Banish Stick-Figure Writing: How Concrete Sensory Details Make All the Difference in Fiction

Thin, generic description is the literary equivalent of drawing with stick figures. That’s a problem—because your reader’s imagination will only engage if it’s convinced what’s happening is real. And if their imagination won’t engage, their emotions won’t engage, and they’ll puts the book down and find something fun to do.

So how do you flesh your stick figures out?

In 1979, a revolutionary book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain pinpointed why so many adults and older children can’t draw. It’s because they aren’t drawing what they see—they’re drawing what they know.

In other words, they’re drawing a category, rather than the thing itself.

I “know” a face is oval and has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, so that’s what I draw. Then I’m surprised that it looks like a stick figure, not a human face. In reality, depending on the way a face is angled and the way the light falls across it, a real face may not be oval, may not have two (visible) eyes, may have only part of a nose, etc.

I “know” a tree has a thick trunk and at the top some branches and leaves—so I draw a stick-figure tree instead of the wild living thing flinging out arms and fingers in front of me.

The same thing can happen in writing. “A dog stood under a tree. A girl ran past.”  But “dog,” “tree,” and “girl” aren’t descriptions; they’re labels for abstract concepts. Was it a tiny mutt or a graceful Great Dane? An aspen or a cottonwood? A 6-year-old Latina or a willowy white teenager?

A few fleshier alternatives:

• A twenty-foot cottonwood, heart-shaped leaves turning lazily in the breeze
• A mutt with a smashed-in boxer’s face and lolling tongue
• A small girl with tangled dark hair, wiping her nose on a dirty coat sleeve as she runs past.

Now a little of this kind of description goes a long way. Be judicious: you don’t want to force-feed your reader a whole box of chocolates. If I were editing myself here, I’d decide which was the most important element for the reader to focus on. Let’s say it was the dog:

“The mutt stood under a tall cottonwood. He turned his smashed-in boxer’s face, tongue lolling, to watch a small, dark-haired girl run past. He did not give chase.”

We’re humans, we live in bodies. That means our minds won’t believe, our imaginations won’t be convinced, without plenty of concrete sensory details. Banish the stick figure. Make your writing juicy with life, and allow the reader to fall in love with your book.

We All Need Community: The Benefits of Critique Partners and Beta Readers

I talk myself out of editing jobs all the time. A new writer will approach me about a project. We’ll get to talking. And I’ll end up advising that writer to wait to spend money on a professional editor. I’ve blogged about this before in various ways, I suppose. And now I’m going to do it again because it bears restating. Writers are stubborn. Sometimes we need to be beaten with an idea for a bit to grok it.

These writers I talk to shouldn’t be spending money on editing yet. A lot of times their contact with me is the first they’ve had with a fellow writer. Sometimes it’s the first time they’ve shared their work at all, which is a monumental moment. They’ve figured out they can’t do the writing thing on their own like they once believed. They’re beginning to understand they need a community.

I usually tell them to seek out critique partners and/or beta readers. And if they’re not already reading in their genre, I strongly advise them to do that, too. So far I haven’t heard back from any of them. I take that as a good sign, a sign they got the deeper message: they need to build themselves a place in a writing community.

I’m talking about more than a writer’s need for critical, constructive feedback here. Or the need for mentors and compatriots, fellow writers who are discovering or have discovered how to make a go of the writing life. A writer needs a few fans, even at the beginning. Maybe it’s just one coworker who stops him in the hall to say how much he loves reading the writer’s blog. However it takes place, that kind of out of the blue validation helps build much needed self-confidence. And knowing there are people reading what you write makes it harder to justify blowing it off.

By the way, I’m deliberately leaving family out of this discussion because family is different. The people who live with writers have to buy in on a whole other level.

I recently had one of these quasi-fan experiences. As you may know, I’m a theater technician as well as a writer and editor. One of my day jobs is as a carpenter at the Texas State Performing Arts Center Shop. Not only do I build scenery there, I usually work on my writing and editing projects during my breaks, sitting on an air-compressor in a secluded corner of the tool cage. While I was gone on my recent vacation (if you want pictures, click here), the scenic painting professor made and installed a sign above my little space between the shelves.

