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    Description
    Description
    Description
    Ebook151 pages2 hours

    Description

    By Marcy Kennedy

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Are you looking for a way to add new depth and re-readability to your writing?

    Are you tired of description being “the boring part that people skip”?

    Are you a writer who’s struggled with making their story world feel believable and three-dimensional?

    Description in fiction shouldn’t be boring for the reader or for the writer.

    Description: A Busy Writer’s Guide will help you take your writing to the next level by exchanging ho-hum description for description that’s compelling and will bring your story to life, regardless of the genre you write.

    In Description: A Busy Writer’s Guide, you will

    - find the answer to the age-old question of how much description is too much;
    - learn how to use point of view to keep description fresh;
    - recognize the red flags for boring description in fiction;
    - explore how to use all five senses to bring your descriptions to life for the reader;
    - discover the ways metaphors and similes can add power to your descriptive writing;
    - gain the tools needed to describe setting, characters, and action in engaging ways;
    - learn how descriptions can add conflict, enhance the theme, and amp up emotion; and
    - much more!

    This book puts theory into plain language alongside examples so you can see how that theory looks in practice. In addition, you’ll receive tips and how-to exercises to help you apply what you learn to the pages of your own story. Most importantly, like every book in the Busy Writer’s Guide series, Description: A Busy Writer’s Guide cuts the fluff so that you have more time to write and to live your life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMarcy Kennedy
    Release dateJun 1, 2016
    ISBN9781988069111
    Description
    Author

    Marcy Kennedy

    Marcy Kennedy is a speculative fiction writer who believes fantasy is more real than you think. Alongside her own writing, Marcy works as a freelance fiction editor and teaches classes on the writing craft. You can find her blogging about writing and about the place where real life meets science fiction, fantasy, and myth at www.marcykennedy.com.

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    • 5/5
      Great book with many useful tips you cannot find in other similar works about writing. I reccomend it specially for intermediate writers who wants to add more value to their novels.

    Book preview

    Description - Marcy Kennedy

    DESCRIPTION

    A Busy Writer's Guide

    Marcy Kennedy

    Copyright 2016 Marcy Kennedy

    Smashwords Edition

    Description: A Busy Writer’s Guide

    First Edition

    Copyright © 2016 Marcy Kennedy

    All rights reserved.

    This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. This e-book may not be re-sold, as a used file or otherwise, and may not be given away to other people. Purchase and download is a one-time final use of this product. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Editor: Christopher Saylor

    Cover Design: Melinda VanLone www.bookcovercorner.com

    Published June 2016 by Tongue Untied Communications

    ISBN: 978-1-988069-11-1

    WANT A FREE BOOK?

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    Sign up for the author's mailing list and get a free copy of Strong Female Characters: A Busy Writer's Guide.

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    INTRODUCTION

    Why A Busy Writer’s Guide?

    A few years ago, I started creating Busy Writer’s Guides for a very simple reason—I wanted to give hope and practical help to writers who were struggling to reach their goals and dreams because of the demands life placed on them.

    This became my passion because I know what it feels like to be overwhelmed by responsibilities that can’t be ignored or delegated and to prioritize the needs of those I love over my own desires. I know what it feels like to make it through a day with no energy or creativity left to write.

    And I knew I couldn’t be the only one. The more writers I talked to, the more I found so many others who felt stretched too thin. They were trying to fit writing in around full-time jobs or around caring for children or aging parents or grandparents. They were battling physical and mental health problems. They had life commitments that were as important to them as writing.

    They were people who wanted to achieve their dreams, but who didn’t want to do it at the cost of their health, their relationships, or their moral compasses.

    While I can’t solve all the problems in the world, or in anyone’s life, I wanted to help make writing a great book more achievable for those people—people like me.

    And that’s where the Busy Writer’s Guides were born.

    They’re short, yet in-depth and practical. The intent is to give you the full coverage of a topic that you need to write well, but to do it in a way that still respects your time.

    How does that work?

    These guides leave out the filler and fancy prose padding meant to impress you. My goal isn’t to make you think I’m fantastic. My goal is to help you become a fantastic writer. I cut the fluff while keeping the substance so that you can have more time to write and more time to live your life.

