7 Tips for Better Descriptive Writing

If your writing sounds blah – despite that you’ve got a great plot and character arc – the problem likely is the lack of colorful, vivid passages. Here are seven great tips on how to address that problem in your story (click the linked title for the full article):

• Add color to your fiction manuscript
Even if your story offers a lot of dramatic tension and the sentences are tightly constructed, it still can feel a bit monochrome or colorless. When that occurs, the writing probably is not particularly vivid. Rather than read like a piece of fiction, the story instead will feel like a work of dry journalism.

• Treat readers to vivid passages in your story 
One of the kindest things writers can do for their readers is employ local dexterity. This occurs when images, sentences, paragraphs and scenes are pleasurable to read because of their vividness.

• Shun beautiful writing done for beauty’s sake
Ever read a beautiful image in a story but then ask yourself, “So what?” If so, you’ve probably been a victim of the “foreground to” trick, which occurs when you draw attention to some object in your story purely for artistic effect.

• Stay inbounds when writing descriptively
As striving to deliver vivid, engaging writing, we actually can make our writing sound worse. There are a number of ways that writers can overdo it.

• Ensure descriptive details aren’t just chrome
Descriptive scenes of places, characters or the time period in stories ought to be relevant to the plot. Such scenes should provide details that molds the reader’s understanding of the character and of the setting.

• Incorporate imagery into your story
When creating your story’s setting or explaining what your characters are doing, you’ll need to use imagery. Imagery is necessary to move along the plot and to establish tone.

• Layer story’s imagery with symbolic meaning
When creating your story’s setting or explaining what your characters are doing, you’ll need to use imagery. Imagery is necessary to move along the plot and to create tone. You even can create resonance in your writing by layering imagery with symbolic meaning – but more on that in a later entry.

______________________

My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my craft of writing guidebooks: