November 2024

Here’s November’s actual newsletter. Thank you for your indulgence with my special notice last week. ~ LZ

Writing Advice

If you are Nano-ing, happy writing! This month’s advice is about what to consider when you’re writing. This may help you get more words down in your writing sprints.

For the most visceral story experience for your readers — and remember YOU are your story’s first reader — share the sensory details of your characters’ experiences. Write down the things they see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. Include their thoughts about how these details make them feel and what these details make them think about, wish for, or remember.

Not everything may survive through editing later, but right now, it will bring alive the scene for you and spur on your writing. It is far better to have more on the page than you need, than to try and capture the same lightning in a bottle three months from now when you are looking through the story to revise it.

Paint Deeper Stories with 5 Senses

Let smells trigger memories. Sun-warmed flowers in a window box on the street where they’re walking might remind your character of their mother’s perfume.

Let sights trigger dreams and wishes. Seeing a father and his preschool son playing catch on the small green space between apartment buildings might make a man melancholy for a child of his own.

Let touches from people give a character information. It’s not just a handshake. It’s a chance to size up the competition, or an invitation to camaraderie. Different textures, like scents, can trigger calm or agitation, good memories, or bad.

Bring up feelings with sounds – hearing laughter often makes the listener smile (at least). Or sad feelings. Hearing the music from a music box might cause recall of a favorite song, or the memory of a dance.

Let tastes bring them memories of home – or remind them they are so far from home. That can bring up either happy feelings or melancholy, even remind a person why they’re setting out to do whatever it is (recommitment to goals).

Happy writing!

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Editing Advice

I’ve offered several discussions of deep POV and why it helps readers get into your story and your character’s head. But one element of this isn’t, IMHO, discussed enough: word choice.

Yes, in dialogue we are encouraged to find those idioms, syntax, grammar (or lack of it), jargon, etc, that reveals a character’s individuality in their speech. In close third person POV, however, the narrative is STILL in the character’s voice, so those words and sentences, too, should reflect the character’s individuality. The best aspect of character to reveal in narrative is ATTITUDE. Look at this list of words from the thesaurus:

haste, hurry, scurry, rush, race, dash, drive, scuttle, scamper, scramble, hustle, bustle, flutter, flurry, hurry-scurry, helter-skelter, no time to be wasted.

She fluttered about, deciding what to do.

We scrambled to the door.

A flurry of activity consumed everyone in the house.

These lines could NOT appear in the same story scene from the same character’s point of view. They all have different registers and even though they are all synonyms of pace, each creates a different mental image of how that pace is achieved.

We write different words for “said” all the time: shouted, barked, snapped, whined, whispered, etc. The deciding factor is which is the best word to give the reader an auditory detail showing the character’s feelings. But getting attitude in both the dialogue and the narrative will make your stories more immersive than ever.

So, when editing, look for places where you can inject the character’s attitude by changing a banal action to something more individualized. Let a little more of your character’s attitude toward why they’re doing the action shine through.

Consider changing “walked” for “padded,” or “trotted,” or even the imperious “strode.” And see if you can’t get characters who move so differently that “he strode into the room” tells the reader exactly who “he” is before you even drop his name in the scene.

Happy editing!

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Service Availability

I have filled all the remaining slots for 2024. January 2025 is also full, but if you’re looking for editing anytime after that, contact me through my website to schedule your edit today. If you are writing novels with LGBTQ+ characters and content, consider submitting to my contest. Your edit just might be free in 2025.

~ Lara

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