Sentence-level writing techniques

You have a great concept, a killer plot, and maybe even a swoonworthy romance; in order to keep your reader engaged in the story, you’ll want to think about how you actually tell the story. In this section, we’ll go over some techniques you can use to improve your writing at the line and sentence level in order to keep your readers hooked. 

Specific Detail

Specific Detail is a way of creating interest for the reader by gesturing to an important piece of backstory or history without giving the whole thing away.  When you boil something big down to a Specific Detail the reader can notice and connect to, it significantly enhances their experience of the story by making them feel like they’re discovering something. It also keeps your reader’s attention much more focused, because it’s easier to take in and remember one Specific Detail than a lot of fuzzy generic details. 

Here are some ways that Specific Detail can work:

Hinting at Characterization

In the opening chapter of your story, we want to meet the characters and get to know them a bit. But this is more than just getting to know their plot motivations and personal goals. We want to get an idea of what makes them distinct and interesting and to hint at their backstory. Incorporating some Specific Details about your character will help the reader understand what makes them unique, and thus help the reader to connect to them. 

Exercise: Write out four memories that are important to your character. Now take those events and turn them into a Specific Detail about your character. Maybe it’s a scar, or a gesture, or their favorite outfit. Now that you’ve got those details, how can you incorporate one or two of them into your opening chapter? 

Hinting at Worldbuilding

Readers love big, expansive worlds with lots going on, the sense that there’s a new potential story lurking around every corner. While this is most obvious in genres like fantasy and science fiction where there’s a lot of worldbuilding, this is also true in contemporary romance. In a small town romance, we expect the small town to be fleshed out, to have its own cast of characters for us to get to know. Similarly, if the story is set in a familiar big city like New York or LA, we expect to get a sense of fast-paced city life going on outside the immediate bounds of our story. 

The promise of a rich world can help to hook your reader, but the focus of the hook should be on the front story. How does this work? 

Rather than giving the reader a crash course on the history of the world, use your opening chapters to give them little hints. If the reader gets the sense that there’s a lot going on under the surface of the scene in front of them, they will want to hang around and find out more. Showing them the tip of the iceberg is more effective than describing the iceberg’s dimensions. 

Exercise: Write out the history of the place your opening scene takes place in. It can be as extensive or as brief as you like, as political or mundane as you want, but should have at least three events in it. Now, take those events and turn them into a Specific Detail in your scene. Maybe a historical battle becomes a statue or a place name. Or, if you’re writing something in our contemporary world, maybe the protagonist’s grandparents’ wedding becomes an heirloom tea set, or a fight with their parents when they were a teenager becomes a bedroom door that doesn’t shut right. Try going back through your scene and inserting these little details where you can. How does this change the way the scene feels?

Creating Tension with Description

You can also use descriptive detail to build narrative tension for your reader that will keep them engaged. Description isn’t just giving the reader a picture in their mind of what’s going on, it’s cueing them to the emotional landscape of the story. Your description, even if it’s not Specific Detail, should help further the emotion and tension of the scene, and thus increase Immediacy by contributing to the narrative tension of the scene. 

Let’s compare two descriptions of a sunset:

Low red clouds hung like bloody slashes across the horizon, promising a swift nightfall. 

Vs. 

The last rays of the sun bathed the shore in a final kiss of gold. 

In the first example the word choice and comparison to “bloody slashes” sets the mood of the scene, and the “swift nightfall” feels ominous, almost deadly. In the second, the emphasis on the “kiss of gold” makes everything seem peaceful and beautiful, almost like the world is being tucked into bed. One sentence here is setting the mood for two very different stories and creating different feelings and expectations for the reader. You can use this to either set up reader expectations (for example, by using the bloody clouds to set the mood for a murder), or subvert them (for example, by introducing something shattering and violent into the peaceful scene)

Exercise: Describe the setting of a scene in your opening chapter. Try to match the mood of the scene, without actually describing the events in the scene. How much emotion can you evoke using only the setting? Now that you’ve got that description, are there any parts of it you can incorporate into your scene?