Pages

June 1, 2011

Anticipating Your Reader’s World

Once thing I’ve really realized in this revision of the novel is that some of the best writing anticipates how people view the world. By that, I mean, when you come into a room, often it’s the smells and the sounds that you register first. Then you see the big picture as a whole. Then you focus in on movement or on what you’re looking for or what you’re most interested in, often the people in the room.

Since this is the way that people sense the world, then that’s how best to structure a paragraph, I’ve discovered. One of the errors I was constantly making in my last version of this novel was to jump around on this order and sometimes repeating myself.

The closer you can get to mirroring the way people see the world, the less they’re aware of your story as being a construct, and the more seamlessly and insidiously ~ MWA HA ~ you can reel them in.

Questions of the Day: Any recent epiphanies on how to structure a paragraph?

No comments: