These descriptive writing tips will help you create impactful imagery that supports your story.

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Video Transcript: Descriptive Writing Tips

Hello. This is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. And today, we are talking about descriptive writing tips.

Now, what you really want to keep in mind, first of all, is the level of description that you will be offering to your readers. The more you describe something, the more it grows in terms of importance in your reader's mind. And you don't want to play games here. You don't want to describe this cookie in, like, three paragraphs and do all of this work to establish this cookie so that when readers read about this cookie, and the ganache frosting, and all this other stuff, it will stick out to them and they will remember this cookie forever. And then it never comes back into play in the story. They're gonna be wondering, "Why did we spend all this time describing this cookie?" Right? So the first thing that you have to remember when you are describing and you're doing descriptive writing is this idea that how much time, and attention, and description you lavish onto something, that is what readers will also interpret as they're reading your descriptions.

Another tip for you, descriptive writers, is this idea that these subjective adjectives that we sometimes feel like using, they don't necessarily communicate anything to the readers. So, for example, if I say that I'm writing or I'm looking out at a beautiful vista... First of all, beautiful means different to different people, and that makes it, sort of, a really blah word. I don't necessarily want to pick up a book and read that something is beautiful, or marvelous, or wonderful. These are blah words. They don't really have any meaning.

You are challenged with this idea of creating a scene in your reader's mind and having them being able to see what you see. And the only tool that you have, unless you're writing an illustrated project, the only tool that you have is your writing voice and your word choice. And so, when I say, "Oh, I'm looking at a beautiful vista, or a wonderful vista, or an amazing vista even," the reader is not necessarily going to be able to picture it because what's beautiful to me may not be beautiful to you. And also, we don't get to see the striations in the rock, and the different colors of the sunset, and the various flora and fauna that may be in the scene. And the more detailed that you can be there, the more specific you can be in terms of the Joshua trees or the cacti... Obviously, I'm in a desert Southwest, sort of, mood today. And, you know, it can smell, like, oh, god, I don't even know, like burning cactus, a chiminea full of mahogany. Good thing I'm not a naturalist. But basically, the more specific that you can be about what a character is seeing, the better.

And this leads me to my third tip for descriptive writing, don't stick just to sight. Don't just stick to the things that a character can experience through one sense, think of all the sensory details that you can weave in for setting the scene. So how about the smell, the feel on the skin? Is it cool out? Is it warm? Is the sun setting and, sort of, setting its orange rays into the character's eyes? There are so many things just beyond sight that we can get into.

In terms of tone, you will also want to think about setting tone with your writing. So if a wind is kissing your face, that's very different than the wind lashing your face. They have very different emotional tones to them. And so, you also want to think about the emotion that you are setting, the tone that you are setting with your description.

And, finally, I just want to bring you back the idea of how much and when. And I want to go back to how we started this video, which is the way that you describe, the amount of description you lavish on something, that directs the reader's attention. And so, you really have to be dynamic and strategic with how much description you give about anything, about a character's reaction, about a scene that becomes very important, about a scene that's not so important. How much or how little description you give sends a signal to the reader. And this also goes back to the idea of when do you need to describe. Do you need to describe everything in every scene? Or if there is a chamber that we are going to visit 20 times over the course of your novel, do you spend more time describing that chamber than you do a tavern that we only visit once? I would say that the chamber and the specific details of the chamber are going to be much more important than this tavern. You could, sort of, devote less time, devote less descriptive energy to it. So these are considerations of descriptive writing and descriptive writing tips.

My name is Mary Kole, and here's to a good story.

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