View Single Post
Old 10-24-2003, 04:17 PM   #11
breakingnews
Q_Q
 
Join Date: Oct 2003
Location: somewhere in between
Posts: 995
This is very, very good. But there's a imaginative void in some of your descriptions, namely the first two paragraphs. As a journalist writer, I'm a big proponent of condensing writing down to the absolute minimum. I.e., don't use 25 words when all you need is 5. That teaches you to be concise with your words.

Once you're concise, you'll realize you need to find the "right" words to describe whatever it is you're talking about.

For example:

When exactly can the horizon be differentiated from the sky? "She woke before sunrise, a distant glow outlining the horizon's edge."

If you've seen fog in the morning, it doesn't really lay upon the earth. It roils, like dry ice in water. "A thin layer of fog spilled across the city streets," or "The tops of tall buildings peaked through the thin layer of fog."

Be active and first-personish in your descriptions. It's tough, but a challenge is understanding how people really perceive images. We see things in groups and only certain things stand out. Like, 'the crowd roared with anger, but a toothless man standing alone clenched his torso as tears streamed from his eyes.' I wrote that about a war protest last year - we've all seen angry mobs, but who the hell was this guy in the mix?

"... the tinkling little bells of the carts approached in the otherwise hushed silence of dawn," could become simply "... the tinkling cart bells broke the morning silence." Because that's what happens. Dawn is already hushed, no need to say that it was quiet.
breakingnews is offline   Reply With Quote