I love my story, the dialogue, the characters, the plot, the underlying themes, I'm happy with how they are going. And I'm getting great advice from local writers on showing, not telling and how to bring the emotions and conflicts of my characters out. But I'm still lacking in describing what people are seeing in my story. Being the inexperienced writer that I am, I need to learn more about describing what I see. There must be some resources for learning how to turn what one visualizes into words. And I'm hoping people here have some resources they can recommend. Learning to paint with words, that's the skill I need most now to finish creating the world my story is taking place in. I know I can learn how. I just need the right resources. Thanks in advance.
well the best way i can think of is to learn how better writers than me did it and learn from them, so read a lot and look for books that deal with lot more describing than storytelling and pay attention. Another thing is to practice it, found one great excercise i use: try describing a room from different angles but without the use of emotion words such as happy, angry..etc -your MC is happy -your MC is angry -your MC is sad paranoid and so on...
Think of what you can see. Describe it in a single word. However complex what you're seeing is, write it down in just one word. Take that word. Find 4 new words that mean the same. Write them down. Write down ways of describing the thing you see in terms of the emotion it stirs when you see it, as well as the emotion you don't feel when you see it. Write down other causes of these emotions, and other emotions those new causes might stir.] Write down ways of describing the things you see visually. What else could be described in the same way visually? Write down the sounds made by what you see. What else makes those sounds? By now, you should have a huge list of words. Map them out. Skim them. See which ones jump out at you... good luck! This might work for you, it might not - everybody's different. It's a tip I got here, and it's worked really well for me so far!
if you can't do it on your own [which is pretty common, so you've plenty of company], you may need to take a creative writing course... i'm currently giving 'imagery' lessons to a client who has the same problem, have done the same for others, so i know it's possible to gain this requisite skill if you work hard enough at it... love and hugs, maia
