Welcome to Tuesday Tips - a weekly blog post for busy writers!
Here is a Tuesday Tip to improve your writing.
My last post was an exercise in paring down a piece of writing or cutting out what isn’t needed. However, concise writing can also be perceived as terse or curt. This is fine if you are going for that impression, or if you are writing within the confines of a word limit.
Just as there is a time to pare down, there is also a time to expound. This exercise will help you bring more description, feeling, and color to your writing and make it bloom!
Try this:
First, write a sentence giving an overall picture of a scene.
Second, expand the picture to 2-3 sentences giving more depth to the scene.
Lastly, describe the scene in detail including colors, smells, and other sensory descriptions.
Here's an example:
First – The mid-January day looked dark and depressing.
Second – Clouds hung over the mid-January day, adding to the darkness of shortened days. Cold lingered as the naked trees shivered. The storm that threatened was like an omen of hard days to come.
Lastly – Grey clouds hung ominously low as a biting wind gusted from the west. The lack of daylight was somber enough without the dark curtain looming above and the added chill from the pending storm. Naked trees that stood leafless for months now seemed lifeless but for their efforts to stay upright against the squall. Another blizzard was coming, bringing with it a sense of doom. Would spring arrive?
Verbosity has its virtues. As the writer, you get to decide when less is more and when more is most!
What do you think about this #tuesdaytip? Was it helpful? Feel free to leave a comment, and as always ...