Aug 02 2008
Writing Tip of the Day: Try to Avoid Striking a Pose
A character strikes a pose by doing anything that’s primarily designed to give readers an interesting visual. Unlike well-executed visuals, poses are usually distracting and rarely add anything like character development or immersion to the story. It’s usually more effective to rewrite the visual to show us something about the character. For example, a character that admires his weapon is striking a pose because he’s not telling us anything interesting about himself. You could fix that by having the character run his finger across the blade to test its sharpness. That helps develop the character as a competent and tough swordsman. In contrast, someone who just admires the weapon probably fails to show any of his own traits and is offering a visual only for its own sake.
