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”