How many times have you told someone something they didn’t really need to be told? “You look like shit today,” for example, when your friend is obviously under the weather. Or worse, “When are you due?” Only to find out she’s not expecting anything.
Learning how to omit the obvious, or even the not-so-obvious, is a hard task for those of us tasked with creating a reader’s world. I’ve briefly covered the topic of killing your darlings before; I illustrated cutting text to imply meaning, where the reader’s imagination does the work. The results can sometimes be more thrilling or terrifying than laying out the action on a moment-by-moment basis.
Today I want to cover how, instead of cutting out information, you can use negative space to eliminate the bore factor and make your story more exciting. (more…)
We writers are intimately familiar with the senses. Most of our metaphors involve some form of touch (“the sun felt like a thousand tiny kisses on my skin”), and nine out of ten descriptions involve sight (“he looked distraught”). Hearing is almost always involved in action (“he gasped as my fist sunk into his diaphragm”), and characterization of dialogue could barely happen without it.
