Crossover post! My Top Three Tips for...Writing Prose That Sings

Yes, it can be taught.

If there’s one thing that SheWrites.com, an online community for women writers, loves as much as I do, it’s helping folks fulfill their dream of finishing and selling a book. So I teamed up with them to bring you a monthly dose of expert advice. 

Every month, I’ll choose a topic and share three of my top tips for honing your craft or making it in the publishing world—and another three over on their site. Check out the first installment below, and then head to SheWrites.com for the other half of the post!

1. Keep details sparse…but potent.

You know how ordering from a restaurant with a tiny menu is, somewhat paradoxically, easier—and the meal more satisfying—than when you roll up to a diner and have to page through a sticky menu as long as ACOTAR? Less really is more…and that’s true when it comes to your writing, as well. There’s a place for flowery prose (guilty as charged!), but when it comes to giving us details, be choosy—drowning the reader in specifics will make their eyes glaze over, but giving a few carefully chosen, emblematic details will cause the reader to fill in an entire world on their own.

Write that line that’ll make the reader go [heavenly chorus]! (Photo by Nitin Arya)

To give an example, when your main character steps into a neighbor’s living room, you don’t need to go full HGTV and tell us everything about the decor. If you reference frilly white curtains, a shelf covered in teddy bears, and a fat blue-and-cream plaid sofa, those three specifics unlock an entire picture, don’t they?

2. Read like a writer.

Let me guess: You already underline or highlight passages you love while reading. Take it a step further and—whenever you finish a book—revisit the parts you marked and really analyze what made you fall for them. What did the author do in that line that made it sing? Did they evoke an unexpected sense—sound or smell, perhaps? Is the description so rich and clear you can picture it perfectly? Is there a beautiful rhythm to the line, so it reads like a song lyric? 

Make a note of what appealed and see if you can emulate it yourself, either in the manuscript you’re working on—or just in a notebook. Bonus: You’ll discover which techniques feel natural to you as a writer, so you can make them your own…and which are better left to other writers.

3. Start an interesting-observation notebook.

…or a note in your Notes app, in my case. As a novelist, I’ve kind of turned life into one huge scavenger hunt: Whenever I experience something that feels, I don’t know, interesting—a tiny moment, a little observation—I pause and ask myself if it’s worth writing down. Sometimes something happens in the physical world that I think might make a good metaphor for an emotional reaction in fiction. 

For example, I was driving through a downpour when I passed beneath a bridge, and I noticed—huh—the rush of the rain stopped for a split second, an auditory pause. It felt poignant, somehow, all this noise and sound suddenly dipping out. Later, in my novel The Spare Room, I wrote this line after a character says something that stops my narrator cold:  

The sounds of the room, the air conditioning and dull hiss of traffic and roar of night insects all drop away, like when you’re driving in a downpour and pass beneath a bridge.

Recently, I was on a beach and jotted this down in a Note: 

It’s the kind of stone that looks opalescent in the surf but dull after you take it inside.

Will it make it into a book, as either a physical detail or a bit of figurative language? Who knows! But now I’ve got it in my mental rolodex to pull from. Hey! It’s sort of like we authors are all beachcombers, sauntering through life looking for shiny seashells to save for later. How lucky are we?

Head to SheWrites.com for the last three tips!