#i love giving hyper specific overly detailed descriptions

[hollis-exe]

mutuals.... send me an ask if you wanna know what your horsie valentine is.....

[jooyeone]

from the mind that brought you the fluffy hoth hat (seriously, I love that hat), porn producer jk, common room neck kisses jikook, bubbly drunk jimin, monarchists on main pjm + myg, no cuddles no slumber, delicate hobi hands & anime heart-mouth obsession, jimin's jams mixtape, tinypollypockettan, jk's factory reset freckles, fishnets and thigh knife, knowing-fuck-all-about-music rapline ~vibes~, mincho koo, the seokwich, Min Yoongi and The Gummy Worm Nose Scrunch (this is very important to me if you could not already tell), rewatching run bts with ur handholding goggles on, 90s boyband heartthrob magazine cover model jk, "bought this underwear at a convince store" jimin, barbie doll mouth seokjin, tae in the fur coat being both anastasia vibes but also that hyper specific "raided his dead mother's closet for her collection of furs" vibe, min yoongi is the powerhouse of the cell, the haunting vintage abba-esque photoset of the jikook pas de deux, choose ur own adventure ultimate bts lineup, 4¢ for yeon kimin explanations, andrea gibson thigh tat, ⅓ is jung hoseok, yoongi's American Girl Doll Smile™, taegiseok sope opera... I could go on... truly, it would be faster to go back through and list the anons since [chaebol boy king jungkook/indoor weather reserved for the rapline] that aren't mine but like. here we are. some of them can keep on living in anonymous limbo, that's what it's there for. 🤷‍♀️ what can I say... I'm kind of like your local neighborhood semi-feral cat : I have a thought I think you'll enjoy, I throw it through the ask box cat flap for you to find in the morning; sometimes it's a lizard, sometimes it's a rock with lichen that looks eeriely heart shaped, and sometimes it's 150+ words describing in excruciating detail the vibes of the day that the boys are giving off (ꈍ♡ꈍ)✌️

...i have so many things to say to you, you beautifully insane galaxy-brained semi-feral cat. i don’t know what first prompted you to leave these masterpieces into my ask box and not someone else’s, but i feel chosen in the same way i would if a cat climbed up on my lap to sleep on at a party full of passed-out drunks and their very-much-available laps. i’d never move again no matter how many times the host asks me to leave, politely at first, then with a bit of desperation in their voice because “how the hell did this cat even get in here?”, and the fact that you’ve stuck around in my lap for so long is something that i’m grateful for beyond words and ear scratches. you’ve been one of my favorite interactions i’ve ever had on this hellsite since i joined over ten years ago; waking up every morning to “anonymous asked you” + the 10-ish visible words from your message in my activity tab that i could already recognize as yours, has been such a happy little routine for me and it’s been so, so, so much fun to keep up with it almost every day. every single eerily accurate description/short story i’ve received from you i’ve held close to my heart and whatever organ is most responsible for sheer awe and incoherent laughter (lungs?); i’ve taken screenshots of so many of them and sent them to (irl too!) friends and just stood there in our chat in utter disbelief at your words (bubbly drunk jimin completely broke one of my friends, and me as well). i feel like you’ve created a little library corner in this little, poorly-decorated house of mine that you keep growing every day and i sit there, every day, on this old armchair, brushing through the classics you’ve already written until you’re back with a new one. and not to get overly sappy here (bear with me for a moment longer, i’ll let you go back to your catnip in a minute) but truly, thank you so much for all of this, it’s been one of the biggest highlights of my experience here in this fandom and while i hope you don’t leave any time soon, just know that i’m always going to remember those little messages from you as one of my fondest memories on here.

[tlbodine]

What exactly is 'character voice'? Is it merely a character having opinions on things? And how do I have good voice if I am writing in first or third person omnipresent? Do I give the narrator's opinion on things? The character's opinions? The different opinions of the characters?

Voice is a tricky thing to pin down -- a bit of a “know it when you see it” type thing. But I’ll see if I can break it down a bit. 