She’s not a writer. As far as I know she’s never even read my writing. I’ve known her for less than a year. But she sees me in there with my computer in my lap. And she’s an artist; she understands. She gets the yen to make something as good as it can be. So she surprised me with her little sign. What I don’t think she understands is how much that small act inspires me every day, how it makes it easier to go into the noisy solitude of the tool cage and write, how she’s a big part of my writing community. I should probably tell her all that, huh?

And that’s why I talk myself out of so much editing work. There’s a lot of great things a freelance editor can offer a writer. But a hired editor can’t offer that fundamental, made-to-fit writing community every writer needs. We writers have to build that kind of support network for ourselves.

Don’t Give Me That Look! How to Improve the Emotional Cues in Your Manuscript

I’ve written blog posts about gesture before, but this particular one has been keeping me up at night! As I am about to embark on revisions for my upcoming novel (forthcoming in 2016), I keep thinking about how to capture the “looks” between two characters. It’s common to find “looks” within a manuscript. After all, how often does one character look or “gaze” at another in a moment of dramatic or even romantictension. Ooh La La!

I have a challenge for you, dear reader! Go to the story you’re working on, open the file, and do a word search. Find any incarnation of the word “look/looks/looking.”

Hurts, doesn’t it? YIKES.

In my WIP right now, I have 176 “looks.” I’m not sure how horrible that is as of yet because I’m still editing, but I know that I tend to overuse “looks” so I thought I would share some of my writing/revision process.

I keep wondering what it is that I hope to elicit from “a look” between characters. In cinema, we have the advantage of various zoomed in shots, savvy editing, camera angels, etc. On film, a look between two characters can say so much more than a line of dialogue ever could. Yet, in fiction, we have the hefty job of creating the cinematic experience in the mind of our readers. We need to create the camera angles and trigger an emotional response with our words.

We also need to ensure that a look will show us something about our characters and their world instead of just telling the readers that eyes are meeting. We can’t assume that the reader is going to understand what is being unsaid between two characters. It is up to us, the writers, to make the gaze mean more. As I revise and as you revise, I hope that these three tactics will help you make the most out of this kind of unspoken communication.

THREE WAYS TO MAKE “A LOOK” WORK HARDER (AKA I am trying to take my own advice):

1. Make sure that the look reveals something important/unknown about your character.

Who are the two people looking at one another? Why is the look important? If two characters make eye contact that doesn’t illuminate something about the characters or their relationship, then we don’t need it.

Now, I’m not saying that every single look in a manuscript has to carry weight. Generally, when you have two characters in a scene together and one looks at the other, you need to consider what is it you are trying to communicate. Here’s an example from my current WIP:

“Where are you going?” Mr. Hall says.

“You do what you want,” I say to Lila who meets my eyes and then quickly looks away. “Take the role. It’s yours. I don’t want any part of this.”

What I am trying to show there is that Lila is self-righteous. She’s hurt my character badly, but doesn’t want to make eye contact because she’s a jerk. Have I shown that? Nope. I need to make the moment work harder so that the reader understands Lila’s character through that shared gaze.

I don’t know if this is how I’ll ultimately end up revising but I could try something like this:

“Where are you going?” Mr. Hall says.

“You do what you want,” I say to Lila who snaps at her gum, eyes to her cell phone, and with a casual flip of her hand, tosses her hair over her shoulder. I’ve never hated the smell of bubble gum so much in my life. “Take the role,” I say to her smacking jaw. “It’s yours. I don’t want any part of this.”

I’ve added action, I’ve made Lila gesture differently, revealing her indifference and also employed sensory detail so that we know how my character feels about Lila’s behavior.

2. The “look”” needs to either be the focal point of the scene or it needs to push the plot forward in some way. Again, not every single “look” can matter but the ones that do should earn their place within the narrative.

Ask yourself: What can the look between your two characters change/reveal? If the answer is nothing, then think deeper and reveal the information between them in a new or varied away. This leads me to my last suggestion.

3. Deepen the gesture.  Is “looking” the only way that people interact with one another? No way!

Consider the emotional moment that is occurring between these two characters. Perhaps all of these “looks” are really a roadmap for you to go back and deepen the relationships between these two characters when you are ready to revise. As you draft, leave all the “looks” in as placeholders, but definitely go back.

