Having your protagonist assess himself in the mirror is one of the most unoriginal ways to describe his or her appearance. Be more creative. Note how other authors do it and when you encounter a great description, study and emulate it.
One approach is to integrate what he or she looks like with action or emotion. Both are best described in a “show don’t tell” manner, which can easily include something regarding their appearance.
A fundamental rule of good writing is to show, not tell. Saying “He was angry” is telling. Saying “His eyes bore into his opponent like steel rods, fists clenched at his side” is showing.
Showing is especially important in rendering emotions, which are essential for sucking your reader into the story. Some emotions are anger, love, hate, betrayal, disappointment, grief, heartbreak, and so forth. These words are okay to use in your first draft, but when you start to edit, stop and consider how you can describe what the character is feeling instead of taking the easy way out. Aim to avoid using that word entirely, but to render it in such a way that the reader knows exactly how your character is feeling at that point in your story.
Maretha Botha is an Italian National, born in South Africa in a small Western Province town called Montague and grew up in nearby Worcester – a town reminiscent of living in Switzerland among the snow-capped mountains in winter. Worcester had a small library. At the time, the librarian limited young Maretha’s visits to three times a week, because “You spend too much time with your nose in a book and neglect your school work.”
Maretha Botha has remained a confirmed bookworm and constantly strives to raise more bookworms who will enjoy reading, not just as a pleasant past-time, but as an excellent tool to be used when grown-up. The area around her birthplace and hometown is often a source of inspiration. She had this landscape in mind when describing the Molodi valley “as an out-of-the-way place, somewhere in the grasslands of Southern Africa.”
Excerpt from “Flame and Hope: An African Adventure – Fauna Park Tales” 1, Chapter 1 – “Friends”.
MY FRIENDS LIVE ON A free-range cattle farm in Molodi, an out-the-way place, somewhere in the grasslands of Southern Africa. Should you visit there and search carefully, you may well notice many of us. Some are slippery and slithery; others are striped, snub-nosed, long-eared and short-tailed, long-horned and round- eyed, furry or feathery. I think you’ll fall in love with us, no matter what we look like! On a frosty morning in May, Flame stormed through the doggy trapdoor with a loud bang. He jumped up against my tree and yapped, ‘Are you still sleeping, Hope?’
Flame had startled me, but I whistled, ‘Not any more! I’m awake now, but you’re very early. Naka[i] is still hanging on the horizon.’ He woofed, ‘I have a brilliant idea which I want to bark to our furry and feathered friends, but for them to accept my plan, they must hear about my life as a puppy in the Kalughari, first. It’s tough for me to bark about certain events, so would you mind telling my story? Besides, you’re very wise; knowing Faunalang and whistling to the birds in their own songs. You even know some Humanlang too. So, you’re just the one for such a story-telling job! Perhaps you might even enjoy telling us more about yourself?’
I fluttered my pink eyelids and whistled, ‘Thank you for asking. I suppose I can try. After
Flame – aka Jack Old Boy – has a promise to keep and a quest to complete.
all, not only humans like stories. I’ve heard that animals and birds also enjoy them, whether they are eyewitness reports or hearsay. Just like you, I find it difficult to talk about my life before coming to the farm, but when the time’s right, I’ll whistle all about it.’
[1] Naka = a bright early morning star which appears before dawn towards the end of May in southern parts of Africa. It’s a sign of the onset of the coldest time of the year and signals the time for the goats to breed.
Maretha Botha has written a series of four books in the series, “Fauna Park Tales”. Featured here is Book 1, “Flame and Hope: An African Adventure”.
Connect with Maretha via Social Media:
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Maretha-Botha/e/B00MOORJAO/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarethMBotha
Fauna Park Tales Twitter: https://twitter.com/FaunaParkTales
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarethMB
Flame and Hope Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/flameandhope.co.uk/
Maretha’s Blog: https://marethmbotha.wordpress.com/
Maretha’s Child-Friendly Blog: https://marethabotha2013.com/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/marethabotha/pins/
Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maretha-botha-976191b8/
First drafts tend to be unbalanced, depending on your style. They may have too much or too little of certain elements. For example, many authors, myself included, tend to focus on action and dialog. These are great for keeping a story moving, but the reader isn’t likely to “see” the story in their head or feel much empathy for the characters.
To remedy this, for your second draft, start by checking how your IDEAS are presented, where IDEAS is an acronym for Imagery; Dialog; Emotion; Action; Suspense. Examine each scene to determine if you need to add something to round it out. You don’t want to slow down heavy action with too much detail, but get enough in there so the reader can visualize it. Setting up the location beforehand is one way to handle that, so the reader already has a mental image for the action to occur.
May the 4th Be With You! And better yet, May the Four Books of Star Trails Be With You!
