If there’s one thing that Andrea Bartz, New York Times bestselling author of We Were Never Here, The Spare Room, and other thrillers, loves as much as we do, it’s helping writers fulfill their dream of finishing and selling a book. We’re big fans of her Substack, Get It Write, where she shares tons of publishing intel and writing tips—so we teamed up with her to bring you a regular dose of expert advice.
Every month, we’ll choose a topic and share six of Andi’s top tips for honing your craft or making it in the publishing world—three here and three on her Substack. Check out the first installment below, and then head here for the second half of the post!
1. Bounce between ingredients.
Great fiction writing is a tapestry of exposition, dialogue, action, and interiority—and you can convey interiority (i.e., what’s going on inside your main character’s head) through a melange of internal sensations (cramped stomach), external responses (running their hand over their neck), observations (“the cave looked like an open, screaming mouth”), and, uh, naming the emotion (“panic flooded through her”).
Like a skilled chef or a mixed-media artist, you’ve got to mix and match and sample and swirl those raw materials to ultimately create a balanced, varied chunk of prose. So grab a set of highlighters and use different colors to mark up a chapter of your manuscript. A visual demo will help you see if you’re relying too heavily on any one tool in the toolkit.
2. Try verbs that don’t belong
This is one of my favorite tricks for surprising the reader and making a line feel memorable and chewy, like something they can sink their teeth into: Watch for opportunities to use an unexpected verb. An exercise I love for building this muscle (which I stole from the amazing Natalie Goldberg) is to make a list of verbs that are super specific to one activity—say, cooking, or working in an office, or gardening—and then challenge yourself to plop a few of those verbs into unrelated sentences:
The air boiled with the sound of cicadas.
She kept her gaze stapled to the screen.
Hope blossomed in his chest.
(Psst—this works with nouns, too, for figurative language that feels fresh:
A casserole of dirty clothes covered the sofa.
She slid the fact into a mental folder for later.
The crush felt like a tender bud on his heart.)
3. Shift observations based on mood
You already know that writing descriptions gives your prose a chance to shine. But here’s another way to think about it: Description is also an opportunity to share the mood and tone of the scene, and to subtly clue us into the main character’s emotional state. How, you ask? By letting the mood of this moment—fraught, giddy, dull, angry, whatever—color how you describe the world.
A frightened character might see houses along the street as “barren and dark, their windows like gaping mouths, their jagged rooftops piercing the sky.”
An excited character might describe the same sight as “an old-timey lineup of friendly townhomes, sunlight bouncing off their windows, their red-bricked roofs upturned to the sky.”
Write descriptions that match the tone and emotional timbre of a scene, and readers won’t just picture it in their mind; they’ll feel totally transported.
Head to Get It Write for the last three tips!
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