To whet your appetite for the Writing in Style course, I've got a brace of delicious quickie Writing Skills for you: ten-minute activities to hone different aspects of your writing. The first, with the nights drawing in and the time of ghoulies 'n ghosties approaching, is a fab technique for the spookification of absolutely anything: Dark Beauty.
First off, choose a location that you think is just stunningly beautiful. Not creepy at all: gorgeous, soothing, filling your soul with beauty. Somewhere you've been on holiday perhaps or somewhere you've recently visited – a picturesque village, beautiful gardens, the inside of a college if you went to Oxford Open Doors. It can be just one building, if you like: standing at the bus stop one evening, I was blown away by how picture-perfect the Royal Oak on Woodstock Road looked. Anywhere, wild, rural, suburban, or urban, that you think is unequivocally beautiful.
Next, you're going to describe its beauty – but with the most menacing verbs you can find. Let things loom, creep, snake, throttle, seep… (Verb: a doing word. Test it by putting "to" in front of it: to loom, to creep, to snake, etc.) I suggest you spend ten minutes on this, though you could do more if you fancy a longer writing session. And have fun with it!
When you’re done, type it up and schedule an email to yourself for a
week’s time – without specifying that you were practising using creepy
verbs. When you reread it with fresh eyes,
you’ll be surprised at how effective your verb choices are and how much
subtler it feels to read than to write.
What you're doing in this prompt is called writing around a semantic field: your semantic field is "danger" and the verbs you're choosing all reflect that. The actual thing you're writing about isn't dangerous – it's beautiful! – but the way you're writing about it creates that sense of danger. We all know how powerful description and sense of place can be for creating a mood in a story. That doesn't limit you to places that echo that mood exactly, though: by playing around with your semantic field like this, you can make any place reflect any mood that you want it to! That gives you a lot more freedom to choose more original and exciting locations, which itself helps the story live on in the reader's mind.
