After a heavy project at my “bill paying job” and my laptop breaking when the project ends, it feels great to get back my passion of writing, even if it feels odd to blog about an area in writing that I feel I need to improve on. I find as I am rewriting my stories (short stories or novels) I find that I gloss over certain places where I can describe body language or a character’s emotions more powerful that I do. Like many writers, I don’t embellish due to word constraint and the desire to get on with the story. But do I rob the reader of a more satisfying tale?

I don’t think I was aware of these short comings until after I first read an article published in The Writer Magazine and then after speed reading a book on writing about emotions. Most of our language interaction in real life comes from non-verbal cues. Yet, how often do we incorporate that into our writing? I don’t mean for the important scenes where the criminal feels the net closing in on him or the next victim of the vampire is running down a dark forbidding hallway where the author is trying to build the scene. I mean in the little scenes; in those parts of our story where all we want to do is get on with the story to get to the big dramatic “hang-by-your-fingernails” scenes.

Allow me for a moment to set an example. In a story you may describe a character like this:

Anita stood against the bus station glass, watching for the Greyhound bus. She was anxious to be on her way to visit Sam and wished she was not afraid of flying.

Ok, I passed on a lot of information about Anita in those two sentences. Great, right? Is it? Or would this have been better?

Anita rolled her long hair in between her fingers as she stared out of the Greyhound bus station window until she caught her habit. She let out a sigh and reached in her pocket for the folded note from Sam. Unfolding it and read the fraying paper that looked to have been folded and refolded multiple times, she paced only to stop between sentences to stare at the slow minute hand of the bus station clock.

While I did not work in the fact that Anita was afraid of flying, does these few sentences create a more vivid and life-like scene? As you can see, this is not a big scene in the story, but which of the two descriptions would make you want to read more?

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on the blogs, short stories, novellas, novels, articles and poems that I write.

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