Writing Forum

Hi, brom21

Here's my thought on your take on the exercies. I hope you'll find some of it useful.

"The man had a tight knot in his stomach" - This pulled me out of the scene for an instance. We have a name character, Dr. Stellar, and by using "The man" it seems another character is introduced, only it turns out to still be Dr. Stellar. Simply using "He" would avoid this.

"“I hope that Dr. White is correct. This source is my last possible lead,” he thought." - Putting thoughts in quotations marks also adds confusion, since those are conventionally used for dialogue. The norm is using Italics or, as you also did here, just adding a "he thought".

You do a good job of getting plenty of setting details in, which is is nice since it makes easier to ground myself in the scene (plus it was part of the goal of the exercise).

The descriptions do get a bit "telling" at times, which can be difficult to avoid. Here, though: "The most interesting thing in the room was..." you could simply leave out the part I just quoted since that's what makes the description telly and adds some distance to the POV character. Since he notices the knives, lances, etc. it's implied that he finds them interesting. And the added "Without a doubt, he was at the right place. This was where he would get the information he needed." reveals very clearly that these are more than just unique setting elements.

"...What you ask is more significant than you know." - The dialogue begins to run into a problem here at a little earlier. The innkeeper is supposed to be reluctant to deliver information, because that creates tension, which in turn makes the scene more interesting (plus, it's a chance to show the POV character being active and competent in trying to extract the information). Here, though, the innkeeper has already delivered information without Dr. Stellar really having to do anything.

"Then there was a knock on the door and there was a woman’s voice came through." - There's a couple of filler words, which add unnecessary distancing, specifically "Then (there was)" and "there was a". You create a tighter POV (part of the exercise goal) by removing those and somethign like: "There was a knock on the door, and a woman’s voice came through."

"It was so dark, it literally felt like it reached his very soul." - Here, you also have a distancer imbeded in the simile which can be removed to create a more immersive description, turning it into something: "The darkness reached into his very soul."