what's up my friend abby here and welcome back to ask abby where i answer your writing questions and help you make your story matter today's question comes from jazleen hey abby how do you make your writing immersive so that the reader and audience feels like they're right there with the characters for example describing internal conflict so that the reader audience fully empathizes describing settings and characters vividly but not in purple prose writing a character's thoughts and feelings etc i tend to be too on the nose or too abstract and i can't seem to get a
good balance on immersive writing i hope this makes sense thank you so much you're a writing life saver there is a fine line between purple pros and beige pros by definition purple prose means overly extravagant ornamental or flowery text that makes a sentence too dramatic or fancy and beige prose by contrast is a sentence that is brief and to the point has a simple structure and few figures of speech however i suggest that you can find a happy medium a balance between these two things so that you're not getting too flowery and ostentatious with your
writing and you're also not making it too on the nose like you were saying too simple too bland and lacking color and lacking character and the way to do this the way to find this balance between those two things and make your writing immersive make your descriptions feel immersive and include your character's internal conflict is not to focus on your own writing style or crafting the sentence but to focus on the character's voice above all else and this is a piece of writing advice that changed my life and it was something that kind of just
dawned on me i don't think that i heard it anywhere but i have said it ever since it clicked for me is that when you're writing from a character's perspective you are writing their voice not your voice so don't even think of it so much as your writing style or you're trying to write an immersive description think of it more from the perspective of the character like the character who is telling this story is trying to write this immersive description they are conveying their perception of the events how they see it through the lens of
their own beliefs personality and internal conflict so what are some thoughts that this character would actually have how would they perceive the events that are happening and this is a great moment to really sink into their character's voice which by the way i made a whole video on character voice you can check out right here um just some really good tips for finding your character's voice but ultimately it's about understanding who they are right their personality their beliefs what's happened to them up until this point in their life how do they see the world how
do they see themselves and how would they describe what's happening to them based on all of that so ask yourself a better question that is always the answer to everything is asking yourself a better question instead of asking yourself how should i describe this ask yourself how does this character see it overly descriptive sentences are hard to read and therefore hard for your reader to visualize quickly they can't see your story happening like a movie in their mind if they're stuck trying to understand what you're even trying to say because you're using so many descriptive
flowery extravagant words to describe it you want your reading experience to be effortless and enjoyable so let's look at a few examples of beige pros versus purple pros versus immersive character-based descriptions and i'm going to use my own writing for the examples here because that way i can butcher it as much as i want for the sake of our examples so only one of these examples is going to be the immersive character-based descriptions the actual excerpt from my book will only be one of the examples the other two will be beige and purple okay so
this first one is taken from a scene in my book 100 days of sunlight the moment when tessa and weston have a disagreement over the flowers that he's brought her and if you know the story you know what scene i'm talking about if you haven't read it you should but that's besides the point so at this point in the book tessa is pretty much fed up with weston but this is kind of the moment where she starts to let him in she starts to break down her walls a bit before i read the actual excerpt
i'm going to read you a beige prose example of this excerpt and a purple prose example so i actually went through and kind of butchered these excerpts and rewrote them to show you what beige prose looks like what purple pearls looks like and what the immersive character based character voice descriptions i'm talking about what that looks like so let's jump into it first beige pro's example i'm ready for your dictation tessa i sit down at her desk and open her laptop there is a moment of silence and i can tell she is angry i type
in her computer password and wait when tessa doesn't say anything i turn to look at her she has moved from her seat on the edge of the bed but now she looks mad enough to throw something at me blah so boring so stale none of weston's voice shines through at all and on top of it i'm telling more than i'm showing okay tessa is angry but how does weston see that how does he perceive that this example is obviously lacking color description and all of the elements that make a scene immersive but we also don't
want to get so descriptive that we step into purple pros like this i'm ready for your dictation tessa i sit down at her glossy white desk and opened her laptop the following silence is overwhelmingly long and deafeningly quiet tessa's anger is like a palpable force of nature radiating through the room and becoming an insurmountable obstacle to conversation as i type in her computer password and wait for her inevitable response when i turn slightly to look over my shoulder at tessa i'm not surprised to find her frozen in place on her bed her cheeks are flushed
