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Improve Your Sensory Description to Bring Readers Back For More

Here’s an exercise I highly recommend doing outside, but you can do it wherever you are.

It’s a simple exercise about being present in a place, centering yourself, and using your entire body to take note of the world around you. Use your eyes, ears, nose, and fingertips to observe everything. What does the place smell like? What does it feel like? What are the textures? Be specific in your descriptions.

Just make a list. You don’t need to write lush, vivid sentences right now—just be as specific as possible. If you hear birds singing, try to identify what kind of birds they are. If you notice flowers, determine their type. If you smell an herbal scent, figure out if it’s lavender, oregano, or something else.

The goal is to dig deep into specifics.

Just this morning on my walk, I brushed a hand over a short pine tree and came up with the following sentences on the fly, which might open a novel someday:

Despite their name, pine needles are actually soft, almost silky, to the touch when caressed the right way. Rub them the wrong way, and they’ll stick you. My mom was the same way.

Will it win a literary award? No, but it’s a vivid image, ain’t it?

For example, one of my students went out to her front porch and sat on the “red brick step” off her porch. Just those three words already create a vivid image.

Then she noticed she couldn’t sit there long without a pillow for her back, which tells us a lot about her if she were a character. Imagine opening your story with such a specific detail: “Frances sat on the red brick front porch steps, thinking she would need a pillow before too long.” This one sentence reveals much about the character.

Another student mentioned going out to her back porch and watching a neighbor hosing down beach furniture. While not highly specific, this detail suggests proximity to a beach. Instead of saying, “Frances lived on the beach,” you can show it through specific observations.

In crafting your story, choose which details to keep and which to trim. You might start with specific details and then refine them in revision. For instance, instead of saying someone walked a dog, specify the breed, color, and characteristics. A detail like “a white hypoallergenic Labradoodle” tells us much more than just “a dog.”

Allow your sensory memory to influence your writing. One student described a ceiling fan’s pull chain tapping against the base, a sound many of us recognize: tick tick tick tick tick. Such sensory details can draw readers deeper into the story. Consider what memories those sensory details evoke—whether they bring warm, fuzzy feelings or negative associations. Does that ticking sound take you back to grandma’s kitchen baking cookies? Or does it take you back to terrible room in a terrible house where terrible things happened?

There’s no right or wrong response, only that you banking that sensory memory for later use in a story.

One student mentioned jasmine bushes around her house. A lovely detail, but it wasn’t the plants themselves that stood out to me as she talked about this exercise. What captivated me was when she said her husband planted them after their trip to India. This detail reveals so much about their relationship and evokes a powerful memory. A simple line of description like that in a story would give the reader instant insight into the character of the husband.

When crafting your scenes, decide what emotions you want to evoke and use sensory details to achieve that.

So: go outside (if it’s safe for you to do so) and immerse yourself in your surroundings. If you can’t go outside, use your immediate environment to practice sensory observation. The more you practice, the richer and more vivid your descriptions will become, resonating deeply with your readers.

I hope this helps!

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Craft

Battling Writer’s Block

Battling Writer’s Block

6 Tips and 1 Big Secret

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Before we address your writer’s block, we need to consider what kind of writer you are and what kind of writing you do.

More specifically, where do you want your career to go?

If you are currently at the hobbyist level, meaning you love writing for fun and have these characters you enjoy working with, that’s great. Maybe you make maps and character drawings and post them on your favorite website. But today, you’re stuck, and you’re looking up how to fight writer’s block.

Or are you are a writer who fully intends to get paid for your work? We have to address writer’s block from a differently if so.

Here’s the reality:

If you are someone who writes fiction to make money, you don’t get writer’s block.

You don’t have the luxury of writer’s block. Whether you are going the traditional route, the indie route, or hybrid, you’re doing it at a professional level in exchange for funds. You are a professional writer.

You may experience “project” block, as my friend Michael Stackpole says. You might be working on a project and get stuck for a moment.

The solution? Go to another project.

Most of my writer friends in the indie world have more than one project going at any one time. Maybe your urban fantasy isn’t working for you this morning, so you shift to your YA romance. For those in traditional publishing, if you’re doing a book a year, you still probably have more than one project going because you don’t know which one will sell.

In any case, you’re a professional. You are expected to craft fiction for your audience. There’s no time for writer’s block.

I recently wrote a 90,000-word novel in three months. The first month was for research and outlining. The other two months were for writing. Almost every day, I got up, looked at where I was, figured out what part of the story I was in, and dove in. I wrote 2,000 to 3,000 words a day.

And I followed an outline.

When you’ve crafted a really good outline, you don’t get writer’s block. You’ve already prevented it by spending the time up front to test your story.

You might get tired, which is different. Physical or personal setbacks are not writer’s block.

When under contract for that novel, I overwrote as much as I could. That way, I built in time for unforeseen events. I wrote as much as I could when I was in “the zone.”

I beat my deadline by a week.

