The events we imagine as we begin to write a story have the power to move us because we see each scene fully formed in our minds. We are under the illusion that what we have written conveys to a reader the same power that moved us. Once we’ve written “the end” it requires no further effort, right?
I don’t know about your work, but usually, at that stage my manuscript reads like it was written by one-hundred monkeys at a writers’ workshop.
The trick is to understand that, while the first draft has passages that shine, most of what we have written is still in the proto-stage. It contains the seeds of what we believe we have written.
Like Michaelangelo sculpting David, we must work to shave away the detritus and reveal the truth of the narrative.
One way we do this is by injecting subtly descriptive prose into our narrative. Properly deployed, power words can serve as modifiers and descriptors, yet don’t tell the reader what to feel.
Think of these commonly reviled words like falling leaves in autumn. A sentence made of a noun and a verb weighs nothing, feels like nothing: She runs.
Put those leaves in a pile, add a day or two of October rain, and they have weight. She runs through the leaves.
Our words gain weight when we incorporate descriptors into the narrative. If we are careful, our modifiers and descriptors add to the prose, coming together to convey a sense of depth.
And yes, modifiers and descriptors are also known as adjectives and adverbs.
Modifiers are like any other medicine: a small dose can cure illnesses. A large dose will kill the patient. The best use of them is to find words that convey the most information with the most force.
Let’s consider a story where we want to convey a sense of danger, without saying “it was dangerous.” What we must do is find words that shade the atmosphere toward fear.
Power words can be found beginning with every letter of the alphabet, but words that begin with consonants convey strength. What are some “B” words that convey a hint of danger, but aren’t “telling” words?
- Backlash
- Blinded
- Blood
- Blunder
When you incorporate any of the above “B” words into your prose, you are posting a road sign for the reader, a notice that “ahead lies danger.” Mingle them with other power words, and you have an air of danger.
As authors, it is our job to convey a picture of events.
But words sometimes fail us. I look at each instance of a modifier and see how it fits into that context. If a word or phrase weakens the narrative, I rewrite the sentence. I either change it to a more straightforward form or remove it. For example, bare is an adjective, as is its sibling, barely. Both can be used to form a strong image depending on context.
Revising your manuscript seems like an overwhelming task, but it isn’t. The best resource you can have in your personal library is a dictionary of synonyms and antonyms. Your word processing program may offer you some synonyms when you right-click on a word to open the thesaurus.
- I rely on the Oxford Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms in my quest to develop a wide vocabulary of commonly understood words.
For most genre work, I suggest you don’t use “highfalutin” words or use acronyms and technical jargon.
But don’t dumb it down. Readers like it when you assume they are intelligent and aren’t afraid to use a variety of words. Yes, sometimes one must use technical terms, but I appreciate authors who assume the reader is new to the terminology and offer us a meaning.
The book of synonyms and antonyms is full of words we’re familiar with and which we often forget are available for our use when we want to convey an overall mood.
Let’s look at the emotion of discontent and how we can shape the overall mood of a scene and reinforce a character’s growing dissatisfaction without saying “they were discontented.”. The following words can serve as descriptors. If you are sparing about adding suffixes [ly or ing], they’re not fluffy. But you must work harder to compose showing sentences when you avoid mushy suffixes.
- Aggression [noun] aggressive [adjective]
- Awkward [adjective]
- Disgust [verb or noun, depending on context]
- Denigrate [verb}
- Disparage [verb]
How we incorporate words into our prose is up to each of us. We all sound different when we speak aloud even when we speak the same language and the same dialect. The same is true for our writing voice.
We can tell the story using any mode or narrative tense we choose but the opening lines on page one must hook the reader, must hint at what they are in for if they stick with the story.
I meant to run away today.
If that were the opening line of a short story or novel, I would continue reading. Two words, run away, hit hard in this context, feel a little surprising as an opener. The protagonist is the narrator and is speaking directly to us, which is a bold choice. Right away, you hope you are in for something out of the ordinary.
That single sentence comprised of five words indicates intention, implies a situation that is unbearable, and offers us a hint of the personality of the narrator.
Some lines from a different type of story, one told from a third person point of view:
The battered chair creaked as Angus sat back. “So, what’s your plan then? Are we going to walk up to his front door and say, ‘Hello. We’re here to kill you’?”
This is a conversation, but it shows intention, environment, and personality in thirty-one words. Battered is a power word and so is creaked.
And here is one final scene, one told from a close third person point of view and uses a form of free indirect speech. This is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech; it is also referred to as free indirect discourse, or free indirect style. The paragraph ends a scene, showing yet another way to incorporate world building along with subtle power words into the prose:
Sara saw the vine-covered ruins of Marlow as an allegory of herself. The core of her, the essence of her that was Josh had been burned away. She’d been destroyed but was coming back to life in ways she’d never foreseen.
The power words are ruins, burned away, destroyed.
When we are consumed with just getting the story down, we often lean too heavily on one word that says what we mean. This is hard for us to spot in our own work, but a friend of mine uses word clouds to show her crutch words.
When we turn a document into a word cloud, the words we use most frequently show up as the largest. Word clouds are a great way to discover where we need to consult the thesaurus and expand our word choices. Free Word Cloud Generator.
