There are many different kinds of writing, descriptive writing being one of them. Pretty much everything I found on descriptive writing talked about essay writing or academic writing.
Descriptive writing is important for any kind of writing, but we’ll stick to creative writing for now.
What is descriptive writing?
Descriptive writing is when you give a clear and vivid description of a person, place, or thing in your writing. It can be in separate paragraphs and sentences or woven into the narration. Descriptive writing is supposed to help the readers visualize everything as though they’re in the story themselves.
How can you use descriptive writing?
There are many different clever ways you can weave descriptive writing into your story.
Figurative Language
Used to show imagery, figurative language uses metaphors, similes, personification, etc. Pretty much the basics of the English language that you learned about in school. These can be used to describe people and places. Comparing and making connections from one thing to the next as well as adding a little more depth to objects (personification, for example).
Organization
It can be spewed out in blocks of paragraphs or it can be woven into the narration. The narration, in my opinion, is the way to go. Sometimes it can look like info-dumping if you go on too long with certain description. It can be tricky, but you want the description to flow nicely in between everything else.
Sensory
Readers and writers alike all have something in common and that’s our five senses. For the most part, we can all see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, or have some sort of combination of those five senses. Using the five senses in our writing adds more depth to the story rather than just ink sitting on the surface of a page. It doesn’t help to use them all at once all the time, but it still adds that little extra to the story.
But we’ll touch upon that more throughout the month.
How do you add the description into your novels? Let me know in the comments below!
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