When you do, ask yourself what other ways these two characters can interact? Sensory detail? Touch? Food? Action/Reaction? What is the look standing in for? What do your characters want to say?

Well, that’s it for me! I hope that I’ve illuminated some tactics to try to deepen the way your characters inhabit the pages of your story!

I wish I could go on and on about this! In fact, I probably could.

Literary Diversity Lesson in Southeast Asia

Sorry for the lack of a blog lately. I’ve beenon vacation in Southeast Asia. I’ve had much good food across three cultures; met many charming, generous, and educational people; fell for thirty-six hours to dysentery; and even got to feel – I mean really, really feel – first world guilt; all book-ended by two thirty-hour flight combos. I’ve been home three days now, and I’m still a little exhausted and exhilarated. As someone once said of traveling, I didn’t just gain a new perspective, I gained new eyes.

So I’m better able to look at that whole first world guilt thing with a little more perspective. And I’m also able to look at the other side–that distinctly American sense of pride that much of the world (rightly) considers arrogance–with a little less shame as well.

Don’t worry, I wont go into all that here. I mostly just wanted an excuse to post some pictures from and brag about my trip. And these issues of Western imperialism, past and present, actually tie into the subject of this post. At least they do in my brain.

That’s because I’m writing about literary diversity.

No, really.

I’ve been contemplating the lack of diversity in my manuscript. What will be my debut novel is the story of young white man who mostly interacts with older white men. Don’t worry, this is not a synopsis. But, mostly due to white guilt, I do feel compelled to mention that there are two major female characters, one of whom used to be a man. So my story’s not completely overridden with Y chromosomes. And, as has recently been pointed out to me, I don’t ever specify the ethnicity of my characters. They could be any ethnicity of Texan. Even still, I think it’s safe to assume that most readers will construct my characters with a certain WASPishness after they look at the headshot inside the back cover.

But, as I said, my WIP will be my first novel. Which is why I’ve decided I’m not going to push too hard to widen its gene pool, so to speak. I’m going to let it be about a white boy in a mostly white world. Whether I like it or not, I’m about as WASP as they come, so it makes sense that I should start my novel writing career with a WASPy cast of characters. I’m writing what I know and settling into my voice. I’m not worrying about exploring other, less comfortable points-of-view.

Yet.

That comes next.

And in the meantime, here’s a picture of a banyan tree eating a 6th century Hindu Wat: 

Mine Field and Gold Mine: Why You Should Read Your Primal Posts

Since my imagination seems to be in a bit of a dry patch when it comes to blogging these days, I decided to explore the wonderful world of reruns. The hope is to recycle some of my original posts that may have escaped general notice the first time around. Luckily (?), plenty of the Internet paid absolutely no attention to me for quite some time, so I’ve got a bumper crop of possibilities at my personal website. But my ongoing trip down blog-memory lane is not what this post is about. As often happens, my exploration in one direction led me some place unexpected.

Reading my first attempts at blogging reminded me of some wisdom I picked up somewhere, way back when, before I had a website (you know, a couple of years ago). Like most good advice, it was simple: the wise one said that all bloggers need to make a habit of reading their old posts and correcting/updating them as needed.

The wise one was right. I know this because, to date, I have completely and utterly failed to take the wise one’s advice. And my oldest posts reflect that. If you, like me, have gotten into the habit of publishing one of these things and then pretty much forgetting about it, then you, like me, might be surprised by what you find in the dustier corners of your archives.

It’s sometimes feels like a different person wrote them.

At first, I thought to share some of my choicest new-blogger gems here. But then it occurred to me that I would just be highlighting what is essentially mediocre writing worsened by bad editing. It occurred to me that might not be the wisest course of action for a freelance writer and editor to take. Though, if you hurry, you can still probably catch lots of the typos and bad grammar I haven’t gotten to yet. I am, after all, still the same procrastinating person I was before. And there are quite a few of those old posts. This process is definitely going to take some time.

But it’s proving beneficial on two fronts: I’m not only hiding my shame, I’m also discovering the various ways my writing has improved. (Yes, I like to think what you’re currently reading represents an improvement.) The biggest example of my writer-ly maturation has been seeing how my voice has matured.

So go back and read your primal blog posts, you might be glad you did. At the very least, you’ll probably catch a few of the typos you missed.