It’s Very Humbling When You’re Reading A Book —part Of A Trilogy, Very Acclaimed— And The Only

Do you ever think you'll stop drawing fanart? No offense it just seems like the kind of thing you're supposed to grow out of. I'm just curious what your plans/goals are since it isn't exactly an art form that people take seriously.

Ah, fanart. Also known as the art that girls make.

Sad, immature girls no one takes seriously. Girls who are taught that it’s shameful to be excited or passionate about anything, that it’s pathetic to gush about what attracts them, that it’s wrong to be a geek, that they should feel embarrassed about having a crush, that they’re not allowed to gaze or stare or wish or desire. Girls who need to grow out of it.

That’s the art you mean, right?

Because in my experience, when grown men make it, nobody calls it fanart. They just call it art. And everyone takes it very seriously.

Hey, help me please. How do you write description in your novels? Not a character one, surrounding ones. How do you describe from 3 POV , the background of the novel?

5 Tips for Writing Great Descriptions

Hi there! Thanks for writing. I talk at length about this in my book The Complete Guide to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers (See Chapter 4 / “Building Your Story World,” Chapter 16 / Setting the Scene, and Chapter 21 / “Choosing the Right Details” for the majority of the discussion about description, but it’s peppered throughout), so I’ll just give a brief rundown here. :)

Tip #1: Use concrete, sensory details

That means describing, with precision, a detail you can see/hear/touch/taste/smell. Avoid using vague words that are hard to visualize or sense, like “the house was ugly” or “the weather was bad.” Instead, choose a sensory detail (or two) for your descriptions, for example “the house was a wretched shade of salmon pink” or “the wind was blowing I could taste dust in my mouth.”

Tip #2: Try not to over- or under-use descriptions

It’s common for beginning writers to either use no description, or go completely overboard. I give examples of both in my book. While there’s no hard rule about how much description is too little or too much (it depends a lot on the particular story, genre, and the writer’s style), I personally like to include around 4-5 sensory details per page.

The idea is to give the reader a solid sense of where they are without going on and on, making them want to skim over as you carry on for paragraphs about the smell and texture of a doily.

Tip #3: Use more description during important parts of the story

Description draws your readers attention to what you’re describing. Use that to your advantage. If that doily contains a blood stain that’s a pivotal clue in your murder mystery, by all means spend three sentences describing the particular color red of the blood or the weird smell it emits. Where you linger, the reader will linger.

Tip #4: Use description to set the scene

Use more description at the beginning of a new scene, or anytime the location of your story changes. I talk about this in the section on transitions in my book. Summary gets a bad reputation in fiction, but these transitional paragraphs are the perfect time to paint the scene with sensory details about your character’s surroundings.

Tip #5: Pay attention to “camera movement”

One common thing I see in writer’s manuscripts is what I call “jerky camera movement.” Here’s an example:

Jesse pulled into the driveway of the suspect’s mansion around noon. A white, floppy dog barked ferociously in the window. It was a warm, sweltering day. Jesse looked down and realized her shoe was untied. The house had three large columns in front, each wrapped with a gawdy red bow. 

In this example, the “camera” moves from the driveway, to the dog in the window, to the “day,” to Jesse’s shoe, to the outside of the house. If that was your head, looking around the scene, you’d get dizzy pretty fast. Here’s a smoother movement, starting wide and focusing in on Jesse’s untied shoe.

It was a warm, sweltering day. Jesse pulled into the driveway of the suspect’s mansion around noon. The house had three large columns in front, each wrapped with a gawdy red bow. In the window, a white, floppy dog barked ferociously. As Jesse approached the door, she looked down and realized her shoe was untied.

These aren’t perfect examples because I’ve dashed them off just now, but you get the idea :) Try not to make your reader seasick by making them look all over the scene (unless you’re trying to achieve that effect, for example, in a scene where your protagonist is drunk or discombobulated).

Hope this helps!

Character's life stories

So like any writing advice, this isn't a universal rule by any means, but I have found that when making characters for my longer form fiction, it's really important to understand their life story, even if it never directly shows up in the writing itself - even if the readers are never given enough clues to put it together.

Here's why.

At least when I was first learning how to create a character, I would pick out a mental picture of what they looked like, slapped a few goals, dreams, and morals on them, figured out two formative events and set them loose in the wild. And they were flat. Uniformly.

(Reasons why, other benefits to understanding your character's life stories, and a simple way to develop them all below the cut)

There were several reasons for my character's general wimpyness:

I didn't really know who they were, except for their surface level persona, which meant I had a really hard time understanding what made them choose the things they did.

If I don't know what their life was like, most of their choices are going to stem from like three events - that means there's not a lot of subconscious factors to work with, meaning they're going to be predictable in a bad way.

Whenever I did try to add some depth, there was nothing behind it, so that depth was lost to inconsistencies that weren't glaringly obvious but were enough that it felt unrealistic.