Let’s talk about the more fun side: What if you’re working on something as a hobbyist, enthusiast, or apprentice? When you’re stuck, here’s what I recommend.

Get out of your space.

You probably have a space that you typically write in. If the routine isn’t working for you, you need somewhere new. Go to a library, a park, a coffee shop, or even a different room in your home. Change your visual and sensory perspective to kickstart your creativity.

Get to the good scene.

There’s no rule that says you have to write in order. Write what excites you the most. If you find some scenes you dread writing, maybe those scenes should not be in the story.

Engage with your favorite media.

Watching favorite movies, reading favorite books, listening to favorite music, or reading poetry can be really good for breaking up a solid logjam in writer’s block. But don’t mindless scroll online. Be deliberate in your engagement. Choose media that you truly love.

Your Voice was influenced by movies, by media, by songs, by other things that you’ve read. So invest back into those. Go read your favorite book. Take an hour, make your favorite food, sit in your comfy chair and get back into the thing that led you to today.

Other authors, other storytellers, guided you to today. Revisit them, hang out with them, read them, watch them.

Which is not the same thing as, “Well, Tom said take a couple hours…” and look at YouTube.

No, no, no, no.

Don’t go to YouTube. Don’t go to TikTok. Don’t go to any of these places. Don’t mindlessly scroll and call it work. That’s not work. You know it and I know it. I’m talking about the deliberate, intentional act of taking an hour or two hours to relax, get back in touch with your self, get back in touch with your heroes, your mentors, and then see how the scene progresses.

Go outside.

A ten-minute walk or just being outside can change your mindset. Engage with your surroundings deeply, using all your senses. Be safe, obviously. But get out. Get out and get moving. A ten minute walk. A 30 minute walk can change all kinds of things.

Put your phone away. Don’t put your earbuds in. Just walk as you’re walking.

Or if you can’t walk for any reason, be outside and just sit. But as you’re sitting or as you’re walking, notice and take note of the things around you. But dive deep! Don’t just look at the pretty flowers. Stop. Literally smell those roses. Smell the snapdragons. Touch them. What’s it feel like? What does it remind you of? Listen to everything.

If you break off a twig from a tree,  what does that sound like? What is the texture of that little stick that you just broke off? What does it smell like?

Get that stuff into your brain. Don’t worry about your book. Don’t worry about the scene. Just get those sensory things going. I’m confident that when you sit back down, you will find a new sort of freshness to the writing.

Write something else.

If you’re stuck, work on another project or take one of your characters and put them in a new, challenging situation. This can reveal new aspects of your characters and invigorate your creativity.

If you don’t have another project on on the back burner, take one of your characters from this current project and put them in a locked concrete room with some of their character, either one of yours or a character that you like from literature or movies

Lock them in this room and let them start talking to each other and just see what happens. One of my favorite stories about this, about breaking writer’s block, is I took a 17 year old girl who was an artist from my novel ZERO. I put her in a room with a 30 year old space pirate and locked them in a concrete bunker just to see what would happen.

You’re never going to read that scene, because it’s never going to be published . It was just a three-page thing that I wrote really quickly. But the dialogue revealed so much about both of those characters that there are still little elements of that scene in those two books. It’s weird, but it works. Just throw them in a room, see what happens.

Remember, if you’re a professional, you need to think about writer’s block differently. If you’re just a hobbyist, don’t worry about it too much. You’ll get there. But if you’re at the professional level or planning to be, your approach to getting through writer’s block will change because your livelihood depends on it.

I hope some of this is helpful. Leave me questions or comments. I’m just glad you’re here, and we’ll do this again soon. Take care.

If you found this article helpful, may I point you to STORYCRAFT. Ten hours of hanging out with two successful hybrid authors, talking about everything from story structure, to approaching agents and dealing with traditional contracts, to the highs and lows of indie pub. Check it out: https://tomleveen.store/b/storycraft

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Craft

How To Deal With the Frustrations of Writing

How do you deal with some of the frustrations that come with being a writer?

We suffer beneath many frustrations. There’s the frustration writers block. There’s the frustration of not having enough time to do the work we really want to do. Of course, the ultimate frustration is not having our work published, or perhaps worse: having a published book, but no one’s buying.

I’ve dealt with, and continue to deal with, all of these frustrations (and many others). After wrestling with these frustrations myself—in my own mind, on paper, wandering around the kitchen at 2 AM speaking into my phone—there is one solution that continues to come to mind. It is great and wonderful and terrible in its simplicity:

Keep writing.

I know. That’s probably the most . . . well, frustrating answer I could I have given to you or me. There are plenty of other actionable items we could add to this list: you could take courses, or spend money on Facebook ads for your book, for example. You can read books and articles like this one, and watch YouTube videos about any topic under the sun related to your frustrations as a writer. God knows I have.

But the one solution that I keep coming back to is that I must write.