First: Stories will contain both “authorial voice” and “character voice.” Authorial voice is the individual writing style of the author, and you’ll start to notice it most strongly after you’ve read multiple works by one author. Character voice on the other hand is unique to the character. A strong character voice will often overshadow the author’s voice, which is usually a good thing! It keeps every book you read from an author from sounding the same. If you’re reading a book in first person or close third POV, the narrative should be in the character’s voice. If you’re reading it in a more omniscient POV, the narrative might have a very different voice. Books that alternate POVs might have different voices for different perspectives, so that you could tell who’s speaking even if the chapters weren’t labeled. 

But OK. What makes up Voice in writing? 

Opinions. Characters with a strong voice have opinions about the world, and those opinions color the way they see things. They don’t sit and tell you how they feel, but instead deliver the world through the lens of those opinions.

Focus. What a character chooses to pay attention to vs ignore in the world around them. This gives an underlying glimpse at what is important to them. 

Word Choice. On a structural level, voice comes down to word choice, grammar, syntax, etc. being used with purpose to create a cumulative effect. 

Books without a strong voice sound dry, like a technical manual or book report. They lack any poetic devices or colorful insights.  A strong voice is one that doesn’t sound generic, which means it’s not usually “correct” from, say, a middle school English class perspective. (In fact, some young writers may often butt heads with teachers over the use of voice in writing -- I know I did. Once you get good at it, 

It might just be easier to show this in action than try to explain it so...

Carrie, by Stephen King: 

She had tried to fit. She had defied Momma in a hundred little ways had tried to erase the redplague circle that had been drawn around her from the first day she had left the controlled environment of the small house on Carlin Street and had walked up to the Barker Street Grammar School with her Bible under her arm. She could still remember that day, the stares, and the sudden, awful silence when she had gotten down on her knees before lunch in the school cafeteria -- the laughter had begun on that day and had echoed up through the years. 

Carrie calls her mother “Momma” even in her head, which already implies a lot about her socioeconomic class, upbringing, and intelligence. She didn’t try to fit in, she tried to ‘fit’ -- a non-idiomatic description. The run-on second sentence gives a hint of a racing thought. “Redplague” as one word is evocative and more powerful than a more drawn-out metaphor might be. 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams 

Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby, and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn’t know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr. L. Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and predilection for little fur hats. 

Comedy lives or dies on the strength of its voice, and Douglas Adams is a master at a very specific type of comedy. Here we see it on display. Prosser is an antagonist, and he’s here being described in a way that suggests, without stating outright, that he’s quite pathetic. We open with a cliche saying, and then immediately deconstruct it in a way that’s overly precise -- a technique of absurdism. Then we compare him to Genghis Khan (also a villain, and a very strong one) in a side-by-side parallel that definitely paints Prosser unflatteringly (his genes are “juggled,” a word that evokes clownishness) and the “little fur hats” detail is the icing on the cake -- imagine standing beside Genghis Khan and the ONLY thing you have in common is the hat! (”Predilection” is also a fussy-sounding word. “Stoutness about the tum” sounds like a childishly euphemistic protest, sort of like “big-boned” but dialed up to 11). 

The Cabin at the End of the World, by Paul Tremblay 

Wen’s eighth birthday is in six days. Her dads not so secretly wonder (she has overheard them discussing this) if the day is her actual date of birth or one assigned to her by the orphanage in China’s Hubei Province. For her age she is in the fifty-sixth percentile for height and forty-second for weight, or at least she was when she went to the pediatrician six months ago. She made Dr. Meyer explain the context of those numbers in detail. As pleased as she was to be above the fifty-line for height, she was angry to be below it for weight. Wen is as direct and determined as she is athletic and wiry, often besting her dads in battles of wills and in scripted wrestling matches on their bed. her eyes are a deep, dark brown, with thin caterpillar eyebrows that wiggle on their own. Along the right edge of her philtrum is the hint of a scar that is only visible in a certain light and if you know to look for it (so she is told). The thin white slash is the remaining evidence of a cleft lip repaired with multiple surgeries between the ages of two and four. She remembers the first and final trips to the hospital, but not the ones in between. That those middle visits and procedures have been somehow lost bothers her. Wen is friendly, outgoing, and as goofy as any other child her age, but isn’t easy with her reconstructed smiles. Her smiles have to be earned. 

