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Do you write too much description in your fiction? While adding description can help give your reader a clearer picture of the events and everything in the particular scenes, it’s important not to add too much description. In this article, we’ll look at the drawbacks of adding too much description in your work.
Read more: 7 Drawbacks of Writing Too Much Description in Your Fiction Book
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A passage about descriptive writing should be able to have an appeal on all five senses. Writing with all the five senses is quite a brilliant rule, when you are working on descriptive writing. This is so because you need all the simple details, in order to help bring your fictional world to life. Each of these five senses is quite a powerful tool on its own. When they are therefore combined together, they help to offer the reader a full experience, that is immersive to the reader. This way, the readers are able to understand better, how words have been used to describe how things smell, feel and even taste.
Writing Sensory Descriptions
There are quite a number of things that you may decide to use while describing a character while writing. For instance, you can decide to talk about the color of his hair, the fact that he has fingernails that have been chewed, some scar he has on his face, that is visible in a certain light, the color of the trousers he is wearing and so forth.
In the example given above, there is absolutely nothing wrong with giving either one or even more of such descriptions. However, the aforementioned details about the character are only one-dimensional descriptive writing. This is because it has only engaged on the sight sense. However, you could give the description as shown below:
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He has hair that has a wiry feel (sense of touch)
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His lips have a ripe fruit taste (use the sense of taste)
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He wears quite a considerable amount of perfume (smell sense)
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He has laughter that is quite high-pitched (use of sound sense)
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He was casually dressed (use of the sense of sight)
The above description is now multi-dimensional since it takes into account all the five senses. This is how detailed descriptive writing is supposed to be done. When you use all the five senses altogether in giving descriptions regarding your characters, it becomes a lot much easier to know more details about the characters, and hence making the whole story much more interesting and the readers entertained more.
1.Descriptive Writing using the Sense of Sight
Sight is actually the most important sense to engage in, when you are looking to give a good sensory description. This is mostly because, when writing, in the absence of cameras, like is the case in movies; you can only use the sense of sight to describe to your readers using words, the things you would wish for them to envision.
In as much as you cannot be able to give every description of every building, trees, things in sight and everything else, you are still well able to give descriptions of sight in the following ways:
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Have your focus on only a handful of the details you want to give. Allow your readers to have the opportunity to paint the rest of the picture by themselves. This makes it more intriguing for the reader actually.
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Ensure that the few details you are giving to the readers are the very best that you are able to come across.
2.Using the Sense of Smell in Descriptive Writing
Among all the five senses that can be used in descriptive writing, smell is the most nostalgic among them. Ideally, smell can be used as a tool in descriptive writing in trying to have the characters be able to have a remembrance of an event from the past.
It is also safe to say that the sense is smell is an easy way for you as a writer to be able to put across so much, using words that are quite few. For example, you could use the following examples:
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The smell of the woodland after rains in the summer season
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Smell of cheap liquor from the breath of drunkards
In as much as the words are very few, they are able to stir up so much imagination in the reader, and help them start thinking about the exact setup in which the events were taking place. This way, using just the sense of smell, can evoke so much descriptions that will go a long way in writing.
3.Using the Sense of Taste in Descriptive Writing
You are most likely to evoke the sense of taste in different ways while writing. First, you can use this sense when the characters are either drinking or eating. Additionally, you are able to use it in romantic writing when the characters are actively using their tongues and mouths, for example when kissing.
You should always look for ways by which you are able to incorporate the descriptions of taste in your writing. For example, if you are writing about a character that is visiting the coast, you can have them taste the breeze salt, in a fictional way.
It is important to note that even in the event that you are not exactly having a taste described, you are able to have it passed across by just a mention of the tongue that is used for tasting. This is often quite powerful in fictional writing.
4.Descriptive Writing using the Sense of Sound
Using the sense of sound is often quite important, especially in helping in a way to bring some soundtrack to a scene. You can, for instance, use the sense of sound to bring so much description to the characters and the settings around them.
You can have the speakers banging things in anger, for example, speaking, singing or even coughing. All these add an effect to the storyline by giving them a vision of what the setting appears to be like.
If you are giving a description of the seaside, for example, you are able to mention the sounds of waves breaking on the seashore pebbles; as a way of adding extra details to the description.
5.Use of Sense of Touch in Descriptive Writing
When using the sense of touch in descriptive writing, it can be displayed in two different ways. It can be used to depict pleasure or pain. For pleasure, you can describe to the readers, the nice pleasurable cool feel of cotton sheets on a warm summer night. This way, the readers are able to have an experience of the pleasure, together with the character.
You can also make it painful, by for instance, talking about a character having their nose head-butted. This may make the readers wince, even because they can imagine the pain.
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Are you wondering if you’d benefit by printing your current novel in progress and editing it by hand? The truth is that there are a lot of benefits to looking at your work in a different format, especially if you do all your writing on a computer.
What You’ll Need
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A red pen or any color pen that isn’t black or the color of your printer ink. You want your edits to stand out on the page. I prefer the Pilot Precise V5.
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Printer paper. I prefer the cheapest stuff I can find that doesn’t have 100 reviews of ‘it jams’ or ‘feels nasty’. I typically use Hammermill and that’s because as of the writing of this article, I can get 8, 500-page reams for $29, which is $3.63 a pack.
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A cheap laser printer. I’m currently using a Brother HL-L2300D Monochrome Laser Printer because it prints 27 pages per minute, and the tray holds up to 250 sheets. The toner cartridges also print 1800+ sheets, which means you aren’t going to switching out your ink mid-novel-print, like with an inkjet. I don’t know about you, but when I owned an inkjet, I got real tired of constantly feeding it more paper and spending $30+ on ink for every single draft.
Read more: Understand the True Benefits of Editing By Hand (Pen and Paper)
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Writing a fictional story can be a daunting task for any writer. Choosing the right words and effectively developing characters are ways to attract your readers, and editing your drafts can help you achieve that goal. You want to be able to clearly add value with each sentence of your writing so that your readers do not get frustrated and turn away.
However, there may be times that your writing doesn't flow because of some editorial problems, and you may not know how to address them. Proofreading and editing your drafts is essential to grabbing your reader's attention and keeping your reader gravitated toward your writing. Without using either tool, readers will likely go to a new source for their amusement.
Here are some common editorial problems that can be found in fiction and how you can quickly fix them yourself and get your writing to flow again.
Read more: Common Editorial Problems and How You Can Fix Them
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Have you ever wondered if it’s a good idea to get a combination editing package, like a line edit plus a proofreading service, in order to save money and get your novel finished faster? If you have, you’re not alone. Many editors offer packages and services that contain more than one type of editing, but you need to be careful when choosing a service, especially one that also contains proofreading. This is because proofreading is the final step in the editing process before you format your book and publish it.