Writing Tips - Instilling Immediacy into your Writing

When writing your story, you want to grab the reader and suck him/her into your book. You want your reader to experience your book as it's happening. Word by word. Emotion by emotion. Action by action. To do so, pay attention to the following three areas:



1. The Story's Structure

2. Description

3. Writing Style


The Story's Structure 
Right from the very first Chapter, your story must grab your reader. If you're not grabbing your reader look at the following:

Point of View: If the point of view is clear and consistent from the story's beginning, readers won't be forced to guess whose perception they are seeing through.

Conflict: Action proceeds from characters in conflict - and pulls readers into your story. If you have the conflict clearly in mind, and pose it clearly for the reader, you will reach for the more active phrases and situations that create immediacy.

Exposition and background: Long descriptions of character or setting background intrude on the reader's illusion. Many writers feel it is important to the reader to being their stories with such passages. Readers do not need the entire background of your fictional world to appreciate the story's movement. The opposite is true. A single sentence, if well-imagined and worded, can do that far more immediately.

Create Compelling Description
Animating objects is just one way for resting immediacy through description. Consider these others:
Create charged images: A charged image evokes all the other elements of your story - theme, character, conflict, setting, style, and so on. As the reader moves through the story, the charged image discharges its potency gradually, keeping the reader involved and intrigued.

Make descriptive sentences rhythmic, as opposed to mechanical.

Filter all description through point of view.

Be brief.

Writing Style
How you arrange your words, phrases, and sentences also contributes to the sense of immediacy that keeps readers engrossed in your story. There are certain styles and techniques you can use to create a forward flow:

State things in chronological sequence

Use active phrasing

Keep transitions crisp

Impinge phrases

Juxtapose elements

Use reveals and surprise to sustain the reader's immediate attention

Use repetition to emphasize certain elements

Avoid distractions and deadeners


Making fiction immediate is a tremendously awesome task. The biggest problem the author has is that he/she tens to own the emotions, imagination and intellect of the reader. We delude ourselves that what we put on paper will be as intensely immediate for the reader as it was for us.

You can overcome much of this occupational hazard by imagining as your write, an audience of strangers. Try to feel their living, breathing presence and respond to their craving for an immediately intense experience.

Writing Resource: The Writer's Digest Handbook of Novel Writing