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

Writing Tips - Style Reminders

Trying to explain a style of writing is something like trying to nail jello to a tree. You can try all you want, but it's just not going to work.

Writing style is as different as there are writers in the world. Everyone has their own style of writing. A way or combining words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs that is uniquely their own.

In the Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, they devote an entire section to style. Do they explain it as a set of rules? No. Not hardly. But, what they do is give you a guideline of things to remember as you create your own style of writing.

To quote Strunk & White, "Style is an increment in writing. When we speak of Fitzgerald's style, we don't mean his command of the relative pronoun, we mean the sound his words make on paper. Every writer, by the way he uses the language, reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias. This is inevitable as well as enjoyable. All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation -- it is the Self escaping into the open."

Per the Elements of Style, here are 21 reminders to develop your own writing style.

1. Place yourself in the background.
2. Write in a way that comes naturally.
3. Work from a suitable design.
4. Write with nouns and verbs.
5. Revise and rewrite.
6. Do not overwrite.
7. Do not overstate.
8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.
9. Do not affect a breezy manner.
10. Use orthodox spelling.
11. Do not explain too much.
12. Do not construct awkward adverbs.
13. Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.
14. Avoid fancy words.
15. Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.
16. Be clear.
17. Do not inject opinion.
18. Use figures of speech sparingly.
19. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.
20. Avoid foreign languages.
21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat.

There you have it. Now get out there and start developing your own personal writing style. Make it memorable!

Friday Five Minute Exercise - Independence

1. Set your clocks/timers for Five (5) Minutes.

2. Write about Independence. Are you an independent person? How do you define independence? How does it relate to your writing? Does being independent make life more or less difficult? Get into as much detail as you can for the next five minutes.

3. Ready?

4. Go.

5. Finished? Review and be amazed.

I hope you had fun. Come back next Friday for a new writing prompt.

Was this exercise helpful?

Did you succeed with this writing exercise? Was it helpful? Were you able to find and write about your own independence? Were you able to define how being independent and how it relates to your writing style?

Why or Why Not?