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Q&A What's wrong with impersonal and lifeless descriptions in a novel?

I'll add something I see my favorite authors use. Basically, you can draw a reader into a scene by doing a three-stage description. Or four. The night was gloomy. (General.) So gloomy, in fact, t...

posted 5y ago by DPT‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T11:56:19Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45333
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar DPT‭ · 2019-12-08T11:56:19Z (almost 5 years ago)
I'll add something I see my favorite authors use. Basically, you can draw a reader into a scene by doing a three-stage description. Or four.

1. The night was gloomy. (General.)
2. So gloomy, in fact, that no light at all could pierce the ground-level window to the dusky basement. (tighter focus. Now we're in a basement.)
3. Instead, the only source of light in the room was the ambient reflection from a projector, situated halfway between a screen on the front wall and the crumbling masonry on the back. (visuals of the setting.)
4. But no movie played on that screen. Instead, motes of dust, illuminated by the cone of light, drifted down, eerily silent, onto eight wide-eyed corpses sitting, stiff, and staring forward.

^^ It's a tightening focus thing. Try that. Might work for you, might not.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-05-22T22:33:48Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 1