The Little Things Novice Writers Miss: The Use of All Five Senses
We've spent the few months exploring the ways novice writers mark themselves as amateurs, discussing how to develop the world beyond your story, build animals into your world, develop your side characters' motivations, and catch filter words in your writing. Now, it's time to discover how to incorporate all four senses into your work and how those senses relate to everything else we've discussed. The importance of all five senses Unlike some of our other topics, you've proba
The Little Things Novice Writers Miss: A Sense of a Larger World
Over the past several weeks, we've discussed several things novice writers often forget to include in their stories—things that risk marking them as an amateur. Many of these aren't minor and are essential to the reader experience. We simply get so caught up in our primary story that we, the writer, often forget about them. Today's item is perhaps the largest one of all: the sense of a larger world, one that exists beyond the confines of your plot. One aspect of this is devel
The Little Things Novice Writers Miss: Filter Words
Today we'll switch gears a bit and discuss a small thing novice writers tend to leave in their manuscripts (rather than something they usually leave out) called filter words. They sneak into manuscripts at every stage of your career but tend to be particularly frequent when you're first starting out. So, what are filter words? Filter words are words like "saw," "thought," and "wondered." They are usually meant to ground you in the narrator's head, but what they really do is d