Posts belonging to Category Description
Posted by Ravyn on January 16, 2012
This one’s back to writing for RPG Blog Carnival. I love the way it makes me think about aspects of the theme I wouldn’t have looked into.
One of the things that a lot of people forget about making locations, fantastic or otherwise, is that the locations themselves are in a constant state of flux. The [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: locations, mood, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, scening, the perfect version, World-building, writing | 
5 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 22, 2011
Yesterday, I talked about the importance of getting places to resonate with the people in a world and thus through them with the audience, even before anyone actually sets foot there, and talked about what sorts of factors might give the places that resonance. The next step, then, is to figure out what sorts of [...]
Categories: Description, Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Geography, History, Places, Scening, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: Places, resonance, roleplaying, World-building, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 21, 2011
One of the things I’ve always loved about a good world-building is a sense of place: the idea that after a little while, hearing a place name alone will bring in all the echoes of what the place actually means to the characters. It’s important, particularly in a narrative that bounces about between cities and [...]
Categories: Description, Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Geography, History, Places, Scening, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: Places, resonance, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 17, 2011
I promised earlier this week that I’d talk about how I get from the image in my head through the principles of art to the image I write, when writing action in stories and games.
As with the image composition, I start with the point of focus. Usually this is both a physical point and an [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: composition, Cross-discipline, description, principles of art, role-playing, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 16, 2011
Yesterday, I mentioned the design principles of art, and how I use them to create the mental pictures that I turn into my descriptions. So how do I get from principles to composition, and from there to a picture?
The principle I start with when laying out my mental pictures is always dominance. Where would the [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: composition, description, principles of art, role-playing, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 15, 2011
When I’m trying to get across a piece of imagery, I start with, well, an image. I don’t mean just getting a basic mental picture; I mean taking the time to take that picture and compose it, as if it were a piece of artwork or a short piece of film, then take the important [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: composition, Cross-discipline, description, principles of art, role-playing, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on August 2, 2011
Yesterday I talked about distinctive silhouettes and why they’re important in comics and other visual media. My question, thinking about this, then became “What’s the prose equivalent? How do we manage distinctive silhouettes when we’re limited to words?
The first thing we need to remember is that for the prose silhouette, most aspects of appearance aren’t [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Character image, Characterization, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Art in writing, concepts, Cross-discipline, roleplaying, silhouettes, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on August 1, 2011
One of the panels I attended at Comic-Con was Bryan Tillman talking about character design—or more specifically, visual character design. I came, I saw, and needless to say, I started thinking about how to apply what I’d learned to prose, to the point where I ended up following up on the jokingly oft-repeated exhortation to [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Character image, Characterization, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Art in writing, concepts, Cross-discipline, roleplaying, silhouettes, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on July 21, 2011
“Her azure orbs sparkled in the moonlight.”
“I took this as a bad sign. Battle sapphires only sparkle when they’re about to be thrown, and I was too close to be the target—who else was out there? Were we under attack?”
–a response to deliberately dubious description.
Not all bad writing is irretrievable; in fact, not even all [...]
Categories: Description, For Writers, Technique, Voice and Style |
Tags: Exercises, fun with words, salvaging bad writing, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on July 20, 2011
A long time ago, I wrote an exercise in which the object of the game was to find something and describe it in as minute detail as possible, in order to learn how to see things at the minute, mundane level. I pointed out then that the results of this exercise really weren’t meant to [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Scening, Technique, Voice and Style |
Tags: description, Exercises, roleplaying, Voice and Style, writing | 1 Comment »