1. I feel you. It can be really hard when you go to use a simile only to find it's too organic for the characters you're writing about. I don't think I use many flowery metaphors or similes, but sometimes even simple ones will catch me out ('so-and-so's loyal dog', 'yowled like a cat' etc.etc.) and I'll have to find a robot-ised version or just scrap it and find another way to write that sentence/passage.
2. I hate reading books where every character's thoughts are explained in detail, haha, so I try to show what they're thinking/feeling through their words and behaviour instead. It helps that for any one scene I do tend to pick one character and write from their POV, even while in the third-person.
3. I actually love painting locations and environments with words, but to counter the risk of those bits becoming too purple I deliberately try to cut back. I try to use rich language as sparingly as possible, to give those words I do use extra impact, I suppose. Paint with broad strokes, I guess, and pick out only the details that are important. I try to communicate a general "feel" for a place, without taking time to describe every aspect. The story I'm writing at the moment has a lot of new, original (as in coming from me, not the canon/source material) locations, so I'm enjoying the worldbuilding aspect to describing them.
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Date: 2013-07-03 05:41 pm (UTC)2. I hate reading books where every character's thoughts are explained in detail, haha, so I try to show what they're thinking/feeling through their words and behaviour instead. It helps that for any one scene I do tend to pick one character and write from their POV, even while in the third-person.
3. I actually love painting locations and environments with words, but to counter the risk of those bits becoming too purple I deliberately try to cut back. I try to use rich language as sparingly as possible, to give those words I do use extra impact, I suppose. Paint with broad strokes, I guess, and pick out only the details that are important. I try to communicate a general "feel" for a place, without taking time to describe every aspect. The story I'm writing at the moment has a lot of new, original (as in coming from me, not the canon/source material) locations, so I'm enjoying the worldbuilding aspect to describing them.