Nowadays, I am rarely able to do in-person events due to family constraints, but I used to do four events a year. However, I have some tips to help ease the path for you.
The final thing you will need is a way of accepting money. I have a metal cash box, but you only need something to hold cash and some bills to make change with. A way to accept credit cards, something like 
Investing in some large promotional graphics, such as a retractable banner, is a good idea. A large banner is a great visual to put behind your chair. A second banner for the front of the table looks professional but requires some fiddling with pins.
Make your display attractive, but I suggest you keep it simple. People will be able to see what you are selling, and the more fiddly things you add to your display, the longer setup and teardown will take. The shows and conferences I have attended offered plenty of time for this, but I’ve heard that some of the big-name conventions require you to be in or out in two hours or less.
Aaron’s interpretation of this classic is spot on. He has gotten all the voices just right, from kindly Fred down to Tiny Tim.
“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
As I mentioned before, this book is only a novella. It was comprised of 66 handwritten pages. Some people think they aren’t “a real author” if they don’t write a 900-page doorstop, but Dickens proves them wrong.
Directors will tell you they focus the scenery (set dressing) so it frames the action. The composition of props in that scene is finely focused world-building, and it draws the viewer’s attention to the subtext the director wants to convey.
As I work my way through revisions, I struggle to find the right set dressing to underscore the drama. Each item mentioned in the scene must emphasize the characters’ moods and the overall atmosphere of that part of the story.
We can bookend the event with “doorway” scenes. These scenes determine the narrative’s pacing, which is created by the rise and fall of action.
The opening paragraph of a chapter and the ending paragraph are miniature scenes that bookend the central action scene. They are doors that lead us into the event and guide us on to the next hurdle the character must overcome.
When the next chapter opens, he steps into an opening paragraph that leads into the next action sequence. We find out who and what new misery is waiting for him on the other side of that door.
When you begin making revisions, take a look at the opening paragraph of each chapter. Ask yourself how it could be rewritten to convey information and lead the reader into the action. Then, look at the final paragraph and ask yourself the same question.
These transitions are often small moments of conversation, italicized thoughts (internal dialogues), or contemplations written as free indirect speech. These moments are a form of action that can work well when a hard break, such as a new chapter, doesn’t feel right. The reader and the characters receive information simultaneously, but only when they need it.
A character’s personal mood can be shown in many ways. A moment of 
Trim that back to 
The main thing to watch for when employing indirect speech in a scene is to stay only in one person’s head. You can show different characters’ internal workings, provided you have a hard scene or chapter break between each character’s dialogue.
As stories unfold on paper, new characters enter. They bring their dramas and the story goes in a different direction than was planned. When I meet these imaginary people, I assign their personalities a verb and a noun.
Julian’s noun is chivalry (Gallantry, Bravery, Daring, Courtliness, Valor, Love). He sees himself as a good knight and puts all his effort into being that person. He is in love with both Mags and Beau.
Next, we assign a verb that describes their gut reactions, which will guide how they react to every situation. They might think one thing about themselves, but this verb is the truth. Again, we also look at sub-verbs and synonyms:
Have you thought about the two words that describe the primary weaknesses of your characters, the thing that could be their ultimate ruin? In the case of Julian’s story, it was:
Julian Lackland took ten years to get from the 2010 NaNoWriMo novel to the finished product. He spawned the books 
I hate it when I find myself at the point where I am fighting the story, forcing it onto paper. It feels like admitting defeat to confess that my story has taken a wrong turn so early on, and I hate that feeling. Fortunately, I knew by the 40,000-word point that last year’s story arc had gone so far off the rails that there was no rescuing it.
The sections I cut weren’t a waste, they were a detour. In so many ways, that sort of thing is why it takes me so long to write a book—each story contains the seeds of more stories.
Sometimes, something different happens. In 2019, I realized the novel I was writing is actually two books worth of story. The first half is the protagonist’s personal quest and is finished. The second half resolves the unfinished thread of what happened to the antagonist and is what I am currently working on. Both halves of the story have finite endings, so for the paperback version, I will break it into two novels. That will keep my costs down.
For those of you who are curious—I have the attention span of a sack full of squirrels. Proof of that can be found in the 4 novels currently in progress that are set in that world, each at different eras of the 3000-year timeline, each in various stages of completion.
think of 
In 1953’s 
Neil Gaiman’s 
Dedicated authors are driven to learn the craft of writing, and it is a quest that can take a lifetime. It is a journey that involves more than just reading “How to Write This or That Aspect of a Novel” manuals. Those are important and my library is full of them. But how-to manuals only offer up a part of the picture. The rest of the education is within each of us, an amalgamation of our life experiences and what we have learned along the way.
Authors write because we have a story to tell, one that might also embrace morality and the meaning of life. To that end, every word we put to the final product must count if our ideas are to be conveyed.
The second piece of wisdom is a little more challenging but is a continuation of the first point: Write something new every day, even if it is only one line. Your aptitude for writing grows in strength and skill when you exercise it daily. This is where blogging comes in for me—it’s my daily exercise. If you only have ten minutes free, use them to write whatever enters your head, stream-of-consciousness.
The story is the goal; everything else is a bonus.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 