Simple, quick tips for improving both your writing quality and your Wattpad experience. Open, friendly, and conversational, this book will give you that little info boost you need to tackle common problems and often-overlooked issues.
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Ever feel like your writing just falls a little flat? Often the difference between a good story and a great story is how well you can pull your reader into it, how much you can make them feel like they are there with the characters. And the key to that lies in description.
Description not your forte? No worries! We're going to discuss five practical exercises you can use to improve your descriptions, and with that, your overall writing.
Exercise 1: Versatility
Pick out a description you've already written or quickly write up a new one to practice on. Try to see how many different ways you could describe that scene. Pick different metaphors, focus on elements you ignored previously, write it from a different POV. Go wild and in different directions; no one has to read it but you. It doesn't always have to be good. It just has to be different each time. Not only will this exercise show you that there are an astounding number of possible variations in any scene, but it will help you be more flexible when you're writing 'for real.'
We recommend picking a small description to start off with. You can expand it, but if you're wanting to do this multiple times, you don't want to overwhelm yourself. Start from little and let your imagination fill in the rest as you go.
Exercise 2: Diction
This one is more a thought experiment, but you could write it down if you preferred. It's a silly word game I play with myself when I'm bored sometimes. I look at a random setting or item and describe it to myself as basically as possible. Then I try switching out the words (or some of the words) for synonyms—stronger, weaker, more idiomatic, less cliché, higher vocabulary, lower vocab, whatever type of different description I want—and then make a sentence out of it. This approach is less about the description as a whole and more about the individual words.
Basic Description: Books, folders, and random objects fill the surface.
So, what kind of "surface" is it? A bookshelf? A desk? The floor?
Does each item need described? How does it change the sentence if we lump it all together as "clutter" or even "junk"? If you describe each item, changing "Books, folders, and random objects" to "Dark tomes, reams of notes, and strange artifacts" makes the objects sound like they belong in a wizard's study. Note, we didn't really change what we were describing, just how we were describing it.
What about the verb "fill"? Does it sound different if we say "overflow" or "crowd"? "Cover" and "are scattered across" give different ideas about how much space the items are taking up. Can you think of any other verbs/verb phrases you could use? Leave them here:
Examples in sentence form:
Cluttered Description: Books, folders, and other junk crowd the desk.
