If you want your reader to feel emotion and action on the page, avoid writing in passive voice. It creates distance between the characters on the page and your reader, it dilutes the immediacy, and waters down action. The most common culprit is helping verbs. Passive Voice and Helping Verbs Ban helping verbs from your writing to eliminate passive voice. That may be a little harsh, but in all honesty helping verbs are the most common indicator that you have slipped into passive voice. When active verbs like take, sing, or walk are aided by a version of the verbs ‘to be’ or ‘to have,’ (also known as helping verbs)…
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Things That Fall From the Sky
Precipitation has a specialized vocabulary all its own. Generally speaking, precipitation includes rain, snow, and hail. But each of these has a range of words to describe them. Rain Rain falls from the sky as drops of water. It comes down hard, soft, heavy, and light. Rain has its own specialized vocabulary. It can mist, sprinkle, drizzle, or rain. A light rain is a shower. Heavier rainstorms come in downpours, cloudbursts and torrents. Rain paired with thunder is a thundershower, and is often accompanied by lightning. A rainfall with copious amounts of water is called a deluge and may lead to flash floods. In northern latitudes you may experience freezing…
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Hoof Print in the Snow
If only I could focus reader attention the way my dog focuses on tracking a deer through the snow. Wait, maybe I can! Remove Distractions Snow blanketed the ground nearly a week ago, masking the usual smells that Dusty loves to sniff on our daily walks. Shrubs marked by other dogs, clumps of native grass flattened by sleeping deer, and bird nests of ground dwelling quail were all buried by inches of snow. So instead of stopping at every bush, tree, and possible ground nest to satisfy her olfactory senses, Dusty has taken to shoving her nose in each hoof print she passes, breathing in what I imagine is the…
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Show Don’t Tell with Sense of Sight
The writer’s mantra show, don’t tell has an obvious partnership with the sense of sight. We show the reader what we see with our eyes. We see shape, size, color, direction, and motion. How best to show these? Comparisons Beginning writers naturally gravitate to the sense of sight in description. We are after all, visual creatures. Be careful not to catalog what you see: the big blue house sat at the end of a long gravel drive. This example includes size, color, and distance descriptors-big, blue, and long. While these all paint an image for the reader, the image is bland and without character. Instead, use comparisons to tease out emotional…
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Sensory Detail in Revision
You’ve spent hours on your paper. You’ve checked spelling, punctuation, and grammar. You rearranged sentences to maximize readability and harness sentence flow. The next item on your list is to insert sensory detail to liven up your text. Wordscape The five senses are: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Landscape painters capture the colors, textures, and essence of a particular place. Gourmands combine color, texture, taste, and smell into a fine dining experience. In the same way, great writers use all five senses to create a wordscape. Okay, I just made that word up. My point is, in order to put your reader in the character’s shoes you must use…
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Show Don’t Tell Part IV
I want to challenge you to use the sense of touch in your writing. The obvious uses are texture and temperature. But there’s so much more. When you think of the sense of touch you may think of your fingertips. The sense of touch goes beyond what you feel with your fingertips. Texture and Temperature Floors are hard, roads slick, and pillows soft. That’s texture. Sometimes a simple word will describe texture, other times you may use a comparison. For example, the floor was hard as a tombstone might be appropriate in a ghost story. But for a light-hearted tale you might describe the floor as hard like rock candy.…
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Show Don’t Tell Part III
Use volume, pitch, rhythm, and rhyme to embed your reader in a sonic landscape. Show Don’t Tell is a writing technique to draw the reader onto the page. Imagine a snowy day. What do you hear? I heard the tap-tap of snow hitting my brimmed hat, the squeak of boots in snow, and the sheer quiet of a world muted by falling flakes after a first snow. Several days later the sounds morphed. The snow had a crust of ice that crunched under my boots. Birds sang from snow covered branches. Traffic hummed on the highway a mile away. Volume and Pitch Show emotion with your dialog. For instance, words…
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Show Don’t Tell Part 2
Show Don’t Tell invites your reader into the pages of your story. Normally in show don’t tell the writer uses descriptive language to evoke the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. You can show taste in terms of intensity, the five basic tastes, physiological reaction, and memory activation. Show Taste Taste usually involves food, but not always. More about that later. One way to immerse your reader is to suggest the intensity of a flavor. There is a big difference between the hint of a flavor and a blast. Take peppermint for example. When I add a candy cane to my hot chocolate, I taste a hint of…
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Show Don’t Tell, Part 1
Show don’t tell is great advice for writers. But what does it mean? The difference between showing and telling is the difference between immersion and bullet points. Think about when you are learning a new skill. While some people can learn from reading a manual, most of us do better when we observe the task then try it out ourselves. Take a moment to write the steps for a routine activity such as making a sandwich or washing your face. Now, think about how you can show the same activity. Did your fingers get sticky from the peanut butter? Did your eyes sting from soap? One way to immerse your…
