Creative Writing

It’s great to be able to develop your writing. It’s even better to create a visual painting with words. Developing your artistic skills can be a challenge when you are trying to have readers see what you see in your mind.

Descriptive words, or adjectives, are your best friends in writing. These are the words that tell the reader how many, what color, and even what size. They draw the picture and add the technical effects for you, helping the reader become part of the scene. Your scenery in your mind isn’t black and white, so why should that be what your reader sees? Your mind sees a dark, creepy alley with many different aspects. However, if you don’t describe these details, your reader will not only see whatever they want but could possibly lose interest, too.

Here’s an exercise. take the following sentence and add as many adjectives you can to it:

The store was bit with lots of shelves.

Without creating an intensive run-on sentence, turn this store into something that everyone can relate to. These are my changes. See how they compare to yours:

The grocery was vast, shelves looming over shoppers and glowing with carefully arranged products while dairy items were set as neatly as soldiers on a defensive line.

By reading that sentence, you see shelves hovering over the top of the customers. By adding the word “glowing,” I changed the negativity of the word “looming.” “Soldiers” distinctly tells the reader the neatness and gives them a sense of order and operation.

Adjectives have many different purposes and can be used so many ways. Remember that adjectives are your friends and can make the difference between your story being a crying bore or tantalizing the reader to turn the pages. See how you can take one paragraph and make it a picture worth the thousand words you wrote.

It’s time. You are ready to sit down and write that amazing novel. You have an amazing idea, a plot, a wonderful and lovable ending, and characters that are present.

Wait, characters? Who are they? Can you see them, feel them? Can you punch that jerk in the face while scooping up the girl of the century? The real question is are your characters real?

How do you make them real? Well, one of the easiest ways is to continue to write about who you know. Perhaps your key character is a rich uncle who is deranged from the family. Now do the interview. Who is he? How did he get so much cash? Why didn’t you get any? Why does the family hate him so much?

This is the easy part. Finding out who your character is may be one of the easiest parts of your entire writing process. Knowing the age, where they come from, their styles, hobbies, relationships, children, dialect… Ok maybe we are getting ahead of ourselves. Once you know the base mold of your character, you can start adding in their subtitles, making them real, making them purely believable “people”.

As you write, think about where you want your character to be from. Are the local? If so, bring your setting into play. It is just as equally hard to wrap a Bronx dialect in as it is to sink Ebonics in to where the character not only is real, but has a voice. Read your dialogues back and see if you can hear them talking, as if you were eavesdropping. If you can’t hear them, break out the eraser.

Here’s a great sample, derived from a book in progress:

“This room be dusty. Ain’t you got no cleanin’ woman? You sho’ ain’t got cause iffin ya did this room would be clean as a whistle, mm hmm.”

“No, we don’t have a cleaning woman, or man for that matter.”

“Well, seein’ as how you rested my’s employah, I might be plyin’ for that job. Y’all sho’ could be usin’ a good cleanin’ round here.”

“I might just put you down for the job Mattie. Seems you keep Mr. Demure’s house fairly clean.”

“Fairly? Fairly!” Mattie was irate. “Listen, mistah, you don’t be knowin’ me, and you ain’t be havin’ no right to be sayin’ how I does my work.”

Look at the language, the obvious misspellings. The thing is, nothing is misspelled. It is the dialect of Ebonics and Southern culture wrapped together into one. It makes the main character, Mattie, believable, and recognizable. You can hear her voice in your mind, know that she is not only under-educated, but poor, Southern, and possibly African American. For the sake of this ideal lesson, we will say that she is and the man she is speaking with is a detective, well rounded, well educated, and trying to stay calm.

Didn’t see that coming did you?

The idea is to develop your character not only in his or her description, but to add and become the character as you write them. Your character can be a corporate paralegal, uptight and thinks they know everything. How do you depict this character? Find ways to make them awesome, even if they are the antagonist. Without the awesome, the character doesn’t exist and will never be memorable.