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Crafting Emotional Resonance: Part 4 – Precise Prose

Posted on March 14, 2023March 15, 2023 by R.M. Archer

Today marks the end of this series on writing emotionally resonant scenes and stories! There will be one more related post in a few weeks that covers writing effective dialogue—plus a critique post next week that provides insight into how all of these tips can be applied—but this will be the last how-to post that’s officially part of the series. Today I want to talk about how your prose can make or break the tone and emotion of your writing.

I’ve talked about why I love classic literature before, and one of the reasons is that classic authors took word choice very seriously. They made a point to choose exactly the right words to convey their meaning, connect to their themes, and highlight the emotion they wanted to resonate with readers. Mark Twain said well that,

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

As authors, we know that words have power. This is certainly as true on the micro level as it is true of story as a whole! Yet our specific word choice within stories, within scenes, within sentences is often less careful than it could be, and our stories—and their impact on readers, by extension—suffer for it.

The question is: How do we fix it? Continue reading “Crafting Emotional Resonance: Part 4 – Precise Prose” →

Crafting Emotional Resonance: Part 1 – Character-Driven Description

Posted on February 21, 2023May 9, 2023 by R.M. Archer

Over the next few weeks, I want to focus on the craft of writing emotionally resonant scenes and stories. What does that mean? I want to give you the tools you need to not only convey the actions of a story, but connect those actions to the emotions of your characters and, by extension, the emotions of the reader. (Thanks to Courtney L for the topic of this blog post series.)

To kick off this week, we’re going to look at the details of prose. The biggest issue I see as an editor reading books and helping authors to build more emotion into their scenes is a lack of description that connects to the character. This leads to flat description that readers don’t really care about—and characters whose emotions are a mystery.

There are two potential issues at play here.

#1: You may be lacking description altogether.

#2: The description is there, it’s just not working.

Fortunately, both of these problems can be fixed.

When Description is Missing

If this is the case, my starting advice Continue reading “Crafting Emotional Resonance: Part 1 – Character-Driven Description” →

5 Tips for Writing Vivid Descriptions

Posted on November 4, 2020October 9, 2023 by R.M. Archer

My brain decided to flip-flop Monday and Tuesday this week, so… this is late. Because yesterday didn’t feel like Tuesday (and apparently I didn’t consult my calendar yesterday). But here we are with a new writing post.

Authors tend to fall into approximately four camps when it comes to description in early drafts. 1) Too little description; everything is dialogue or action. 2) Too much description; we’re overwhelmed by the detail of every blade of grass. 3) There’s the right amount of description… but it just sits there and looks pretty. 4) The magical people who can actually write fantastically vivid descriptions on pretty much the first try (believe it or not, I know people who fall into this category). I usually fall somewhere between too little description and flat description… which is really frustrating since I know the principles for description and when I’m editing description is one of my strong points. But what are those principles? Continue reading “5 Tips for Writing Vivid Descriptions” →

Preptober Prompts Week 2 – 2018

Posted on October 14, 2018August 23, 2020 by R.M. Archer

I intended to do these on the days they were posted, but I forgot so I’m doing all six at once. This past week’s category was description and was hosted by RaeMarie at Ozark Mountain Cailins. (Click on the prompt graphics to go to the original posts.)

I take a walk down an empty street, admiring the colored leaves as they fall. They skitter across the pavement, whisked away with a crisp autumn breeze. Loose hair Continue reading “Preptober Prompts Week 2 – 2018” →