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.