Beyond that, by fleshing out your character's backstories more fully, you'll also end up with insights into:

Worldbuilding - you don't necessarily need to flesh it out in full detail, but for characters to exist, they need somewhere to be, and that can help you understand parts of your world that aren't necessarily the main focus - it adds flavor, which will come through in your writing.

Timing - kinda like how if you have a map of the building your characters are in, it's easier to keep track of it and you don't have weird hallways that lead to nowhere or a room that's simultaneously in three different places. If you understand what was going on generally throughout your character's life, you can better tie their age to what happened and understand the effect the event might have had, or track when people could have met, or all sorts of things that, again, will help them seem more real.

Arcs - character creation is less about starting off with a character, and it's more about crafting an arc. If you just plop a flawed character into the book, it may work, but often the seeds for that arc will appear much earlier, and they may have even started on part of their arc (especially if they're a side character) - understanding what progress they've made or lost can keep them dynamic.

Relationships - if the characters have already met each other, it's useful to know what perceptions they had, what relationships they've built (or set fires to), and what headspace they were in while doing that compared to now.

So that's great and all, but how to... do all that?

1) What's the groundwork?

How old is your character now? This is important because you have that many years of life story. You don't have to figure out every year, but there is a difference between working with a 40something and a teenager.

What global events would have affected everyone (if any), and when did those happen? These will help with scaffolding, since you're going to want to address them.

What point are you trying to work toward? If your character has developed certain mannerisms, views on the world, etc, you may want to figure out sources for them.

2) Set up your timelines.

I find it's best to work with your main cast all at the same time on a common timeline. That way I can see how threads might interact with each other, and make sure that I'm not messing up the years or anything. It also means that when I set up global events, they all line up so I won't have issues with chronology.

Sticky notes and an open workspace are excellent for this. (set up each character going from left to right, and then across the top, set out the years). You can also do it pretty effectively with a spreadsheet, but I find working with things physically to be a nice change of pace.

3) Drop in all of your major life-changing events

You have your timelines set up. If you already know something happened to change any of your character's lives, drop them in. These are probably the most important bits, and you want to make sure they're accounted for.

Birth date (at least to the year)

Major changes in living arrangements

Moments that you already know rocked their world

Etc

A benefit to this is that you'll also see what time periods you have more worked out for which characters compared to others.

Also make sure that you drop in times when characters first meet. Since these are places where timelines converge, you want them to be consistant. If there are important exchanges or interactions after that, those go in too.

If they are not already accounted for, also put in their reaction to any global events you've set out. This is important because it's going to be some kind of common ground for all of your characters later (whether or not you use it), and it will be useful for comparing where everyone was at during a certain point in time.

4) Put in the other important stuff

In the beginning of this process, you figured out what kind of characters you were working toward having at the start of the book. Figure out what events would probably need to happen to make that work, and drop them into the timeline, if they're not already there.

5) Fill in the holes

So at this point, you've got all your important stuff in, but it's highly likely there are still pretty large gaps. My rule of thumb is that you want to have a general understanding of what they were doing at least once of every three years of their life. This will help flesh out their upbringing, or what they were doing in places that are less story-specific

These are the kinds of thins that aren't going to affect the story directly, but are going to influence what they reference, as well as give you a deeper insight into their psyche and experiences. It'll also help make sure that your understanding of who they are isn't bunched up at one point in their life but is more comprehensive.

(Help) advice for people who have been writing for a long time and haven't seen improvements?

ok, so first of all have you REALLY not improved? most of the time when we are working on complex tasks, our ability to see what we are doing wrong grows more quickly than our skills, so there's this constant, growing awareness of what we aren't doing well. i suspect if you look back at your first stories, you will see that they are clumsier than your current work

BUT, it's frustrating. i get it. hoo boy do I get it.

SO... the advice you asked for.

sit down and do a really cold-blooded assessment of your work. ask a couple CPs to help if you can bear it. figure out several places you have a clear weakness.

common things people struggle with include:

mechanics (grammar, punctuation, how to format dialogue, etc.)

prose (how does it read on a line level)

engaging opening pages (do people reading the start want to keep going, does it set up promises for the rest of the book to pay off, do we know, as readers, what sort of story we're getting from the first page)

characters (do the people feel real, do they behave in the way people behave, are they well rounded with flaws and strengths, do their stupid decisions seem believable given their own set of issues)

pacing (does the story feel too slow to readers? does it seem to skip over important moments)

plotting/structure (does the middle sag, do things build up in a compelling way, do plot points come out of nowhere, are there too many moving pieces)

stakes (are there stakes? what is the main character's goal? what happens if they fail?)

theme/mood/vibe (do you have a vibe? is there an overarching theme?)

emotions (are your characters/is your plot emotionally engaging to the reader)

climax (does it stick the landing)

pick ONE (and only one) identified weakness to work on for the next 3-6 months. Google resources that talk about that thing. write or revise aiming to work on that thing. (if you ask for a specific one of these, I will put together a list of resources, but it might be a bit much on an already long post to include here)

shake up your working methods to see if that knocks skills loose from your brain in the learning process. if you usually outline, try just brain dumping onto the page, focusing on that thing. If you usually pants it, try outlining.

go back to beta readers and CPs and say "how does this story work FOR THIS ONE PARTICULAR THING." It's much easier to beta read a chapter for someone if you know the thing that they want you to focus on is "prose" or "emotions" than "just anything that jumps out at you."

good luck and have fun!

