Description  Enough or too much? Are you including trivia? Are you omitting vital 'show don't tell' information about character, place, purpose, atmosphere. Is your description integral to transmission of plot, characters, action, your style, story's tone? The reader's feeling experience can be enormously enhanced by judicious use of description. It helps create that virtual reality experience that takes reader deeper into story.

Dialogue  The most important questions to consider with dialogue are: Is it worth saying? and; Is it said well? Delete, or replace with valuable content as necessary.  A note on using street talk. Beware; great skill needed. Reading written translations of this material can be tedious.  Similarly, with jargon or accented language use this sparingly and with skill, otherwise it is painful to read. Err on side of using regular written language with tweaking to support your style, story tone, or character's personality or background.

Your Style  Some writers forget or choose not to develop this and just copy someone else's style or a generic style. This can work if other components of your story are strong.  If you specifically try for creation of your own writing style or 'voice', remember to create a style aimed at benefiting reader, not your self image. If former leads to latter, great. The flow goes one way only. You may need to experiment or workshop this style. Look for a feel, a pace, a tone, a way of thinking, speaking or moving that creates type of energy you want for your story, characters, narrator and action. Find an integrated, fundamental way to write this energy into your story components. Each time you sit down to write your next scene you need to put yourself into that energy, that style, that feel, to maintain consistency and quality.

Briefly Practice these seven components with short written versions to ensure you have a quality experience to offer your reader. Try standard ten-minute exercises. This will give you an idea of which components you are ready, and which need more development.

And always apply your maxim: What thinking and feeling experience are you giving your reader? Are you taking them there? Or are they just watching from outside while you go there?

_______________________________________ Need To Read? Take a Break! A quick break to clear and refresh your mind before plunging back into your busy schedule.

Claim your fr*ee fiction ezine now. http://www.Seismicfish.com Quality 21st century crime fiction, science fiction and historical fiction, and articles, courses, entertainment and freebies. Submissions welcome 21st of each month. Come join me in a good fr*ee read!

Mail was a long awaited sign of relief from incarceration of what seemed like house arrest. The seed catalog was like a Bible for spiritually famished pagan. It brought assurance that Spring was not far hence on calendar and under frozen ground buried by days and nights of blizzards and an inch of ice.

When sun shines during these winters it gives more light than on a smoggy July day. It’s a good time to start some seeds. Seeing seedlings poke out from under warmed soft earth sterilized in oven between Mom’s baking buns and bread sparks more than hope. Pride in our strength and courage to call it another winter sprouts thoughts of a good crop of grain and new spring calves.

While these memories flooded into a greying head, stove cooled off so I will need to leave you start a stew as I reload wood box and stoke up stove.