommend this book for people wanting to begin writing, or those who simply wish to learn how to improve their craft.”   Arwen

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© 2013 Ray Rhamey

How brain science can make you a better writer

Learn the ingredients that light up a reader's brain here. One line from the story:

And you don’t have to be a brain scientist to do it, just apply the same kind of techniques that writing teachers have been preaching for years.

Vivid characters, challenging reading

In a recent interview, bestselling author Tess Gerritsen, who is a pantser/organic writer, said this:

“I find that the most vivid characters are the ones you don’t think about too much because your subconscious takes over. I think that the most stilted characters were the ones I tried to do biographical sketches for.”

She spoke about how she did not do a character sketch for her main co-character, Jane Rizzoli, because she had planned to kill her off. But, by the end of the book, she had become interested in Jane and wanted to learn more about her, which she did by starring her in the next novel.

Thus the pantser approach to discovery by writing.

I agree with Tess’s notion because I’ve had similar experiences with characters I’ve created on the fly. And you read, now and then, of writers who declare that their “character just took over.” That’s your subconscious mind working in the background to pull things out of who and what you are to create richer, more real characters.

In my We the Enemy novel, that happened to me. In the opening chapter I had my protagonist rescue a woman from an assault. The scene’s purpose was primarily to characterize him as a man of action, just as the opening scene in The Raiders of the Lost Ark serves to introduce Indiana Jones as an adventurer and man of action.

Then the unexpected happened. The woman was “cannon fodder,” a character to be used and discarded. Not this woman. Nope, she followed my main character to thank him for her rescue. And she became the second lead character in the novel and plays a pivotal role. She sprang from my subconscious and grew from there.

I challenge you to read this novel

I’m still offering free ebook copies of  We the Enemy because it explores alternatives to dealing with gun safety. A part of the fabric of the world is that gun and ammo manufacturers support gun safety laws rather than oppose them. You’ll have to read it to find out why.

Why the challenge? The way a number of issues are tackled—the 5^th Amendment and justice in addition to gun violence—challenge the status quo, and could challenge the way you think about them. It’s not just escapist entertainment; there are things to chew on. Politically, people from both sides of the aisle will find things to love and things to hate—and to think about.

Just email me and tell me which kind of ebook to send—Kindle or .epub. Reviews are here, but don't buy the book, just email me for a copy.

All I ask is that you pass it on.

For what it's worth.

Ray

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© 2012 Ray Rhamey

Constant comma worries

I received a promotional email to introduce me to a website called “Grammarly.” It included information regarding comma usage. The meat was this:

Misuse of commas is among the top grammar mistakes that writers around the world are making, according to a recent audit of English writers conducted by the Grammarly team. And there are many ways to misuse a comma:

• Not including a comma before a coordinating conjunction (makes up 43 percent of all comma mistakes among Grammarly users)
• Comma misuse in an introductory phrase (8 percent of comma mistakes)
• Comma misuse inside a compound subject (7 percent of comma mistakes)
• Comma misuse around interrupters (6 percent of comma mistakes)

There are 28 different types of comma mistakes that English writers can make. Yet, not including a comma before a coordinating conjunction -- and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet -- is six times more common than any other!

Good information. Grammarly will critique your text for grammatical errors, but it won’t tell you what they are unless you sign up with them. I haven't, and I don't know what the cost is or how good they are. However, I did put them to a test.

My test came from two fascinating articles from “Opinionator,” a blog from the New York Times, on "The Most Comma Mistakes." The first one is here.

In the second Opinionator article, there were good specific examples and instruction. I’ll quote some—and, later, put Grammarly.com to the test with one of the Opinionator’s examples of the wrong stuff. The first example of a common comma problem is . . .

Identification Crisis

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

Comma (not correct) after “movie,” comma after “friend” and, sometimes, comma after “Paris” as well. None are correct — unless “Midnight in Paris” is the only movie in the world and Jessie is the writer’s only friend. Otherwise, the punctuation should be:

I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend Jessie.