The thing I love about Tremblay’s writing style is how wonderfully understated it is. At first blush, it seems very straightforward and precise. But the details work to give such a rich image beyond what’s on the page -- like one of those paintings that creates a cat with just like, two brushstrokes of ink. This paragraph is jam-packed with information -- the character’s age, race, adoption, gay parents -- but also illustrates her character indirectly: a kid who is interested in precise numbers, competitive in a specific way, self-conscious, skeptical. Little lines really stand out, like “caterpillar eyebrows” and “reconstructed smiles.” 

Horrorstor, by Grady Hendrix 

It was dawn, and the zombies were stumbling through the parking lot, streaming toward the massive beige box at the far end. Later they’d be resurrected by megadoses of Starbucks, but for now they were the barely living dead. Their causes of death differed: hangovers, nightmares, strung out from epic online gaming sessions, circadian rhythms broken by late-night TV, children who couldn’t stop crying, neighbors partying til 4 a.m., broken hearts, unpaid bills, roads not taken, sick dogs, deployed daughters, ailing parents, midnight ice cream binges. 

But every morning, five days a week (seven during the holidays), they dragged themselves here, to the one thing in their lives that never changed, the one thing that they could count on come rain, or shine, or dead pets, or divorce: work. 

This is the opening of the book, and it does a perfect job of setting the tone for the story -- a combination of humor and horror, a lighthearted touch on a really dismal subject. Like the Douglas Adams example, it relies on an excess of hyper-specific detail to create comedy through absurdism. Describing the store they wrok at as a “massive beige box” says a lot -- beige is a boring color, box is a boring shape (and implies constraint, the opposite of “think outside the box” etc.) Calling the workers “zombies” and using zombie words (”stumbling”, “streaming”) invokes a specific set of concepts -- mindlessness, for starters, and death -- and using that to describe going to a job certainly implies something about what it’s like to go to work, right? This paragraph could just come outright and say “work is soul-sucking and pointless and takes you away from things that are important” but it illustrates that instead. A perfect example of “show don’t tell” in action. 

Hopefully that gives a bit more illustration to what I’m talking about. As you read, pay attention to the way things are said and how that varies from one book to the next, and you’ll get a better intuition for voice (and learn to craft your own through practice). 

Some general tips/things to think about when creating strong voice for your narrative and characters: 

Education and socioeconomic level of the characters. A professor will talk differently from a car mechanic; a college graduate sounds different from an elementary school student; an inner-city black teen will use words differently from a New England socialite. Think about what kind of background a character has and choose vocabulary and syntax that makes sense for them. 

Evocative descriptions. Words come with baggage, and good writing puts that baggage to use to create a meaning stronger than what’s on the page. Precision with language, not just what words mean but what they imply, is the hallmark of good writing. 

Words used uniquely -- in other words, avoiding cliches and descriptions we’ve seen before in favor of creating new word combinations that do the heavy lifting of the previous bullet point. 

Hopefully that helps! 

[blinder-secrets]

So what should be done if the only real problem with the writing is lack of dramatic flare? I assume using different words to replace “boring” ones but idk.

This is actually a tricky one, because I don’t know whether my idea of dramatic flare would be the same as yours. Or if anyone’s is the same as anyone else’s. People could read the most detailed, imaginative story, and still come away thinking ‘god that was dull’. 

Honestly, my gut reaction to this is that, there doesn’t need to be any dramatic flare. A lot of my writing is quite plain in terms of language and set-up. I really love writing short stories where nothing really happens, and nothing is really out of the ordinary. Chekov made a hell of a literary impact from doing just that. So, honestly, you can just write your boring story about boring things, and if it’s crafted well enough, people will enjoy it. 

