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.
By popular demand (i.e. one of you asked, and I thank you for that), here's a post about the counterpart to the em dash and the hyphen. Let's get to know the en dash. An en dash is one of the special punctuation marks that most people see all the time, but rarely...
You’ve written a book. Congratulations! But wait . . . now what? What do you do with your manuscript? How do you turn it from a rough draft into a publishable book? The next step is to get professional developmental editing. A developmental editor will help you take your rough, unpolished ideas and turn them into an amazing second draft.
If you’re new to the world of editing, though, the term “developmental editing” might sound a little confusing. What is developmental editing? What makes it different from other kinds of editing, like line editing, copy editing, or proofreading?
Here’s everything you need to know about developmental editing, including how to find the best editor for your book.
I play kickball on a league in Denver, and if you haven’t tried playing this playground game as a grown person, I highly recommend it.
I was talking about my team with someone this past weekend, and they asked, “Oh, it’s like intramural kickball?” I said yes, although it is weird to hear someone use the word intramural outside of college.
Also, it’s definitely intramural, not intermural. But what’s the difference?
Maybe and may be are both used to discuss possibility. However, they are different, with the main difference between these two words being that they are two different parts of speech.
As you may remember from elementary school, there are nine different parts of speech. Let’s look at how to distinguish between maybe and may be.
Some time ago, we published a post on italicization in album and song titles. And then Joe sent me a screengrab of a Google search with general italicization questions, so we’re going whole-hog and attempting to write an all-inclusive complete guide to italicization: when you do and when you don’t. We’ve covered italicization in song titles and album titles already, so we’re moving on from there.
