This email is an excerpt of the Be Precise Workshop, a benefit of being in the StoryADay Superstars group. Interested? ​Find out more​.

Sometimes when I talk about precision in writing, people worry that I want them to write in a formal, clinical, or clipped fashion. Not so!

If you want readers to be interested in your characters, you need to bring them alive. One way to do that, is to use exquisitely targeted facts about them, including showing us what they notice.

The Things They Carry

The details that characters notice and obsess about are specific to them and their experiences.

Here’s an example, in which a young research associate observes his colleagues. As you read, notice: What do we discover about how Daffyd feels about each of them, from the details he notes?

Tonner Freis—with his tight smile and his prematurely gray hair that rose like smoke from an overheated brain—was, for the moment, the most celebrated mind in the world.

“From where Daffyd stood, the distance and the angle made it impossible to see Tonner’s face clearly. Or the woman in the emerald-green dress at his side. Else Annalise Yannin, who had given up her own research team to join Tonner’s project. Who had one dimple in her left cheek when she smiled and two on her right. Who tapped out complex rhythms with her feet when she was thinking, like she occupied her body by dancing in place while her mind wandered.

-James S. A. Corey, The Mercy of Gods (The Captive’s War Book 1), Orbit 2024

Here are some exercises to keep you company this weekend, and to help you sharpen your powers of observation in writing:

1. How does Daffyd feel about Tonner?
2. How does Daffyd feel about Elise?
3. If he were to approach them, what might he be feeling?
4. Write down five precise details that give you a sense of each person and how Daffyd feels about them.
5. Go into a passage of your own writing and try to replicate this idea: which details does your character notice about other people (or the setting), and what is it about your character that makes them choose those detail to notice?
6. Have you used the most precise language you can, to highlight those details?

What did you discover? Join the discussion