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

The Top 10 Writing Posts From June 2021

Every month, we look at the posts that people read the most.

These were the new Writers Write posts you enjoyed in June 2021:

30 Writing Prompts For June 2021

A Quick-Start Guide For Creating Characters

On Ghosts & How To Write About Them

The Way Of The One – For Writers

14 Boring Expressions & What to Use Instead

How Much Sex Do You Need In A Sex Scene?

The Notorious ‘You’ – An In-Depth Look At Second Person

What Is Imagination & Why Is It Important For Fiction Writing?

The Unintended Consequences Of A Lack Of Setting

7 Writing Observations From Ian McEwan

How to avoid White Room Syndrome

by Writerthreads on Instagram

A common problem writers face is "white room syndrome"—when scenes feel like they’re happening in an empty white room. To avoid this, it's important to describe settings in a way that makes them feel real and alive, without overloading readers with too much detail. Here are a few tips below to help!

Focus on a few key details

You don’t need to describe everything in the scene—just pick a couple of specific, memorable details to bring the setting to life. Maybe it’s the creaky floorboards in an old house, the musty smell of a forgotten attic, or the soft hum of a refrigerator in a small kitchen. These little details help anchor the scene and give readers something to picture, without dragging the action with heaps of descriptions.

Engage the senses

Instead of just focusing on what characters can see, try to incorporate all five senses—what do they hear, smell, feel, or even taste? Describe the smell of fresh bread from a nearby bakery, or the damp chill of a foggy morning. This adds a lot of depth and make the location feel more real and imaginable.

Mix descriptions with actions

Have characters interact with the environment. How do your characters move through the space? Are they brushing their hands over a dusty bookshelf, shuffling through fallen leaves, or squeezing through a crowded subway car? Instead of dumping a paragraph of description, mix it in with the action or dialogue.

Use the setting to reflect a mood or theme

Sometimes, the setting can do more than just provide a backdrop—it can reinforce the mood of a scene or even reflect a theme in the story. A stormy night might enhance tension, while a warm, sunny day might highlight a moment of peace. The environment can add an extra layer to what’s happening symbolically.

Here's an example of writing a description that hopefully feels alive and realistic, without dragging the action:

The bookstore was tucked between two brick buildings, its faded sign creaking with every gust of wind. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of worn paper and dust, mingling with the faint aroma of freshly brewed coffee from a corner café down the street. The wooden floorboards groaned as Ella wandered between the shelves, her fingertips brushing the spines of forgotten novels. Somewhere in the back, the soft sound of jazz crackled from an ancient radio.

Hope these tips help in your writing!

please please please please reblog if you’re a writer and have at some point felt like your writing is getting worse. I need to know if I’m the only one who’s struggling with these thoughts

Hacks For Writing

Writing (at least for me) is all about momentum. If you stop, you crash and burn. So, here are some hacks I use to keep myself writing.

-Instead of stopping to google information, like “How long does it take for trees to grow,” or “how many different species of birds of paradise are there, simply put "TK" in the spot where the units or information would be and move on. After you are done writing, you can go back and google for the needed information.

-In scenes where you simply cannot think of what to put, simply write something in brackets like, “[The characters reminisce with each other around the fire. This leads into the next topic.]” or something similar. Oftentimes, later writing will give you inspiration for what to put in those spots.

-If you can’t remember the word, or need a synonym, DON’T stop to google. Simply put the word (or “placeholder”) in brackets and come back later. If you are still having trouble finding out or remembering the word when going back through, I would recommend Onelook Reverse Dictionary as a very good source for finding words and synonyms.

-When plotting something out, don’t feel the need to put everything that happens. If you want to, cool! For me, I find I quickly lose disinterest in actually writing when I have every little thing already planned out. It has become boring to me. To combat this, I simply write the main ideas of what I want to happen and things I want to mention (symbolism/foreshadowing) and move on, giving myself room to continue to explore and discover as you write.

-To avoid burnout, If I’m working on a bigger project, I’ll usually also have something that I’m writing on the side that I can switch back and forth so I don’t lose interest.

-Don’t be afraid to use generators! Character names, places, powers, etc. can all be created using a generator. You don’t have to worry about every little thing. Also, if you can’t think of a name or something else at the moment that you could use a generator for, just mark it in brackets (ex: [Name]) and move on.

Lastly, remember that everything you write is for yourself. Having others validate you is always great, but they are the ones who have the privilege of reading your works. You don't owe them anything.