by Joe Bunting |
You’ve heard the classic writing rule, “Show. Don’t Tell.” Every writing blog ever has talked about it, and for good reason.
Showing, for some reason, is really difficult. Yet, it’s also one of the most important writing techniques you need to master if you want your own writing stand out.
Telling is one of the hardest habits to eradicate from your style. I still struggle with it regularly. However, writing that shows is so much more interesting than writing that tells. Most of the time.
In this article, you’ll find the definition of “show, don’t tell,” see several show don’t tell examples, and learn the one simple trick to strengthen your writing style.
by Monica M. Clark |
By the end of this post you will be using an excel spreadsheet.
Don’t make that face—I know you’re a writer and not a data analyst. Or if you are a data analyst—I understand that you’re on this blog to get away from you day job. I get it. But guess what? At the suggestion of Randy Ingermason—the creator of the Snowflake Method— I listed all of the scenes in my novel in a nice little Google spreadsheet. It changed my novel-writing life, and doing the same will change yours too.
by Robert Harrell |
Euphemistic language is everywhere in polite society, used to speak and write sensitively about taboo subjects or to tackle difficult situations.
Parents sometimes refer to “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for sex when speaking to their kids.
Euphemisms can make it both easier and harder to talk about uncomfortable topics, so they can be used in interesting ways in literature.
by Liz Bureman |
My mother seems to appreciate having a grammar lover in the family. For Christmas one year, she bought me the book I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar. (By the way, it is equally correct to say “bad grammar.”) Last week, my mother emailed to ask if she was using the word “nor” correctly, which brings me to today’s post: the use of either, neither, and the connecting words that go with them.
by Joe Bunting |
You worked hard. You stayed up late, got up early, pushed through writer’s block, and finally, at long last, finished writing your book.
But after you write your book, what comes next?
by Joslyn Chase |
Atmosphere matters. You might be someone who will pay a premium to eat at a restaurant with a certain ambience or buy a house in a setting that supports a particular feeling. But how do you use atmosphere in your book?
In like manner, your reader won’t remember every word you wrote, but if you infuse the story with atmosphere, they will remember the way it made them feel.
But how can you weave atmosphere into your story without making it feel forced? How can your story’s atmosphere evoke an emotional response and leave a lasting impression on your readers? How can you leverage this literary technique to enhance that feeling?
A strong sense of atmosphere figures into the works of William Shakespeare. Edgar Allan Poe mastered atmosphere in poems like The Raven and his haunting tales of suspense. J.K. Rowling managed it well in the Harry Potter series.
And you can learn it too.
There are many literary devices and elements of fiction a writer uses to impact the atmosphere of a literary work, including figurative language, word choice, similes, and personification. In this post, we’ll examine how point of view and genre considerations help to set the mood and establish atmosphere.
