I have to agree with this post in so many ways. Just because colorful words are used, they may not be structured or written in a way that helps the reader get a good feel for the scene or even the character. This can leave an otherwise great story, limp and lifeless – like Ben Stein’s character from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
What I appreciate from this post are the questions and insight provided to help writers create more sensory scenes – the type that engage reader’s 5 senses and can provoke thoughts. I’ve always loved books and movies that could do this.
Image: Five Senses – Tomesia Ingram
I try to read a book a week; it’s usually on a Saturday, when I have time to sit down and read a good chunk at a time. This past weekend I read a book which prompted thoughts around this concept of “sensing” a scene, and reading it aloud to hear any howlers that might have crept into the writing. The author of that book obviously did neither, though her editor might have told her to beef up descriptives – so they were clumped all together, staggering me as a reader to a halt while I tried to figure out the context of the pages of descriptives before remembering what the characters were doing there in the first place, and often the dialogue sounded very stilted (e.g. using “vocalized” instead of “shouted” – the latter of the two would have fit into the character’s time and place far better) – a…
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Melanie V. Logan 