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@jared-williams

Hi Jared,

I totally agree. I am a writer-in-progress with much need of help from fellow authors and readers.
This is my second pass through the “editing” of my WIP, and I’ve taken to doing dramatic recordings of it with atmospheric background and music.  I think it helps me visualize not just what is going on in the foreground, but also think of the scene as having its own character voice.  I tend to write cinematically but tend to hamper myself with too much description.  This becomes all too obvious when I do a dramatic reading, but that helps me recognize my flaws in a way I might gloss over otherwise.
Thank you for the input and review. I am still revising and will make these edits and more.  I so appreciate the help.  I think this method also helps us perceive our scenes in a different way, making what needs revise more obvious.
Some writers, myself included, tend to “beat the dead horse” with description and metaphor, where only a few simple images help.
Kind of like salt.  A little bit provides savor, too much sours the experience.  It also impacts the pacing of a scene, and that becomes abundantly clear when it is read aloud.
My clips are basically some of my dirty laundry. [Heh-heh!]
Whether we know it or not, readers tend to “hear” the words in their imagination, which calls forth associated imagery so that they “see” it in their minds too.

What I hope this Forum thread does is open readers to thinking about how their writing might be experienced, rather than just read.
I am still working with the Audacity software to get my foreground reading maximized over the dramatic audio background.  I do need to tone down volumes, but this is my amateur effort that will perhaps be perfected the more I do it.
I would love to hear one of yours.  I think each posting in this thread allows us one link per post, so I would put it on a cloud-based shared drive, and make the link accessible.  We try to keep the clips to around the 5-10 minute range.  If you need the link to Audacity, it is a free download and open-source software and makes it easy to edit clips and add in effects tracks and an instrumental music track.  There are many non-royalty, no-copyright instrumental tracks available, so long as you do not monetize the result.  I think dramatic music can set a baseline tempo, which reveals where the beats of a written scene may lag or overrun.  This too reveals a lot about what I need to fix lyrically.

I agree about “the angry kid image” too.  I’m glad you picked that up.  It creates an odd distracting word picture that lessens the intensity of the scene.  I was thinking about the storm itself being a spiteful persona somehow, but haven’t struck on just the right thing. There are a lot of instances where less is more here.
As you can tell from this posting response, I struggle with being too verbose.

I appreciate any advice that will sharpen me. 🙂

As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend. [Proverbs 27:17 NLT]