Writing Fiction in the New World (Part 4)

puppy looks in autumn leaves.

Image (C) gurinaleksandr / Deposit Photos

We are in the final week of the 2023 Writing Story Bundle. If you haven’t picked up your set, you have only six days left.

Onward to the topic!

The challenge of having only a beginner culture is that it’s pretty hard to even figure what other skills to learn at a more advanced level. If you wanted to write a prologue, how would you find out when no one teaches it? Add to this yet another problem. While there is advanced writing teaching some things, it’s their opinion. They may leave something out that they don’t agree with, or never use, and it’s something you would find helpful.

So here’s a list of skill areas to tackle (bearing in mind that I may have missed some myself)

Description

Hands down, description will be the foundation skill for nearly everything else. If you find it a challenge for any of these, it’s your description skills behind it:

Characterization

Setting/Worldbuilding (which is also characterization)

Five senses

Emotions

Pacing

Character actions

Hiding information

…And the list can go on.

If you’ve spent a lot of time in the writing culture of drips and drabs, it’ll be hard unlearning that. I had to tell myself every time I opened a scene to start with the setting. What did it look like? What did it smell like? What did it sound like? After all, your character exists in this place in the story. The reader should never feel like you could replace Washington DC with Los Angeles or Atlanta and not tell the difference.

Start by hitting the setting and the five senses at the start of every scene. What you need varies, depending on how you talk to, and even in what order. Dean Wesley Smith, in his depth class, says the five senses every five hundred words. To me, that’s very hard including taste like that. While technically you can add taste from smell, pretty much your characters have to eat (though you can use dialogue for this and have the characters talk about food or being hungry).

Edward Amejko, The Writer July 1949, recommends using touch, sight, and hearing at the very least. He also notes that the reader will experience emotions through the senses.

Dorothy McCann, The Writer, February 1952 also notes that some sounds carry their own story. Probably the best example of that is your character is in bed late at night and is woken up by a gunshot. The reader instantly knows “trouble” and maybe “danger” for the character. Use the tools liberally.

The late Dave Farland also recommends that you add a sense of light to every scene. This doesn’t have to be a physical description of light. You can mention the sun being low in the sky, a nearly full moon with a chip out of the side. Characters can give the time, say “Good morning,” complain about getting up early, complain about missing dinner, eat dinner (and you get the five senses in!). Try studying James Rollins for this.

David Farland also notes that you must be specific about the weather in the scene. If it’s raining in your setting (or snowing or wind gusting), describe what kind of rain. Just saying “It was raining” is a fake detail. It doesn’t give the reader any kind of visual image of the rain. Here, if it’s too vague, they won’t remember it until it suddenly becomes important and then kicks them out of the story. So, is the rain spitting, a piss trickle, or dumping so much rain that the streets are flooding (a common occurrence where I live)?

This means, of course, you have to also decide on the time of year. A surprising number of writers ignore the seasons entirely. Thinking about how it affects your story adds more to the plot and the characterization. If it’s almost Thanksgiving and the main character doesn’t get the annual invite to the turkey dinner, what’s going on? Description feeds into everything!

Practice adding it to your scene as much as possible. You’ll probably add too much and slow the story down, interfering with the pacing. If that happens, take a sentence out. Tighten a few others up.

To study, start with The Writer Magazine online archives. Search for the five senses, since you will find that with description. You can also try searching for description and setting as well. The writers say the same things, but in different ways.

After that, take Dean Wesley Smith’s Depth class. This will probably be the single hardest class you’ve ever taken. However, once you’ve practiced the skills you learn, if you submit short stories to professional rate magazines, you’ll see personal rejections and eventually some acceptances. You’re also likely to overbalance and put too much in. It will be helpful to practice all the skills above before you take the class.

Then take Drake University’s Show Don’t Tell Basics. This will sound like a beginner course, and it’s anything but. Where Dean Wesley Smith gives top-level concepts, Drake University gives specific details and examples. Depth is such a big topic that input from other sources will only help with your understanding.

Other things to try:

Build your observation skills. Walk around the neighborhood and study what you see. Try to use as many of the senses as you can.

Sit at a restaurant table outside and watch the people walk by. How do they dress? Do they wear jewelry? What does their hair look like? What does their voice sound like? (David Farland says description of voices is often neglected). If you’re sitting near two or more people, eavesdrop discretely (this is a tip also from David Farland).

Take a moment to study the meal’s composition and smell it. What does it taste like? What’s the texture?

There are lots of opportunities to do this. Better still, it will also stir your creativity. I wrote several stories based on lawn ornaments I observed. If you have trouble figuring out what to do, try Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. He sends out a weekly newsletter with a noticing task to try.

Do a metaphor review. Metaphors are a huge part of our language. When you’re reading a non-fiction book, write down all the metaphors you find. Or do it with a week’s worth of newspapers (paper copies are best). This came from Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind. When I tried this, I was amazed at the results. Metaphors sometimes get a bad rap because writers can try too hard and end up with purple prose. When you do a review like this, you see how rich with metaphors our language is. It isn’t just comparison phrases, but specific words we use daily.

Boost your vocabulary. I’m not talking about doing it the traditional way, like receiving a word a day. Those are usually not words you’d want to use in fiction. Instead, take a moment to look a word up to see what it means, then hit the thesaurus. And I know there are some writers who discourage using the thesaurus because supposedly everything comes from your subconscious. However, our brains are always going to hit the more generic words.

I’ve been amazed to discover that some words don’t mean what I’m thinking they do. Let’s suppose you’re writing about the Christmas rush on the street downtown. Your default word is “crowd.” But look it up and discover it isn’t the right word and that there’s a better, more specific word that suits your setting.

Read poetry. This comes from David Farland. If you like poetry, it’s a great way to study description. Poets have to hit the point concisely, and off with non-traditional descriptions.

Find and Replace. Use this word processing tool to find certain types of words and then think about how to replace them with description. For example, the infamous “look.” Writers are often horrified when they discover their characters are always looking at each other. Other potential words are glanced (which means something different than looked. Vocabulary!), shrugged, and nodded. This problem goes away with boosting the description skills.

This single skill is what separates the writer from artificial intelligence. An AI tool can put together a description, but it’ll be like the exercises the beginners do—disconnected from the character. The writer puts the character’s opinions and judgments in, giving characters heart. No machine can do that.

Description is a huge skill, and you may spend some time getting comfortable with it. Each level uncovers more nuanced skills, like discovering how to get emotion into the story. Enjoy the process!

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More topics on this to come! This should be a lot of fun, since there are some topics no one talks about at all at the beginner level.