While writing about a person, a place, or a thing, it is helpful to provide your reader with informative insights, which your reader would not readily ‘drum up’ on their own. A writer may achieve this by way of simple pre-writing exercises for developing a study of their subject matter, preceding a first draft. The result is prose that conveys a quality of intimacy with its subject.
Observation
List details – characters, functions, personalities – that distinguish your subject from other persons, places, or things. Also, note what impressions your subject makes on other people.
Investigation
Spend ample time in the presence of your subject and interview it. If your subject is a person, ask it as many prepared questions about their past, present and future, as well as probe its inner life. Anticipate that answers to questions will prompt new questions and ask these, too. Do this also if your subject is a place or a thing, writing the answers in the voice of your subject. Then seek people, places, or things familiar to your subject, and interview them (or these) for further insight.
If you are writing fiction and lack direct access, use your imagination! However, if you are writing non-fiction about a subject ‘sight-unseen,’ utilize and notate credible source materials.
Definition
You are now ready to reduce your subject to a few defining terms pertaining to its purpose and personality, and state your subject’s chief importance to others.
Description
Re-catalogue all your subject’s traits that are observable, and correlate these with details that have come into focus from both the investigation and definition processes. Don’t tell, but show your readers exactly how they are by describing your subject while it is in action, passing through time and space, stimulating all 5 senses.
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