Description - How to Share the Workload with Your Reader

Whatever genre or form you’re writing in, getting the level of description right can be tricky. Too much and your reader might get bored, too little and they might not be interested. 

But you don’t have to do all of the work yourself. One of the things I love about writing is that the reader brings so much of the story-telling process with them.  They look at our squiggles on the page and transform them into worlds and characters in their minds. 

How to Create Characters Your Readers Will Care About

Character creation is a very involved and varied process.

Each writer has their preferred methods, and each story has its own requirements.

Sometimes stories begin with the idea for a character and the writer has to work to create the right plot for them, other times an idea for a plot will present itself and the writer will have to populate it with the right characters.

But how do you make your readers care?

First, you have to care about your characters.

There is no point writing a story about a character you aren’t interested in. For starters, why would you want to? No matter how disciplined you are, if you don’t care what happens to your protagonist, you simply aren’t going to finish writing the story. If there even is one.

But, more importantly, your reader will notice that you don’t care and they’ll stop reading. Readers are annoyingly observant. They’ll notice the scene you found boring to write, because it will be boring to read. They’ll spot the setting you didn’t bother to think about, because your descriptions will be vague or absent. And they’ll know which of your characters you care about and which you don’t. And they will lose faith in you as a writer.

After all, if you don’t care about your characters, why should they?

Understanding Point of View - Limited Vs Omniscient

In my last post, we talked about first and third person Points of View (PoVs).

Now, we need to consider whether the viewpoint for your story is:

Limited: This is where we can only write about things our viewpoint character knows or observes.

or

Omniscient: This is where we can write about anything and everything. It is often used when a writer wants to ‘head-hop’ between characters.

Understanding Point of View - First Person Vs Third Person

One of the things most writers struggle with, once they stop to think about it, (which they have to if they want to get it right) is Point of View (PoV). This term is used to describe whose eyes the story is told through.

Today, I want to talk about first person and third person PoVs.

First Person: This is where the character is telling their own story.

I got out of bed and rubbed my eyes.

Third Person: This is where a narrator is telling a story about someone else.

She got out of bed and rubbed her eyes.