It's Sensory Saturday, which means a blog focused on descriptive writing. As always, feel free to comment on my writing, make suggestions, or write your own descriptive passage.


Breath rasped into Erika's heaving lungs. The air was jagged daggers tearing down her throat, visiting her lungs for the briefest of moments before tearing out again to be replaced by more of the painful air.

Her leg muscles quivered, sweat running slick down her thighs, behind her knees, even beading on her shins and trickling down to her socks. She bent over, rested her hands on her sweaty knees, and tried to steady her breathing and ignore black spots dancing in front of her eyes.

In the distance she could hear traffic passing on the highway, but the running trail was deserted aside from her. The traffic was the only human sound, but there were other sounds: birds singing despite the sticky, oppressive heat, fish lipping insects off the surface of the lake with a distinctive plop.

The wind shifted and, warm and humid or not, it felt good on Erika's face. It carried the faint scent of fish from the lake, and she'd recovered enough to be bothered by that. She drew in another deep breath and coughed, her lungs spasming from the abuse.

She'd run too fast, too hard, too long.

Erika shuffled to the side of the path and sat down in the shade, tipping her head back against the trunk of a tree. She'd rest--her legs, her lungs--and walk back home when she felt steady enough.

Sensory Saturday #8! I can't believe that I have been at this for a whole month so far. It seems incredible, and I have to thank all of you who have been visiting my site to read these posts.


I hope that more of you will post comments this week to help me celebrate my 2 month anniversary, so as a little incentive I will give a Twitter shout-out (or 2 or 3) to anyone on here who comments and wants said shout-out. Authors, think about the promotion opportunity here. Tell me the name of your website and I will include a link to that in my Twitter post as well.


But enough bribery. Writing is about the fun and the adventure, not the strong-arming of my readers. This week I have a really intense feeling to portray in my passage, and I think it is one that you will all be familiar with.

His eyelids slipped down once again. It was as though two twenty-pound weights were attached to them--the more he struggled to keep them open, the more readily they seemed to close. Despite his best intentions, he was fighting a losing battle.

It was ridiculous. He was a grown man, closer to forty than thirty, and he couldn't keep his eyes open. Opening them seemed almost painful now, as if the very muscles were protesting. His boss's voice became a dull hum, and his head kicked back as if he was jerking awake every time his eyes opened again.

He pushed up from the table, made an apologetic hand gesture, and headed toward the water cooler in the corner of the room. He got a glass of the cold liquid and threw it back like a shot of whiskey, then filled another glass and sipped more slowly. The water filled his mouth and slid down his throat. He shuddered a bit from the cold and from the hint of energy it generated. He tried to unobtrusively bounce on the balls of his feet and move his arms to get the blood flowing, but he caught a coworker looking at him and stopped, moving instead to sit back down.

The moment his butt connected with the seat, his vision blurred again. He hardly realized what was happening when the woman next to him passed him a stick of peppermint gum.

"It will help," she whispered.

He accepted it numbly and unwrapped the gum. He was too tired to respond to the refreshing smell of peppermint, and his jaws moved lethargically.

He wondered if he could get away with taking a nap during lunch hour.

He wondered how it could seem so impossible to keep his eyes open.

Again, please try your hand at writing your own descriptive passage in the comments below. It is a way to develop a skill (new or merely rusty) or show off your ability as a master wordsmith.

Before you get all excited, I just want to say that no, I'm not accusing you of copying a beloved Marvel super hero. I'm not doubting your imaginative abilities, I'm wonder about your character's appeal.

If you're like me, you love the Marvel heroes. The Avengers is one of your favorite movies, a rainy weekend just begs a movie marathon with lots of action, and you love Tony Stark.

Of all of the amazing Marvel characters, Tony Stark is by far my favorite. He's super smart, by far the best in his field, charismatic, and rich. He definitely has his character flaws: Tony Stark can be a jerk, and though he has a lot of fun, he has substance abuse issues, intimacy issues, PTSD issues (the list goes on). But, in a word, Tony Stark is awesome. I don't know anyone who likes the Iron Man movies and didn't walk away from them--the first one at least--wanting to be Tony Stark. As a main character, he is spectacular.

So I ask again, is your main character Iron Man? That is, do your readers want to be your main character after reading your book?

Writers are always looking for a way to amp-up their writing. Create tension, perfect the pacing, utilize the right prose, and...create compelling characters. Books and blogs on writing will often emphasize the importance of compelling characters. You want to make your characters realistic, interesting people that readers want to know more about. Your readers need to care about your characters, especially your main character. But that can be hard to do. What makes someone interesting? What makes them real?

That "real" aspect can be especially hard in fantasy, where your characters are not living in a realistic time and place. If your MC is an elf, it can be hard to inject the right amount of "real." If the setting is a sahara-esque region and the technology is circa the middle ages, how "real" can everything seem without people dying of starvation and pestilence? All writing is hard, and the more removed from reality, the harder it can be to develop those realistic and interesting characters that modern day fiction calls for.

So I've developed (and by developed I probably just mean renamed a method that is already used by authors all over and probably has a dozen names) the Iron Man Method (Marvel, please don't sue me).

Iron Man is a compelling character. Tony Stark is even more compelling. And he exists on the edge of reality and fantasy, making him the perfect model for writers. (Warning, if you are writing a Catcher in the Rye type novel where you don't really want people to want to be your character--no one should want to be Holden--then the Iron Man Method is not for you).

First, the good attributes of Tony Stark:
1. He is rich and has all the toys and comfort afforded by piles of money.
2. He is famous.
3. He is very self-confident.
4. He is incredibly smart--the best in the technology field.
5. He is Iron Man

Now, the bad attributes of Tony Stark:
1. He is spoiled.
2. He is arrogant and egotistical.
3. He has drinking problems.
4. He has relationship problems.
5. He's arrogant (again).

