Coloring:

After my ‘scene list’ — a poor man’s outline (discussed previously) — I tend to bull through the writing with situations and dialog predominant. Early on, my editor and some readers commented on my relative paucity of ‘color’; descriptions of people and places. I have had to work on developing that aspect of my writing and am making progress, I hope. I still do the blast-through-it first draft and come back to enhance the color on the second or third review. In the course of my struggles, I have developed some observations about ‘coloring’:

* Weave in people descriptions, don’t just plop them down. A description should be revealed in the course of getting to know a character. Instead of leading with ‘he was six foot three inches tall, weighed 207 pounds and had size 10 shoes’, there might be an initial impression like ‘he loomed in the doorway menacingly’ to be followed by his redolence of bat guano and his high water overalls as the scene unfolds. (In script form, however, there is format requirement for a curt description when a character is first introduced).

* Place color has to be more frontloaded to give necessary orientation. ‘Light only penetrated the cavern the length of a dog’s leash’ should help the reader ‘see’ the situation the protagonist sees. Otherwise, it leaves the reader unsure whether this scene is taking place in the woods or in an alley and, if too subtle, can require the reader to do annoying backtracking.

A writer naturally has a mental images of his/her characters and settings. It is the writers’ duty to allow the reader to not only see what the writer sees but to smell, taste, hear and sense the temperature. Summary: put the reader IN the scene.