If that seems wrong or weird or anything short of clearly right, bear with me a minute and take a look at another correct sentence:

I went to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my oldest friend, Jessie.

You need a comma after “movie” because this and only this is Mr. Allen’s newest movie in theaters, and before “Jessie” because she and only she is the writer’s oldest friend.

Two other examples (I recommend you read all of the two articles.)

The Case of the Missing Comma
A related issue is the epidemic of missing commas after parenthetical phrases or appositives — that is, self-enclosed material that’s within a sentence, but not essential to its meaning. The following sentences all lack a necessary comma. Can you spot where?

My father, who gave new meaning to the expression “hard working” never took a vacation.

He was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1964.

Philip Roth, author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” and many other books is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize.

If you said “working,” “Iowa” and “books,” give yourself full marks.

Lastly, this good stuff (BTW, often comma splices are used in dialogue, and, in that case, I think they can be forgivable, especially when they are used to give the rhythm of the speech.)

Splice Girls, and Boys
“Comma splice” is a term used for the linking of two independent clauses — that is, grammatical units that contain a subject and a verb and could stand alone as sentences — with a comma. When I started teaching at the University of Delaware some years ago, I was positively gobsmacked by the multitude of comma splices that confronted me. They have not abated.

Here’s an example:

He used to be a moderate, now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.

It’s easy to fix in any number of ways:

He used to be a moderate. Now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.

He used to be a moderate; now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.

He used to be a moderate, but now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.

He used to be a moderate — now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.

How did Grammarly do?

I pasted the first example from Opinionator into Grammarly’s test box:

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

Grammarly gave this writing sample a score of 100 out of 100 for grammatical correctness, with three checkmarks (okays) for “punctuation within a sentence” (where the Opinionator found errors with which I agree). However, Grammarly did tell me  of “1 critical writing issue.” It was this: “Unoriginal text detected.” True.

I then posted the corrected version from the Opinionator article:

I went to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my oldest friend, Jessie.

This time the results were another score of 100, but it also told me:

Grammarly generated 2 word choice corrections for your text and found no writing issues.

It didn't show me the word choice corrections--I'd have to sign up for that. I didn't.

UPDATE: I told the Grammarly people about my test and they sent this response:

Grammarly provides the world’s most accurate software-based English spell and grammar checker. While Grammarly’s algorithms are very powerful and constantly improving, they are not a replacement for a teacher or proofreader. Our users rely on Grammarly as an automated, cost-effective and always-available tool to improve their English writing and skills.

For what it’s worth,

Ray

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© 2012 Ray Rhamey

Listen to the King

I came across an article by Stephen King on the art of using description to create imagery in fiction. It’s here, at Wordplayer.com.

Here’s a quote that really resonates with me, especially in the light of editing:

If I can say anything important to writers who are still learning the craft of fiction, it's this: imagery does not occur on the writer's page; it occurs in the reader's mind. To describe everything is to supply a photograph in words; to indicate the points which seem the most vivid and important to you, the writer, is to allow the reader to flesh out your sketch into a portrait.

And this:

Good description produces imagery, then. The next question that always comes is, "How do I know what details to include and which to leave out?" The answer to the question is simply stated but more difficult to apply: Leave in the details that impress you the most strongly; leave in the details you see the most clearly; leave everything else out.

Hallelujah. And this:

Too many beginning writers feel that they have to assume the entire burden of imagery; to become the reader's seeing-eye dog. That is simply not the case. Use vivid verbs. Avoid the passive voice. Avoid the cliché. Be specific. Be precise. Be elegant. Omit needless words. Most of these rules -- and the four hundred I haven't quoted -- will take care of themselves almost automatically if you will, from this point on, take two pledges: First, not to insult your reader's interior vision; and second, to see everything before you write it.

Read the whole thing. It’s a lesson from a master.

Ray

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© 2012 Ray Rhamey