He's not perfect, I could easily come up with as many bad attributes as good, but look at the "good" list again. Who doesn't want to be wealthy, famous, confident, smart, and a super hero? Maybe you don't want to be famous right now, but if you were that self-confident? Not to mention, Robert Downy, Jr. is very attractive, meaning that Iron Man is also. Every time I watch Iron Man, I wish I was like him. I want to go out and take a computer class (or 20), learn advanced mathematics (even though I am awful at math), and do something incredible (like design a metal suit that turns me into a super hero). Even if I only feel this way for 10 minutes after the movie, it means that the character stuck with me. He was compelling enough that I wanted to be him. 

And his negative attributes? You want him to work through those. Or not. The drinking and relationship problems? Work through them, Tony! The fact that he's spoiled? We can live with it. And that arrogance? Well, honestly, deep down, I think most of his fans feel that he deserves it. Maybe he doesn't have to be such a jerk, but...he can get away with it, especially if he keeps the humor.

So look at your main character and examine his or her strengths and weaknesses. Would anyone want to be that character? Do you? If you don't, think about if you should or if you have a character more like Holden or Cartman from South Park-->compelling characters that no one wants to be. If you should want to be like your character, make sure you highlight those good attributes. Is your character strong? Intelligent? Does she have a lot of friends? Can she hold her breath underwater for 5 minutes? And those bad attributes? Maybe she can be a bit conceited about her intelligence (think Hermione Granger) but we overlook that because she can be helpful, too.

So use the Iron Man model. Make your readers want to be your main character, at least while reading the book and for a few minutes afterward. And make sure that their bad attributes can be worked through (or at least ones that your readers hope they can work through), and that the good outweighs the bad, or explain and justify the bad.

So write a character bio. Write a list of pros and cons. Write your book and then go back and make sure that your character is a character that your readers will connect with. You as an author have a responsibility to make realistic, interesting, and compelling characters that your reader can connect with and want to be.

Do you feel that? That. That feeling deep inside your breast, that flutter at your heart, like something small and winged trying to escape. 

A butterfly, or maybe a golden snitch.

What you feel are words, and they are trying to escape. They want to find their way out, maybe onto a page, maybe into your computer, but out of your chest where you have been keeping them locked away for much too long.

Take a minute to close your eyes. If you feel that flutter, small but insistent, you are a writer, and it is time to get back to writing.

I felt that flutter this weekend. I closed my eyes, and that flutter grew. Stronger. More insistent. And I heard a siren's song, and I took out a pen and paper and called on Homer's muses, and I wrote for the first time in what felt like years.

I wrote until my hands cramped, until there was a red indent against my finger where the pen had pushed against it too hard. Until my back ached from bending over my desk in a position that it had not maintained in much too long.

I wrote until I felt drained.

I wrote until I felt elated.

I'm an author, and I finally took the time to release those fluttering words. It was Saturday night, after a busy day of graduating from college and going out to a celebratory dinner and exhausting myself with friends and family. With one weight off my shoulders, I was able to relax and get back to something I truly love.

And as the words were transferred from my heart to the paper in a flow of blue ink, I realized that I should have made time to write earlier. That I should not have waited to relax to write, I should have written to relax. Because I am a writer, and that flutter in my breast was a sign of what I really needed, deep down, to do.

If you're a writer, take the time to write. If you have writer's block and can't come up with that next word or next scene, skip to something new. A future scene, or a piece of the backstory. Or something completely unrelated. Write down the first paragraph from one of your favorite books, just to get your mind and body into writing mode. And write.

It is what you were meant to do.

Clear a space for yourself. Tidy the room, clear the desk. Turn on some music, light a candle. Take out a notebook, a laptop, or a pile of scratch paper. Shut out the world, close yours eyes, and feel those words in your breast.

And let them loose.

You are a writer. Now write.

It is a busy day for me today, so I decided to look at a passage from descriptive-writing master Jean M. Auel's bestselling book The Clan of the Cave Bear. These are just the first paragraphs of the first in her brilliant series, and every line is rich in description.


"The naked child ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in the small river. It didn't occur to her to look back. Nothing in her experience ever gave her reason to doubt the shelter and those within it would be there when she returned.

She splashed into the river and felt rocks and sand shift under her feet as the shore fell off sharply. She dived into the cold water and came up sputtering, then reached out with sure strokes for the steep opposite bank. She had learned to swim before she learned to walk and, at five, was at ease in the water. Swimming was often the only way a river could be crossed.

The girl played for a while, swimming back and forth, then let the current float her downstream. Where the river widened and bubbled over rocks, she stood up and waded to shore, then walked back to the beach and began sorting pebbles. She had just put a stone on top of a pile of especially pretty ones when the earth began to tremble." 


If you really want to learn to write descriptively, every once in awhile you have to step back and learn from a master.

The girl's foot tapped nervously on the ground, the sound muted by the worn orange carpet left over from the 80's. She looked away from the sheet filled with empty bubbles that made her head swim and focused instead on the room around her.

The walls were the sickly beige color shared by so many public institutions, and the facilitator watching the students had sharp features that reminded her of a hawk. She picked up her pencil to begin sketching the hawk-man, but remembered that she could not draw on the test and dropped the writing utensil.

It made a thud as it hit the desk, unnaturally loud in the quiet testing center, and she saw a boy sneak a furtive glance at her before bending back over his work. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as though she planned to dive underwater for a long time, then opened them again and dove back into the test.