description – Confabulator Cafe

Too Many D*cks on the Dance Floor: Doing More with Less

Larry Jenkins - September 10, 2012

In my own writing, I don’t usually work with a large cast of characters. I like simple stories that are more or less stripped down to their bare essentials. Whenever I write a scene that has more than two characters, I tend to get worried about whether or not everyone is getting equal billing. Has […]

Is that a banana in your pocket, or are you trying to kill me?

Kevin Wohler - March 6, 2012

I’ve already blogged here and elsewhere about my difficulty writing description. My prose tends to be terse and action-oriented, much like the television, movies, and comic books that have influenced my work. I think in pictures, and write only what needs to be shown. This was not always the case. Back in college, the most baffling […]

Start in the Middle, Fill in the Gaps Later

R.L. Naquin - February 8, 2012

Sometimes a scene springs from me fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead. And sometimes, every word has to be squeezed from my neurons like the last bit of toothpaste at the bottom of the tube. What’s the difference? It took me awhile to figure it out, but descriptions bore the living hell out of […]

Writing description: There is a small mailbox here.

Kevin Wohler - February 7, 2012

If there’s one failing to my writing it’s probably a lack of description. This isn’t to say that I don’t include any description. I do. But when it comes to including long, laborious passages about the moss-covered flagstones or the texture of the fabric in a character’s clothes, I tend to ignore it and move […]