How do you ensure your story doesn’t take place in a blank room? Or a blank forest or castle or city as the case may be?
Too much description and your reader’s eyes glaze over. Too little, and they don’t know what is happening. Except, the amount of description is rarely the problem.
Strong description isn’t about the length of the description. Rather, it’s about how you go about describing the particular item, setting, or person.
It isn’t a new idea. It isn’t revolutionary.
But it bears repeating.
As Christians, we should not sit down to create the next great Christian piece of art, be it a book or painting or movie. It’s a terrible idea and if that’s all we have to go on it will end up stilted, cringy, and dull as a rusted coin that’s lain in a gutter all winter.
Here’s why.
Continue readingWhen I read something I love, I can’t just enjoy it. I have to study it. Pull it apart to see what worked. Put it together again just to see if I can do it too.
It’s how I process and it’s how I learn. And it’s something I did recently with a new favorite series, Red Rising. Continue reading
Do you ever love something so much you actually hate it?
Example: Amazing book. Tears out your heart. Shreds it with sharp fingernails and hands it back to you with a serving of thematic truth, raw emotions, and a glaze of carefully crafted prose and self-doubt. Continue reading
Writers aren’t always inspired artists with words spilling from their fingertips to paint an imaginary world in a thousand and one shades.
Correction.
Writers are rarely inspired artists with words that just flow. We have the picture in our head, but the word part is a bit more difficult. Continue reading
Life isn’t normal. People aren’t normal.
There’s a dryer setting labeled ‘normal’ but if you’re using a Dominican dryer and want your clothes to be dry before you walk back down the mountain to check them, you might want to turn the heat to high instead.
Point being, everyone has different versions of how things should get done. Hence this post. Life hacks from life in the DR. From the perspective of students, myself, and Scarlett alike.
Who do you trust if your own memories betray you? If everything you think you know has come from someone else’s mind, how do you know who to believe?
And who to kill.
I get annoyed with myself sometimes.
Do you know the most aggravating thing about living on a tropical island?
Living on a tropical island.
All of your failed drafts and wasted attempts are probably the best thing that ever happened to you.
I like information, okay?
How do things work? How do people think? What’s the best way to do a thing?
