05-14-2014, 08:30 AM
As Keith says, you have had some excellent pointers, especially, I thought, from Northwardsb. I shall therefore be brief-ish.
1) Sincere or no, it might be useful, as an exercise, to recast what you have written into some fairly rigid form, let us say, terza rima -which you would learn in the process. Do this to master some of the tricks of the craft.
2) Whether or not you do that, reflect on this: as you wrote, and read, your piece, you have a picture in your head of the room, its smell, its colours, sounds and shapes, what you see from the window, the degree to which the eye could tell with a glance whether it is trim, and perhaps in a 'good' neighbourhood, or sleazy. That is the picture people mean when they say 'show, don't tell' . You have the picture; we do not. Decide how much you want the reader to see and experience all that, and how you can achieve that without writing an epic.
3) However you choose to write, do not assume that everything you read represents the writer: mostly it is fiction. Yet, somewhere in it, some part of the writer does emerge, like it or no -just not in the tale which is told.
Good luck!
1) Sincere or no, it might be useful, as an exercise, to recast what you have written into some fairly rigid form, let us say, terza rima -which you would learn in the process. Do this to master some of the tricks of the craft.
2) Whether or not you do that, reflect on this: as you wrote, and read, your piece, you have a picture in your head of the room, its smell, its colours, sounds and shapes, what you see from the window, the degree to which the eye could tell with a glance whether it is trim, and perhaps in a 'good' neighbourhood, or sleazy. That is the picture people mean when they say 'show, don't tell' . You have the picture; we do not. Decide how much you want the reader to see and experience all that, and how you can achieve that without writing an epic.
3) However you choose to write, do not assume that everything you read represents the writer: mostly it is fiction. Yet, somewhere in it, some part of the writer does emerge, like it or no -just not in the tale which is told.
Good luck!