Writing Trip: Descriptive Language
- Print
- 9/11/2008 |
- 10:00 am
We've discussed the idea of not relying on adverbs too much in order to color your stories...but that doesn't mean you shouldn't paint pictures in the mind of your reader. This month we'll focus on language that does just that...
In my writing workshops I often talk about getting your readers to turn the page. Your goal as a writer is not only to entertain your audience, but keep them interested in the story that you're weaving. If they get to the end of a chapter and want to keep going, then you've done a good job.
Your use of language is important. That doesn't mean you have to break out a thesaurus and use every big word you can find, and it doesn't mean you dress up every sentence with mindless adverbs. It means that you find interesting ways to hook your reader's attention.
That might include using strong metaphors in your writing. A metaphor is a figure of speech used to compare two things that seem unrelated. For instance, "Tom is a pig in the lunch room." Well, Tom's not really a pig, but the comparison allows the reader to better understand the extent of Tom's eating habits. If you were to say, "Tom eats like a pig," you have suddenly softened the comparison, and it's not considered a simile, rather than a metaphor.
Or perhaps you might enjoy using an idiom. Idioms are expressions whose meanings have nothing to do with the individual words in the expression. For example, you might say "I would move mountains to help her," you're basically saying that you would go to any length to help her out. Another example of an idiom would be, "see light at the end of the tunnel." That means you're able to see that the solution to a dilemma is near; you're close to solving a problem or reaching the end of a project.
Metaphors, similes, idioms...these are all fun ways to paint mental images for your reader. If you pay close attention to what you read, and to conversations around you, you'll find that they're much more common than you think.