Gary Vaynerchuk points out that if you really want success with the thing you love to do, design a process you love. There are no guarantees in any pursuit, whether that’s law, medicine, creative arts, financial work, you name it. So, you’d better come up with a process that you really enjoy. I really enjoy the process of writing novels. All of those frustrations I listed at the top of this article are still true—sometimes on a daily or even hourly basis all at once. But I still love the process of writing.

If you’ve gotten this far in this article, you probably do, too.

With no guarantee of financial or emotional success, how do you deal with all of those frustrations? You keep writing. You write because, as Stephen King points out, to not write is death. More than once in the last decade, I have considered quitting altogether. I have thought about going back to school, getting a graduate degree . . . “I’m just going to work full-time at a library or somewhere.” (That’s not a bad gig by the way.)

The problem is, the thought of never writing another word of fiction chills my heart. I already know that I may never ever publish with a New York publisher ever again. But in this day and age, there is no excuse not to write the things that we love and share them with the world. The internet has utterly and forever changed publishing. Find your audience, and you will be fine.

I am not trying to diminish the size or weight of those three frustrations, or the many other frustrations I didn’t even list. They are real. They hurt sometimes. They can cause distress. But if you are a writer, the only way forward is to keep writing. Perhaps we need to try a new genre, or a new format. Maybe it’s time to take a class in poetry, or essay writing, or creative nonfiction. I have taken these classes and gotten a lot out of them. More than once, they’ve reignited my desire to continue writing. I am also not dismissing all of those videos and courses I mentioned. They can be very powerful as motivators, or to inspire us to try something new and different.

Through it all, we must write. We must not just merely suffer anxiety, but rather be anxious to set forth to tell our stories.

If we cannot or will not do that, then the frustrations have won. Let’s not give them the satisfaction.

I say this at the end of most of my articles and posts about writing, but today, it takes on a slightly more serious meaning:

Keep. Writing.

I mean it.

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Craft

NaNoWriMo: Let’s Write Together!

 

NaNoWriMo: Let’s write together

 

The idea here is to start a novel from idea generation and go all the way (hopefully) through the agenting process, the publishing process, marketing . . . everything that happens along the way to your very first author event at your local independent bookstore.

 

I don’t know if that’s what’s going to happen or not; we’re just getting started! But that’s the goal.

 

I’m going to be gearing everything we do toward that ultimate goal of finding representation from a literary agent and then hopefully traditionally publishing your novel. If that doesn’t happen, that’s okay, we will shift gears and we will self-publish it, and we’ll be talking about all those things every step of the way.

 

It seems like a good idea to write something accessible to more people if I’m going to do my job as an instructor, or as a mentor, or as a coach for writing. I need to make this process and story as accessible for as many novelists and aspiring writers as humanly possible.

 

Again, the idea is I’m starting from zero. I’m going to go to a couple of photo free photo websites (pexels.com and unsplash.com), look for an image that speaks to me—that I find compelling or that inspires me—and we’re going to write a novel based on that image. The final story may change and shift and morph throughout the writing process; that’s fine, that’s normal. But you’ll be along for the ride every step of the way as we talk about structure and plot and pacing and characterization and dialogue and description and white space and all those things that go into novel writing.

 

One question I do see a lot is, “Where do you get your ideas?” or “How can I get ideas to write?” This is one thing you can do: go to a free photo site and just surf around and see what compels you, see what grabs you. (The other advantage to doing that is if we end up going the self-publishing or independent publishing route, this image can become the basis of a great book cover.)

 

I found this shot of a girl sitting on a skateboard with sort of a do-rag thing going on:

 

photo credit:

Olia Danilevich

 

She’s got kind of this Mona Lisa smile going on. She is somebody I would write about.

 

I also like this girl by herself at a carnival or fair of some kind. She doesn’t look like she’s very happy, but there’s this prominent image of the ferris wheel in the background:

 

 

photo credit:

Hannah Busing

 

That’s interesting to me. Why is she there? Why is she by herself? What happened in the moment before?

 

 

Even as I scrolled through many images, I already started mulling ideas about these two images. How can how can they be related? How can they be in relationship?

 

As these posts continue, we will also talk about outlines: should you outline, should you not outline, should you be a pantser or an outliner . . . all these kinds of things we’ll discuss but right now, all I need is something to get the fires burning.

 

Here is the story idea I came up with:

 

I have decided that these two are friends, and they have been friends for a long time, but the girl in the carnival picture perhaps has depression or is struggling with something at home. Some external force is is acting upon her. They go to this carnival, she meets a boy and he’s a carney—maybe he operates the one of the games. She falls for him and decides she’s going to run away with him to the carnival, or follow him to the next town or whatever. Her friend on the skateboard is like, “Not by yourself, I’m coming with you!” She has her own baggage, but I don’t know what that is yet.

 

And it doesn’t matter, because now we have three characters and a story.

 

I have no idea where it’s going, but this is how it works. So that’s where we’re going to leave it for now. Thank you very much for reading, and we’ll see you soon!

 

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