Description carries the story along through the use of the senses, bringing life to what happens along the storyline.

But description can be overdone like eating too much, so that eventually the muscle loses battle against the fat.

There are a few ways description falls flat, such as:

• Using adverbs, which weaken writing when they are not specific. Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs. Saying that your character slowly walked across the room (here “slowly” modifies walked) does not give the reader as good of a mental picture as: “She shuffled to her bed, falling into it after working 12 hours.”
• Writing in the passive voice, using “he was,” “they were” and the like. The passive voice slows down the action, while distancing the reader from what’s being said.
• Using general words, instead of concrete details and specific nouns and verbs. Tree and bird are general nouns, as opposed to a birch oak or maple and a cardinal or robin.

Verbs are important in description, much less so than adjectives, which qualify a noun or noun phrase to provide more information about the object being described. The river spit onto the rocks is more descriptive than the bubbling river.

Adjectives, when used, should be kept simple.

Description is what fills the pages of a story. To keep readers interested, choose words carefully, making sure every word has a purpose. That purpose can be establishing setting, developing character or moving the plot forward.

Use the senses, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing (sight is obvious), to let the reader experience what you are describing.

You hear it every day, but you don’t have complete control over it.

It is voice.

The way it sounds – the pitch, tone and accent – and how you choose your words as you talk is part of it.

Voice written down becomes more than word choice. It is how you put together words and sentences and paragraphs. It is how you choose to describe things.

Hemingway wrote short, crisp sentences.

Faulkner was effusive.

Dickens was a bit flowery.

The voices of the greats show how writers can capture the feeling and tone of their writing through word choice, syntax and phrasing.

Voice is how writers structure a sentence. It pivots toward boredom as a series of subjects and nouns without variety in where the words are placed. It becomes staccato in the even, unaltered rhythm.

To be exciting, voice uses varied sentences, becoming descriptive in places and action-packed in others, aware of the balance of the story structure and the plot needs.

Voice is how you transition between thoughts and ideas.

It is how you choose to tell a story.

It is the reason you write. It is you, reflected in how your heart unfurls into words. It’s what you choose to write about, revealing what you notice, what you care about, what matters in the world you’ve created.

It is what you see, hear, smell, taste and touch, but in your own words.

Voice is your style. It is the way you see the world and interpret events. It is you on the page.

In love with the word and the beauty of language.

Dropping a conversation, recorded verbatim or that imitates actual talk, directly into a story would bore most readers.

Dialogue is one of those elements of fiction that if done poorly slows the pace of a story, distracting from the forward motion of the plot.

Unlike dialogue, conversations start with introductions and are peppered with fillers, like um, oh, sure, okay and other one-syllable words.

“Hi, Anna,” I said. “How are you?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Good. It’s such a beautiful day.”

“Not for me. It’s raining,” said Amie (who lives in Seattle or Washington, D.C., where rain is the norm).

Not very interesting, but this is what happens when we talk.

Dialogue has a point and leaves out normal conversational natter, like the “hi’s” and “how are you’s.”

It edits out the repetitions, tangents and diversions that occur in conversation.

It economizes by skipping introductions.

It winnows down to the key words, removing the subject or creating an ellipses within the sentence. Dropping words adds to the impact of what the characters are saying.

In other words, dialogue must drive the plot.

It shouldn’t be used to tell back story, explaining the incidents that occurred before the story’s opening scene. It shouldn’t give exposition or drop in information better left to the narrative.

Dialogue, as well as facial expressions, gestures and movement, should be used to show what the characters are like. It should show who they are and how they are feeling in the moment.

Dialogue differentiates the characters, so that they don’t all sound the same.

In other words, dialogue communicates a lot using a few words. Conversation doesn’t really have a stopping point, but peters out or ends when someone has to catch a taxi, gets bored or has a very important date.

Dialogue is like butter, too much and that’s what you taste; too little and the toast is dry.

It’s best to give description of time and place in moderation. Provide the snippets that ground the character in his or her reality without drawing too much attention to the words.

It would be like reading by looking at the individual dots of each letter, looking at each letter and then coming up with the word – just a tad too time consuming and boring.

The idea is to get readers wanting to find out what happens next.

You don’t need to describe a map of streets with rows of businesses, stores and houses detailed down to the last shingle, as well as every piece of clothing on your character as if you’ve just dressed her up like a Barbie doll.

Instead, try a well-phrased sentence or paragraph or two or a literary description of the character’s surroundings to add color and dimension to her world. This description of setting is necessary to establish a story’s mood, feeling, historical period and location.

To give a description, use any of the five senses – sight, taste, smell, hearing and touch – to draw out what is happening in the character’s world. What does the chocolate chip cookie she just baked smell like? How does its buttery taste crumble on the tongue, leaving you wanting seconds?

Through description, the character is giving her sense impressions of the colors, sounds, flavors, odors and feelings of the things within her environment.

As she describes these things, she reveals her relationship to her environment, which is essential to ground her in the plot of the story.

Is she a big city girl stuck in a small town? Does she like the open prairie but is living in the mountains? Or is she interested in being a novelist but stuck doing her day job?

