Sunday's Links to Writing & Marketing Blog Posts

2 TRICKS FOR POWERFUL DESCRIPTION

By: A Beckert

Communication demands description. Incorporating it into narrative, however, can be tricky, especially when writing for entertainment. Linear storytelling demands that action occur and characters interact.Much of the art of writing requires description not only convey information, but also induce emotional connection and psychological force. Straight description, or line on line of information (however unique and creative), often trips the audience up, neglecting necessary action or not holding up to the sensory standards necessary to catch and hold attention.

Understand, first, that description is only one of several rhetorical modes, and only one of still more narrative modes in fiction. Description, defined in a scholastic sense, is “the act of capturing people, places, events, objects, and feelings in words so that a reader can visualize and respond to them.” (www.csub.edu) Breaking down the elements of a story can be the subject of a master’s thesis, so here all we need to remember is that description, while a major element, is often blended successfully through several other modes. Rather than discussing straight description, here are a few ways to make description earn its place.

Description communicates strong development in a story’s setting and the characters that act in it. There are several lenses through which the same story can be seen, and character is one of the most direct lenses to describe. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and lecturer for How Writers Write Fiction 2015, communicates her perspective this way (taken as printed in the transcript of her lecture):

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If you missed my writing & marketing tweets and retweets yesterday, here they are again:

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• How to Handsell Self-published Books | Self-Publishing Author Advice from The Alliance of Independent Authors http://ow.ly/W7seM  
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• The Creative Penn Blog: Helping you write, publish and market your book | The Creative Penn http://ow.ly/W7stB
• Writer Unboxed – about the craft and business of fiction http://ow.ly/W7syT
• Holiday Book Marketing: a Holiday Cheat Sheet | Nicholas C. Rossis http://ow.ly/W7sFo
• The Write Conversation : The Change I Want to See Next in Publishing http://ow.ly/W7sJA
• BookMarketingBuzzBlog: Why No One Returns Your Call http://ow.ly/W7sQp
• The Write Type - Multi-Author Musings: Twelve Reasons Why Authors' Incomes Are Dwindling http://ow.ly/W7sSY

Happy writing and running, Kathy