Hello and welcome back.

I decided to add a new category to my blog – a 3 tips series. A lot of my posts have 3 tips and so that’s what the reason for this was. In time I will get all of tips posts into the 3 tips series.

For today’s post it will be on description.

Description could be about a person or an object, or anything else. The tips I give here can be used for any of them.

Tip 1:

It’s not enough to say the woman is/was beautiful. In what way? Remember beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In taking with earlier posts write down ten things to describe this person other than the cliche she’s beautiful. The smoothness of her skin, her eye color and hair color.

The same thing with a smell good or bad. In No Remorse No Regret – coming soon – I have the main character accosted by a junkie who hadn’t showered in weeks or months. So you could imagine how bad he would smell. But it was not enough to say he stank or smelled bad. I wrote down the stench crashed into her like a tsunami wave.

Tip 2:

One of the things to remember is how a person will first see something or an area. When you watch a movie they don’t usually start on a close up of a building or a person. They start with a wide shot which is also known as the establishing shot. Then they move in, physically move the camera in or use a tighter lens to get the details the director wants you to see.

Use the same thing here when you have a character entering a scene. For example a man comes home to find his home has been burglarized. Does he first see his the lamp smashed on the floor? Or his trophy he won from the karate tournament broken in three pieces? No. What he’ll see is the whole mess in the room. Again write down ten different things or ways to describe a burglary scene. Then the details that you want the character and by extension the reader such as drawers pulled out, the TV gone, etc.

Tip #3

For describing sounds that a character would hear, they will hear the loudest sounds first if they’re in a noisy environment such as a bar with heavy metal music playing. Or in a place where there are a lot of people talking before they will hear the voice of someone they know and are there to meet.

It could also be that they will walk into a place and notice that it is quiet when it’s not supposed to be. But write down a different way than saying the silence was deafening or it was deadly quiet.

For example it could be Laura walks into the front door of the office, there was something missing. She couldn’t quite place it. A silence that shouldn’t be. Did the air conditioner not come on like it was supposed to? It is on a timer.

That to me sounds a lot better than the quiet was eerie.

Use these tips for anything else like to describe the speed of a car. The weight of a backpack.

Got any additional tips you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below and make it a great day.