Tag Archives: adjectives

Starting Out

Posted on by
10

When I first started to write a novel, I thought I knew what I was doing. After all, I figured, I’d read lots of them. What could possibly go wrong?

Just in case there was something I might have missed, I enrolled on a 5-day residential novel-writing course. I won’t mention the name of the organisation. Suffice it to say it is very highly regarded in the field of literary endeavours. Maybe I just hit a bad week, but it was a pretty expensive waste of time and I won’t dwell on it, except to say that I’ve since heard an interview with one of the tutors where she actually admitted how bad she’d been that week. (I think she only did it once; she wasn’t temperamentally suited to the concept of coaching at all.)

Continue reading →

Advertisement

Actions speak louder than words

Posted on by
6

Non-verbal communication is usually understood to mean the process of creating or representing meaning by sending and receiving wordless, usually visual messages. These can include facial expressions, gestures, body language and eye contact. But how, I hear you ask, can this possibly help the writer? We need to examine the concept in a little more detail.

Previous posts have discussed the art of showing, not telling. Non-verbal communication falls firmly into the ‘showing’ category. Our characters don’t have to say anything to convey how they are feeling. The postures they adopt, their facial expressions and unconscious actions or tics will all reflect their moods and tell the reader more about the characters’ thoughts and feelings than long paragraphs of description, speech tags and adverbs.

Continue reading →