description

I’m finishing up converting the workshop I did at Surrey International Writers Conference a month or so ago, Dunking Your Readers in the Details, as an on-demand class. That class was in turn based on an hourlong online writing class I did for Greg Wilson’s Twitch channel a few months ago.

The class has been fun to put together. Over the course of being taught multiple times, it’s evolved to a point where it presents a dozen tools for writing more immersive worlds, and includes several exercises to allow you to test out the different techniques and see what works for you.

Curious about it? Here’s the section on prioritizing the senses.

A common tool of “Golden Age science fiction” “” the late 1930s through the 50s, when science fiction was first coming into its own as a genre “” was to invoke all five senses within the first page of a story.

It turns out there’s some science behind that method, in that writing that uses the senses creates more brain activity, setting off mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are neurons that fire under two circumstances: when you are experiencing an event and secondly when you are watching someone else experience it. Writing that invokes the senses makes mirror neurons fire, which makes your reader feel as though they’re experiencing what you are describing.

But beyond that, three of the five senses are more useful to you and should be focused on. Sight and sound will come naturally, and we’re inured to them from watching television and the movies. What you need to push to invoke are smell, taste, and most importantly: touch.

Why is the last the most important? Because touch is more than a question of smooth or rough, velvet versus pebbled. It includes:

â—¦ Temperature like a chilly breeze, the warmth of a sunbeam

â—¦ Bodily sensations such as pain, nausea, exhaustion, fever, itches

â—¦ Motion moments like falling, flying, and floating

When you use these senses in your writing, you are making the reader feel as though they are in the body of the point of view character and experiencing the story world through them. This is a key technique when writing an immersive world.

Update: the class is now available here!

I’m working on converting the Description and Delivering Information class to the on-demand version, along the same lines as the Character Building Workshop and the Literary Techniques for Genre Writers workshop, and hoping to finish it up over the next couple of days, which may be overly ambitious, because a) I am doing NaNoWriMo, b) life is complicated by Orycon and then a Thanksgiving trip on the 20th and c) this is my birthday weekend and I like to slack a little.

So, what’s the difference between taking one of my live online writing classes and the on-demand versions? Let’s look at the cons first:

1. No live interaction, which is a little sad. You can comment on the class material, though, which you have access to in perpetuity, or at least as long as it’s up.
2. No chance to hear other people’s work with the exercises or get a chance to chat with them.

Pros, on the other hand?

1. A bit more lasting. As I said, you do get permanent access, including when the material updates.
2. Work at your own pace. Want to do an exercise more than once? Go for it. Want to stretch things out or take a break for that trip to Bermuda? You’re fine.
3. Considerably cheaper than the live version — half the price, usually.
4. Considerably expanded material and more exercises. The character building workshop ended up being close to 20,000 words; this one will match and probably surpass that.

This week focused on delivering information and description. Next week we’ll talk about revision, rewriting, and otherwise preparing a story to go forth into the world.

In the course of one workshop the topic of writing about rape came up and Jim C. Hines has provided a timely article about it in the most recent Apex Magazine. In brief, Don’t use rape as 1) easy motivation for a character or 2) shorthand for how bad someone is and do some research about things like the mental aftereffects if you’re going to write about it.

If you want to read a piece that does it well (and harrowingly), I would suggest The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell. I also mentioned Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her.

Also mentioned last week as a great book for looking at sentence and paragraph level writing:
Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace

A series that I come back to repeatedly is Dorothy Dunnett’s marvelous six-volume series The Lymond Chronicles. Dunnett has two strengths: dialogue and its accompanying actions as well as a descriptive gift that I am bitterly envious of. Right now I’m working my way through the books for a third or fourth time, and I’m midway through Book 3, The Disorderly Knights.

In this chapter Lymond and Oonagh are escaping the Turkish camp, and it’s just marvelous.

At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. ‘I cannot swim. You know it?”

The sea is the still dark pool, the brimming edge of freedom and we know that it’s still perilous and questionable because they can’t even see the boat. It’s a passage where words are scarce and breath is conserved, and Dunnett deftly raises the stakes here with that six word exchange.

It’s snowy out, the sort of snow I grew up with in Northern Indiana. A clumpy snow, a little wet, so it clings to branches in inch thick lines, making some more snow than branch. Last night I watched it drifting past the light in the parking lot, which illuminated a sphere of falling snow, like an open-air snow globe, the good kind without sparkles or glitter, just evocative white bits that make us think of quiet nights, growing quieter as the snow muffles sound.

Sometimes writers need to stop and look and figure out what makes a scene real, what distinguishes it from one of the many movie backdrops in our heads, so that when we recreate it or take a piece from it or somehow incorporate it into a piece of writing, we can convey that quality. Karen Joy Fowler mentioned that often the most unique detail of a landscape is one of the most transitory: a busker, the shape of a cloud, the noise of the rock concert next door. Right now it’s snow for me. So, I ask you – what’s the most evocative detail of your current landscape?