Writing With Crayons

Writers' Wednesday!!!

Let your inner child play with the keyboard.  Children can spend a tremendous amount of time fascinated by little details or small areas that we adults tend to take for granted.  If you have a spot of writing that sounds flat.  Perhaps looking at that section through the eyes of a child will save it.

It can be said that your readers/audience are that child.  Everything in your writing is new to them.  They want to figure it out, see it, touch it, smell it, hear it, and taste it.  Their greedy little hands grope at your words meting out as much information as possible.  Don't disappoint them.

Remember, this is a fix for flat writing.  Not flowery.  If your writing is more description that action, your inner child may need a time out.

Usually these flat passages happen at transitions.  We feel compelled to relate how our characters got from one scene to the next, so we join them on their car ride, pick up some coffee, complain about the traffic, and arrive uneventfully at our plot point.  Because we tend to write transitions for continuity, they can be quite uninspired.

Assuming the transition has to be in the writing or nothing will make any sense, see what your inner child could come up with to make the transition pop out.  Wrong turn.  Coffee spilled potentially wrecking an important first impression.  Seeing an important character of the story driving the opposite direction, perhaps foreshadowing a some twist of fate.

Lackluster, wonderless writing is fine for scientific abstracts and research papers.  Maybe even appropriate.  Even still, I'd like to see that child scribble on some physics.