    Each book in the Busy Writer’s Guides series gives you enough theory so that you can understand why things work and why they don’t, but also enough examples to see how that theory looks in practice. Approaching it from two sides like this streamlines the learning process and speeds up your learning curve.

    In addition, these guides provide tips and exercises to help you take what you’ve learned to the pages of your own story with an editor’s-eye view. There’s a leap we all need to make from intellectually understanding a topic to proficiently applying that topic to our work. The Take It to the Page sections give you a way to start, trying again to make this transition easier and quicker for you. If you’re not ready to apply it to your work yet, you can skip it and come back to it later.

    The final way that I try to respect your time is by separating some topics out into appendices. A lot of writing craft concepts overlap. I try my best to keep the material in the body of each of my books fresh. In other words, I minimize the content overlap between books as much as I can without sacrificing clarity. (In some cases, I still do have to re-explain elements or I wouldn’t be doing justice to the concept at hand.)

    When I think there are elements of other topics that aren’t absolutely essential to understanding the current topic, but which would help you understand the topic of the current book better, I add them as appendices. That way, if you’ve read my other books and don’t need a refresher, you can save time by skipping the appendices. If this is the first one of my books you’ve read, or if you want to refresh your memory on a topic, you can read the appendices.

    And that’s quite a long enough intro, I think. If you want to find out more about me, you can visit my website at www.marcykennedy.com or check out the About the Author section at the end of this book.

    CHAPTER ONE

    How Much Description Is Too Much?

    One of the most common questions when it comes to description is how much description is too much?

    This is a valid question. Without enough description, we leave the reader feeling ungrounded. Actions take place in a white bubble of nothingness. Too much description can slow our books down so that the reader grows bored and moves on to something else.

    The problem is how much description is too much? is a nuanced question and isn’t the best question to ask if we want to write an excellent book.

    THE DESCRIPTION MYTH

    Description is the red-headed step-child of the writing craft. It’s undervalued and almost feared because writers tend to believe that things like dialogue and action are inherently better. We start to believe this because we associate dialogue and action with being active and interesting and we associate description with being static and boring.

    Those are false dichotomies.

    As a freelance fiction editor, I’ve more often seen people whose books lacked depth and emotion because they were dialogue heavy than I’ve seen people whose books were too slow due to excess description.

    Dialogue doesn’t necessarily make our stories better. Good dialogue does. Bad dialogue makes our writing slow and boring.

    Now here’s the fact we need to understand—the exact same thing is true about description. (And about every other element of the fiction writing craft.)

    Good description is vibrant, interesting, and active. Bad description is slow and boring.

    So part of answering the question of how much description is too much? comes down to setting aside the myth that description is somehow less interesting or less important to our story than other elements.

    GENRE CONSIDERATIONS

    The genre we’re writing in influences how much description we’ll need.

    For example, cozy mystery, historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy readers all expect and want a higher level of rich sensory description in their stories. Comparatively speaking, thriller readers want less description (or, at least, description of a different kind, but more on that in a minute).

    If we don’t give readers what they want, our books will fail.

    This means that another part of answering how much description is too much? depends on knowing our genre. What do readers of our genre want?

    DEFINING DESCRIPTION

    Description isn’t de-valued only because of the false dichotomy created between description and other elements of fiction writing. It’s also de-valued because many times it’s assumed—incorrectly—that description is merely recounting the physical appearance of the setting and the characters in it.

    Description does cover those physical appearance elements. It also includes the other senses (sound, smell, touch, and taste) and action (both internal and external).

    Yes, you read that right. Action is actually a subset of description. It’s description in motion.

    Most of this book focuses on helping you master the more traditional sensory description because that’s where the majority of us struggle, but I’ll also be lightly covering action description. Until we reach that section, when I say description, I’m talking about sensory description unless otherwise stated.

    So rather than asking how much description is too much?—which implies that it’s a necessary evil or a virus we need to minimize the spread of—the questions we really need to ask are how should we use description in our story? and how can we make description as interesting as possible?

    Answering those dual questions is what we’ll spend the rest of this book doing.

    CHAPTER TWO

    How Point of View Brings Description to Life

    Point of view is the perspective from which

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