To celebrate, don’t miss this FLASH SALE! Each of the four volumes of the Star Trails Tetralogy, plus “The Terra Debacle: Prisoners at Area 51”, is on sale for only 99c!
If you’re a hard science fiction fan, this series is for you! But don’t take my word for it. Being the author, you know I’m seriously prejudiced, and not to be trusted. So here’s an excerpt from an Amazon reviewer who’s read the entire series and left this comment under “Refractions of Frozen Time:”
“I love seeing the threads from all the books come together, and the climax is so amazing and unexpected, I kept waiting to hear a huge pipe organ chord! Wow! I love this family and how they all grow in unexpected ways, even when facing death. This series has made me remember why I love science fiction–it stretches my brain in mind-bending ways and opens new ways of seeing the universe. Thanks to the author for a great read and a wild ride!”
And thanks to that wonderful reviewer as well for sharing her feelings about Star Trails!
You can find out more about the series on the website StarTrailsSaga.com. There are videos for each book, links to excerpts on Bublish, and various other things, including forms to request your local library to carry the series, newsletter signup, and coming events.
Here are vendor links to the various books. [Note that “Beyond the Hidden Sky” is always FREE, everywhere but Amazon where it’s 99c.]
The Terra Debacle: Prisoners at Area 51
Economy of words makes your message stronger. Using too many that are extraneous distract and dilute it. This is why adverbs, adjectives, and prepositional phrases often add extra bulk that should be trimmed, just like the fat on a brisket.
Flowery writing or over-writing simply doesn’t work. Do you want your reader to get your message or get lost in a tangle of words? [Please note this is not to be confused with saying something so beautifully that your reader (most likely another writer) pauses to admire how well you expressed a thought or rendered a description.]
Being redundant is ever worse, and a special case of over-writing. As a reader, I feel somewhat insulted, like the author thought I wasn’t smart enough to catch it the first time. Doing so within the same sentence or paragraph is even worse. If this is part of your natural style, don’t let it hamper your creativity; worry about it when you start to edit.
I’m excited to announce that the audio version of “The Terra Debacle: Prisoners at Area 51” has just been released! You can find it on Amazon/Audible here. It will be available via iTunes in a few days. If you’d like to give Audible a try, you can get the audio book for FREE! If you’re already a member, it’s out there now and I’d love to start getting some feedback via reviews! So far people have loved it as you can see from the reviews for the printed version on Amazon as well as the Star Trails Website.
Hollywood actor, T.W. Ashworth, did a fabulous job narrating! You can find out more about him here. T.W. has been busy auditioning for a variety of roles during this time while still doing a fabulous job of bringing the story to life. Check it out! There’s no time like the present to give audio books a try. They’re a multiplexer’s dream and the ideal way to make that long commute more enjoyable!
Never underestimate the importance of moving your reader emotionally. This is the key to making your work stand out as memorable. As they say:
People will forget what you said.
People will forget what you did.
People will never forget how you made them feel.
Emotional memories are the strongest, residing (literally) in both the brain and the heart. If you haven’t read any of the research done regarding heart transplant patients who acquired some of their donor’s memories, I recommend you read “The Heart’s Code” by Paul Pearsall.
If you move your reader emotionally, their heart doesn’t know the difference whether it was a personal experience or vicarious on behalf of a character in a novel. Think about your favorite stories and tell me if that isn’t true. For me, the most memorable books are those that made me laugh, cry, or best yet, both. Reader involvement emotionally is essential to creating and retaining fans.
Be aware of your most common typos. Mine are typing “you” instead of “your” or “the” instead of “that”. A simple spellchecker is very likely to miss such goofs when it’s an actual word and not misspelled, just not correct in context. These are also difficult to find when you’re proofreading or editing because that same disconnect that originated between your brain and fingers will come back to haunt you when reading it. However, an alert reader will trip over it in a heartbeat. During your final edit, be sure to take your time and read each word deliberately, looking for such things. If you’re beta reading for another author, be sure to point out such goofs because the author is less likely to catch it.
A good grammar checker should pick up various mistakes including subject-verb agreement and using the wrong homonym. The finer points of grammar can get lost in a creative frenzy, plus many talented writers were bored in English class and didn’t learn as much as they should have about proper use of the language. One mistake I hear a lot is “we was”.
Another mistake waiting to happen is when a sentence has something like a preposition phrase between the subject and verb, it’s easy to mess up. For example, “He looked over his list of grocery items, which was written on the back of his hand” (correct where “list” is what “was written”) versus “He looked over his list of grocery items, which were written on the back of his hand” (incorrect, i.e. “items” isn’t what’s written on his hand).
One homonym frequently used incorrectly, which drives me nuts every time, is using shutter (a window covering or decoration) instead of shudder (to shake or shiver with fear or cold.) Look it up!
Marcha's Two-Cents Worth 