101 Writing Tips from an Exhausted Reviewer

Descriptions

Which leads me to my first tip:

1. Avoid Empty Descriptions.

Seriously. For example:

"It was a nice day."

What is nice? For some people, a nice day is a sunny day. For some people, a nice day is when it is raining, because they can cozy up in their bed and read with a hot chocolate. For me, an Australian, a nice day is when I go outside and my neighbour has not thrown the snake back into my yard (we are playing ping-pong with a real snake because we both disagree with whose tree the snake came from).

Avoid sentences such as:

"She looked good."

"The weather was great."

"The ice-cream cone was beautiful."

Actually, scratch that. You can use sentences like the ones above--but I really strongly encourage you to follow them up with some actual, substantial description.

How?

2. Use Your Senses.

Do an exercise with me right now. From where you are sitting/standing/laying down/squatting because you're scary, tell me:

- Five things you can see.

- Four things you can touch.

- Three things you can hear.

- Two things you can smell.

- One thing you can taste.

I use this exercise as a psychologist, when I am grounding my clients if they are feeling particularly distressed. As a writer, I use it to ground my reader into my story.

Practise that exercise as much as you can. If your story is set inside an ocean, try going to an ocean and completing this exercise. If your story is set inside a forest, sit on a tree and complete this exercise. If this story is set inside a snake's mouth, climb inside a snake's mouth and complete this exercise (but please note that I will not take responsibility for any injuries you acquire).

Get used to knowing what is around you and writing it down. Start by simply labelling what you can see/hear/feel/taste/smell. Then, start writing them out into sentences. Which leads me to my next few points!

Before we do that, let's keep this interactive. Either use the comment section or grab a piece of paper and complete the exercise above as if you are your protagonist in a certain setting you have difficulty describing. For example, if I am inside a snake's mouth--

Why do I do this to myself?

Five things I see: forked tongue, sharp fangs, vemon trickling along the mouth canal, a cavern leading to the belly, pink walls.

Four things I can touch: Oozing saliva, jagged teeth, I have never touched a snake's tongue but I'm going to say that it feels really squishy, and my own sweat.

Three things I can hear: a rumble from inside the snake's belly--ominous, sort of like a roar. I can also hear a squelching sound as my shoes walk across the tongue. I can also hear the this crunchy sound as the snake continues to move across the gravel, despite me somehow fitting in its mouth.

Two things I can smell: the damp air that is super heavy and thick and smells like corpse, and probably my own blood somewhere on my face.

One thing I can taste: fear lol.

Cool. I have all my stuff. Now, when I describe this all to my readers in my story, I'm not going to write it like this:

I could see a forked tongue, sharp fangs, venom trickling along the snake's mouth canal, pink walls, and a cavern leading to the belly. If I dared to reach out, I would touch oozing saliva, jagged teeth, a squishy tongue, and my own sweat. I could hear a rumble from its belly, the squelching of my shoes, and the crunchy sound of gravel as the snake moved. I could smell the damp air and blood on my face. I could taste fear.