Here are a few questions to ask about a character’s relationship with the setting:

• Is she limited by or at odds with her environment? Or does she love where she lives, including her zip code and type of residence?
• How does her external world relate to her internal world? Her internal world consists of her thoughts, feeling, beliefs, fears, memories and other psychological factors, while her external world is everything she senses outside her body.
• How does her setting influence her identity and behavior?

The key thing to remember about setting is the old adage of show, don’t tell. Let your reader experience the time and place of your created world, rather than telling them as if giving dictation to the steady rhythm of a metronome.

Good fiction, I believe, needs to be driven both by plot and character.

A novel or short story fails without fleshed-out characters that readers empathize with and view as real.

These characters have to do something. They have to have goals or desires and to face obstacles that block the path to what they want.

Otherwise, why read a book that rambles, even if the language is beautiful.

To give a character substance, begin by identifying her (I use the “she” pronoun because my main characters tend to be female) basic identity. What does she want? What is she afraid of? How do the people around her see her as a person? Do they like or dislike her?

Here’s a few things I’ve learned about adding depth to a character:

• Give her a secret – an inclination, trait or a part of her history that she doesn’t want anybody to know about. If revealed, her secret, which is what she has to lose, would change her standing in her world and make her less desirable as a friend, neighbor or coworker.
• Add a lovable quirk, such as laughing at inappropriate things or giggling in church.
• Try a nervous gesture, such as biting her lip or pulling on her hair.
• Play with an idiosyncrasy, such as a nervous gesture or repetitive behavior.
• Give her a contradiction to make her unpredictable, such as someone who is shy but rude or is brash but sensitive.

These twists of characterization set the stage for surprising behavior that keeps readers turning the page.

Whatever you do, give your main character a minor flaw, so that she is more likable to readers, who don’t want to read about someone who is 100 percent perfect and, thus, boring.

Whatever her qualities, the character cannot be static. She needs to change as a result of the experiences she undergoes through the course of the novel.

This change is what gives the story direction and meaning.

Note: As I blog about different writing topics, I occasionally will add in a suggested exercise. This week, think of someone you know and try to describe them, using some of the items from the bullet list.

It’s like the sugar in cookies.

Or the money in the paycheck.

Without it, why would the reader want to continue reading?

The reader likely will stop if a story lacks plot, character, setting and dialogue and just rambles, going nowhere as if the writer was saying, “And then this happened, and this happened after that, and on and on.”

To get the reader to chapter two and to give your book or story a chance, there has to be a hook that reels in the reader (think caught fish, but one that has the choice to cut loose without struggle).

The hook typically contains a strong inciting incident that triggers the main character’s problem or submerges her (I tend to write about female characters, hence my pronoun choice) into trouble.

This character realizes that she wants something out of reach or doesn’t want what’s just happened to her. She’d like to return her life to status quo, but it has been altered by this problem or trouble that she has to resolve.

Let’s say the character has been served divorce papers while waiting tables to pay off the student loans of her just-graduated husband. He comes into the bar where she works with a …

Or she yells at someone in the parking lot who raises …

Are you hooked?

The hook, or the first one or two or three paragraphs, shouldn’t start with scenery (the opposite of an exciting inciting incident) or dialogue, though some writers will disagree. If a story begins with quote marks, the second paragraph has to make it clear who made the statement and where and why. As for writing pages of scenery, writers of the classics delayed the action in a manner stylistic for the times that readers in a fast track tech world typically find cumbersome.

That’s not to say that the opening should exclude a reference to the setting, without which the character would be floating around in no particular time or place.

The opening scene, I believe, should begin with character, and not plot, though there needs to be some sort of action. An interesting character with a secret, a contradiction in her personality or an overwhelming desire for something makes the reader want to find out more about this person.

The reader becomes engaged in finding out why the character wants to tell her story.

A hook, if not an immediate grab into the story’s action, can pivot on the use of language, or a description of something that is so compelling and different that the reader becomes intrigued by the writer’s style.

The writing either way shouldn’t be heavy with clichés and abstractions, but visual and visceral, drawing upon the senses. Good writing includes detail and shows and doesn’t tell. It doesn’t summarize or skim over descriptions like a skipping stone.

Writing a great opening scene requires some action on the part of writers. They need to write and rewrite, of course, but they should save the rewriting and self-editing for later in the process. They need to think of story and character, while resting like the angler on the water, waiting for the fish to bite. They are waiting for words to rise, not forcing them as they begin.

When I told my friend about my challenge for the year – 52: A Year of Writing Basics, Beliefs and Beauty – he asked, “How do you write a great opening scene?”

Understanding plot is an essential start, just as having a blueprint is necessary to build a house or an outline to write a college essay.

Without plot, there is no story, but unconnected moments of time like a broken string of pearls scattered on the ground. Stories follow a structure or framework called the narrative arc, which, simply put, is the story’s beginning, middle and end.

The opening scene needs a hook, or the inciting incident that gets the story moving. There should be some action, a character or two and a setting, which is the time and place where the action is occurring.