in infuriating shade of pink and her fingers are curled around the white linen bed sheets as she silently contemplates the numerous punishments she would like me to suffer for being so stubborn about the flowers so purple it's painful it's literally painful plus there is no western voice in that paragraph at all that's what i mean when i'm talking about focusing on character voice above all else because sometimes character voice calls for fewer right words and more color more mess more spice so now let me read you the actual excerpt from the scene i'm ready for
your dictation tessa i sit down at her desk and open her laptop a deathly silence falls i can practically feel the volcano rumbling underneath me getting ready to erupt i log into her computer with that weird password open every door 325 and wait she's pissed i can tell but i don't know how much until i turn around and look at her she hasn't moved from her seat on the edge of the bed her cheeks are flushed pink and her fingers curl around the twisted blankets until her knuckles whiten for a second i wonder if she's
going to throw something at me probably not since it would disrupt the perfect feng shui of her bedroom she doesn't throw anything but she does explode with poetry so right away you can probably see how that description hits all the points we talked about character voice showing not telling we see what weston sees we see what he is perceiving about tessa's body language her reaction also the volcano thing is a recurring metaphor that happens throughout the book because the first time they meet it's quite an explosive argument okay let's look at another example we're gonna
go to tess's voice this time so we're gonna jump halfway through the book to kind of the midpoint of the story when tessa is starting to realize that she has feelings for weston first we have the beige pros if he's so good looking i say why doesn't he have a girlfriend grandma hesitates then replies perhaps he does the thought makes me feel envious but it's unlikely westin does have a girlfriend she wouldn't want him coming over to see me all the time even though our relationship is platonic that is i always thought it was platonic
but now i don't know i feel things for weston that i've never felt before i think i might be falling for him no just no on the flip side let's look at some purple pros if he's so good looking i say why doesn't he have a girlfriend grandma hesitates for a minute before replying perhaps he does the twinge of envy i feel is imperceptibly small but impossible to ignore i contemplate it for a long moment and eventually come to the conclusion that westin most likely does not have a girlfriend after all he spends so much
time over here and no girlfriend however long-suffering and virtuously forgiving would spare him day after day even if weston and i are nothing more than platonic friends but in the secret caverns of my thoughts a battle rages between intellectual reasoning and emotional impulse the former insists that i have no romantic feelings for weston but the latter argues with a language of sensitivity and a depth of emotion too infinite for words oh my god it's so snuffy and formal and annoying and not immersive at all and also not tessa's voice like i mean she's she's kind
of lyrical and and poetic but but not like that and now the actual excerpt from the book if he's so good looking i say why doesn't he have a girlfriend grandma hesitates for a minute before replying perhaps he does i feel a twinge of envy small and prickling in my gut when i consider the possibility westin can't have a girlfriend she wouldn't spare him to come over here all the time and she would dump him if she knew he was seeing another girl regardless of how platonic our relationship is but is it i didn't think
i liked weston and my brain still insists that i don't but my body suggests otherwise my heart flutters in my chest like a firefly trapped in a mason jar my cheeks warm with a blood rush when i talk about him and my hands still do that tingling thing like they did when he was sitting next to me on the couch i didn't think i liked weston but now i'm not so sure simpler to the point but not without feeling or color lots of body language some overthinking but most importantly it is in keeping with tess's
voice so bottom line don't strive to make every description in your book spectacular and colorful instead strive to make your reader feel something you want to immerse them in the character's perspective so much so that they forget they're even reading a book and another great way to practice character voice is to just write practice pages just sink into your character's voice by writing something that maybe it doesn't even belong in the book maybe it's like a journal entry from that character's perspective or just anything any scene that comes to mind just to kind of try
your hand at it and sink into their voice and the more you do this it's really a matter of practice and time time time the more you write in this character's voice the more you will feel like you you are becoming that character and you you see things the way that they see things and that might be different than the way you the author sees things and that's the cool thing about writing is that we can explore these different perspectives and these different perceptions of reality also definitely check out that video that i mentioned before
all about character voice my top tips for mastering character voice i think you'll get a lot out of that video but hopefully that answers your question and gives you some good examples to go off of and of course if you guys want to read 100 days of sunlight and you haven't yet you can click the link below and grab your copy it's the best way to support what i'm doing another great way to support what i'm doing is to go to my patreon which is where you can sign up to ask questions for this show
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you haven't already because i post writing videos every wednesday and saturday and i would love to have you here in the community until next week my friend rock on seen posts on uh on pinterest and different places that's like questions to ask yourself about your magic system and there's like a ton of questions and a lot of times i'm like well really you don't need to know everything here you don't need to know the answer to all these questions and the reader certainly doesn't need to know the answer to all of those questions so try
to narrow down