But, in terms of boring words, I don’t think there are any. If it feels boring, it’s probably just a case of it being the wrong word for the moment, or you’re simply thinking about it too much. In story telling, there will always have to be plain… boring, shit. Trying to make every word, and every description, jazzy or original will just end up back-firing. For example, if a character needs to cross a room, sometimes you do just have to write, “they walked across the room”. If you tried embellishing it, it’d just sound odd like, “they paraded across the enclosed space.” Actively trying to make boring things sound interesting, for the most part, will just draw too much attention to something that doesn’t need it. Which will just make your prose sound strange.

By letting boring things stay boring, it’ll make the more creative, flamboyant use of words much more effective.

It’s less about making use of fancy, unusual, words, and more about making sure you’re using them only when they need to be used - and that’s done by recognising the effect you want to generate. SO, if the character you’re describing is pretty plain, and you want people to think that, let the description be plain. i.e.

“The girl had brown hair to her elbows.”

It does the job, the reader knows exactly what to picture, and the story can continue. If she’s very prim and proper, you could put in some clues of that.

“The girl’s hair was long, curled and set in place with a gold-clip.” 

Neither of those examples were adventurous in their use of language, but both were written and constructed with the intention of creating a specific impression, which is where your flare will come in. The base of what’s being said is “the girl had hair” which obviously is a fucking waste of a sentence, and no-one would write that. Unless you were some sort of deconstructionist. So, from the get-go, your descriptions will always have a certain level of juicyness. You just gotta learn how to shape it. 

For some examples, let’s imagine you’ve got a character who’s just meeting a circus performer with huge stilts. There are a variety of ways you could approach it, to suggest various different things, and it all lies in a combination of structure and word choice. So:

“He was tall, though not naturally. Attached to his knees were stilts three times the length his original legs would’ve been. They were constructed of leather, wooden planks, and wire-sprung hinges. It was ingenious.” (suggests someone with a practical, perhaps scientific mind, who’s impressed by what they see.)

“He had stilts on, wooden and curving. I doubt they were made in this century so, when I passed him, I kept as far away as the ring would let me.” (A more cynical view - not overly fussed about the height of the man, or the stilts, more concerned by his own safety.)

“I looked up at the stilted-man; I couldn’t see his face past the leathered knee-straps and gnarled wood, but I assume he was smiling down at me.” (a more humourous - though dry - view, only including details that’ll help emphasise the positioning of the narrator and therefore the joke of it.)

“He was wearing stilts. Tall ones. Taller than the ones I’d had at my own show.” (bitter, short sentences and lack of details show he’s pissed off about it and reluctant to give them his attention.)

None of them are particularly dramatic; none of them stand out as ground-breaking literature. Some of them will be liked, and some of them wont. The important thing is that I’ve thought about what I want from the description, and then I’ve tried to craft it in a way that’ll reflect that. That’s how you keep your writing engaging. Don’t write anything just because it sounds good (with a few exceptions, cause we all love a bit of indulgent poetic imagery here and there). 

Overall, I wouldn’t try and focus on making sure your writing is special. It doesn’t need to stand out, or sound smart, or read like you personally created the oxford dictionary. It just needs to do what you want it to do. If you want to make your narrator sound like a dick, make sure you describe things like a dickhead would. If you’re story is set in a hyper-immersive fantasy world, make sure you include details on the way the creatures talk, or how the sky looks, or what the politics are like. If it’s an everyday exploration into the relationship of two characters, don’t stress over your words being simple, focus on what creates tension, what makes the room feel small, what makes it seem like they hate each other. 

It’s all about recognising which words add something, which words aid something, and then getting rid of the stuff that does nothing at all. If you’ve got that down, you won’t need to worry about making sure your piece has flare. It’ll naturally be engaging and immersive - have faith!