Readers will turn to page 2 and on to 3 and 4 if they care about the main character, whose actions drive the plot. The character has to have a goal or desire, whether it is romantic, emotional or practical.

This desire is what drives the character to act; otherwise the character would be just as happy watching TV or reading a book.

As the character goes for what she wants, she will face challenges, or obstacles, that become increasingly more difficult to overcome as the arc of the story rises upward.

The conflicts, whether internal or external, represent what the character is trying to resolve and are what creates these obstacles. The climax offers up the largest obstacle and determines whether the character actually gets what she wants.

The structure or framework, once in place, requires that everything in the story work together to tell the tale.

The other side of the arc, or the falling action to the story’s end, is where the character experiences some kind of revelation. Does she meet her goal? Or does her goal even matter anymore? Did she get something better (or worse) in her search to obtain her desires?

The resolution is where these revelations occur and where any loose ends are tied up, so that the strand of pearls becomes a full circle.

Now that the framework is in place, next week, I will talk about how to approach the opening scene with inspiration, creativity and originality.

Shelley Widhalm reads some of her poetry during a poetry reading in 2011.

The end of the year offers a time for reflection, while the New Year is a time to make those resolutions that too often get broken.

I started 2011 with a shyness challenge with the goal of overcoming my shyness by the end of the year.

By August, I realized that too many of my friends were telling me that I wasn’t shy but quiet and reserved. I realized, too, that in most situations, I felt comfortable starting conversations with people I didn’t know, engaging in conversations in large groups and going to bars, dance clubs and parties by myself.

Though I’m reflective and spend a lot of energy on the inner life, I saw that I equally loved being social. The fact I seek the company of others probably indicated that I was not socially afraid.

So on to 2012.

I’m going to engage in a new challenge:

52: A Year of Writing Basics, Beliefs and Beauty.

Each week, I will tackle a writing topic, reflect on the writing process and remark on any beauty I find in the writing life. At the same time, I will try to get my work published and work on my fourth novel.

I’ll start with the basics, such as Plot, Setting, Character, Dialogue, Pacing, Arc and Tension.

I will reflect on how reading influences writing, what is creativity and what motivates and inspires.

I will talk about my struggles, frustrations and accomplishments as I look for an agent, write stories and poems, and try to market myself as a writer. I hope that as I write about writing, I will become a better writer and inspire a beginning or veteran writer to engage in the social side of writing: talking about the passion that gives life to words.

Why?

Faith carries the writer through the frustrations of sitting on piles of completed but unpublished manuscripts.

And faith is what is required for believing in the North Pole resident who delivers wishes in exchange for milk and cookies.

If I were to mail off my wish list for writers, it would contain some essentials, including:

* A room of one’s own, or a place to write that is comfortable but also fosters excitement and imagination.

* Time to write in that place.

* Some sort of financial backing that allows for that writing (juggling a full-time job with writing doesn’t open up the space for creativity but limits it to certain hours, likely when the writer is tired, at least for me).

Beyond the essentials of who, what and where, there is the how of being a writer.

A writer, I believe, needs to constantly observe and participate in life, both through being there and a part of things and reading about it.

This gives the writer something to write about, at least from external influences, added to the given internal dialogue, reflections and thoughts.

Studying through reading writers’ magazines, taking classes and attending conferences also adds to what a writer knows about the process.

But what is absolutely essential is that snap-and-pull attraction toward words without which there wouldn’t be anything to who you are. Words and how they sound and feel in the mouth and the ear are the foundation of the passion, at least for me.

The salt is the way I am lifted out of myself into the beauty of letting my fingers trill over a keyboard as I create out of the rhythm of my breath.

Dear Santa,

Please do not let my frustration break my heart.
I guess that is my only real wish.

Beginning writers can have pretty sentences that go nowhere, or they can have plot without the other elements of good writing.

That’s what young adult author Brenna Yovanoff, who visited the Loveland Public Library last week, has found to be the case from her multiple years of experience writing short stories and publishing two novels, including her New York Times bestseller “The Replacement.”

I have to agree.

My first attempts at writing had the adornment of store windows decorated for the holidays, sparkly, colorful and attention grabbing. But they lacked the building holding the windows in place.

What I wrote had a scantily clad plot, without setting and character development to color my created world with people, places and things.

Everything I did was an attempt without story. My characters acted but without the goal that drives them through each scene until they overcome some obstacle to get what they want or realize that they didn’t want, but learning something even better along the way.

I had to do a lot of research – I read books and magazine articles about the writing process – to understand the structure that holds stories together.

This structure encompasses the plotline from beginning to end with the arising conflicts, whether inner or outer, and tension between characters or forces serving as the scaffolding. Otherwise the plotline would be flat moving from Point A to B to C and on and on.

I didn’t understand what some would call formula, but what I now know is elemental to writing a novel.

Plot is what gets readers turning the page, escalating their desire to find out what happens until the last page. Sentences and how they are written, or an author’s style and voice, is what gives writing individuality, so that no other writer can tell a story just how you, the writer, has to. Pretty sentences and all.