Thursday Tips: vivid language

Hello everyone!

Welcome to another Thursday tip day! Today we will talking about vivid language. Our job as a writer is to paint the picture in the readers mind so they can see your story unfold before their eyes. Vivid language is very important to descriptive writing.

Let’s look at the sentence:

"I took a trip to the mountains."

Does this paint a picture for your reader? Assuming that the reader has ever seen a mountain, the reader is able to somewhat visualize what you meant. However, the picture the reader has may be very different from what you actually mean. After all, there are many different types of mountains.

Is this one better?

"My last trip was to the quaint mountain village of Helen, Georgia located in the foothills of the evergreen Appalachian mountain range."

Does this paint a more clear picture for the reader?

How about this one?

"I visited the snow-capped peaks of the Canadian Rocky mountains, where I stayed at a skiing resort."

Does this paint a clear picture? Is it different from the image evoked from the first example?

There are many different types of mountains. Just saying that you took a trip to the mountains is not sufficient to paint a clear picture of your experience to the reader. Vivid language consists of the descriptive adjectives that bring your experience to life for the reader.

Remember when describing something look at what you have written and see if the words are sufficient to put your reader in the moment with you. 

Hope this helps! See you next week!

Thursday Tips: Using all 5 senses

Hello everyone,

Welcome back to another Thursday tips to help you be a better writer. As writers we want to be aware of the five senses. We use the five senses to transport our reader into the scene we are describing. The five senses have a power to connect with our readers in a deep way. So remember,engaging them all helps bring your fictional world to life.

Write With Sight

Don’t simply tell your reader how you feel or what is going on. Show them. There is more to writing with sight than green trees and blue skies.

Ask yourself, “What am I seeing?” and as you start with the mundane white car driving by I challenge you to look further. Beyond the man walking by with tattoos covering his arms, watch the way he walks. Does he stare at the ground as he walks or does he confidently stare forward? Practice with photos. Try to describe a picture to someone who has never seen the photo before. Show them what is there in detail so they can build the picture in their mind's eye.

Write With Taste

Describing taste can be a fun way to keep your reader intrigued in the details. So often we neglect or even simply forget to describe the way something might taste or what that taste means.

This might be awful, but comparing the flavor and taste of Krispy Kreme donuts to “eating a baby angel” does bring a picture to ones mind. Or, the taste of tomato soup is like, "coming in from a blizzard, kicking your boots off, and sitting in front of the fire.” 

The metaphors we use have the power to transport our readers to places that evoke memories and emotion from their own life, allowing a deeper connection to be made.

Write with Smell

Generally  smells are categorize into two options: good or bad, but smells can help tell stories, too. When you begin to describe a scene close your eyes and envision all of the possible smells that surround you. Smells do not only describe food and body odor, they can be used to describe the weather, a room, or a situation.

Write With Sound

There are noises all around you. Have you unlocked what the sounds are really telling you?Sounds are not always external buzzes and bangs, sometimes they come in the form of thoughts and voices. Some of those sounds are truths and some are lies. Some sounds tell the reader where you are or what you are doing without actually having to tell them.

Write With Touch

Describing the way things feel is just plain fun. The number of adjectives available are endless. Temperature and texture great to use and so much fun!

For example: “Her fingers skimmed the cool, silky water.”

When writing about touch, the physical is very important to describe, but even more important is the invisible. The different aspects that are “touched” but not with your hands.

As you have probably noticed by now, the key to unlocking the five senses is the question behind it. The question of why you are seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, or feeling something. Once you’ve established the sense, ask the question, 

“What does this mean?”

Hope this helps! See you next week!

Thursday tips: what is a story?

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to another Thursday tips day! Today we ask, what is a story? A story is simply a tale of events that are linked by cause and effect. It can be true or it can be a work of fiction. We expect stories to have a beginning, middle and end. They involve at least two characters, and some type of event take place.

Though there are three major contemporary types of written story:

• The short story
• The novel
• The life story (biography or autobiography)

For the purposes of this blog (because it's for fiction writers) I will only give tips for the short story and novel. (I will be glad to come back and do a separate blog for the life story if there is a call out for it) 

Short Story

A short story is a piece of fiction under 20,000 words. More typically, a short story will be 1,000 – 10,000 words. (Pieces under 1,000 words are “flash fiction”, over 20,000 and they’re novellas.)

How to Write a Great Short Story

Like any story, your short story needs to have a beginning, middle and end:

• The beginning is where we’re introduced to the characters, especially the main character and his/her problem
• The middle is where the action and plot develops. The main character will face difficulties such as opposition from other people or a challenging environment.
• The end is where the main character triumphs over his/her biggest challenge (or fails, in the case of a tragedy). The resolution should be satisfying and conclusive for the reader.

Even in literary and experimental short stories, it’s important that something should happen. Much of the action might take place inside the characters’ heads, but there should be a real change as a result.

By the end of your short story, your main character should have experienced an internal change. This means that they’ve grown and developed as a person – perhaps overcoming a fear, or recognizing an unacknowledged truth about himself or herself.

Novels

A novel is a piece of fiction that’s 50,000 words or longer (shorter books are novellas). The typical novel is around 80,000 – 150,000 words, depending on genre.

Novels and short stories share similar structural features, but novels give the author a much wider scope. A novel might have:

• More than one main character (though attempt this with caution!)
• A large cast of characters
• A long time frame – potentially covering several centuries and several generations
• Multiple subplots

Novels tend to be much more popular than short stories with the reading public, and almost all full-time authors are novelists rather than short story writers. A novel is a much bigger undertaking than a short story. Even if you are able to write short stories without much planning, you’ll need to plan out your novel in advance. There are a number of ways to do this, but whichever you choose, ensure:

• You have enough plot to meet your word count target
• Your main character (protagonist) is sympathetic – readers of short stories will put up with a dull or unlikeable character, but novel readers are stuck with the character’s viewpoint for much longer. As the writer, you’ll need to be able to become your characters.
• You have an escalation of events throughout the plot. Things need to get worse and worse for your characters, until they finally overcome their problems or enemies.

Share Your Story Writing Efforts

It’s hard to write in isolation, and sharing your work with other writers is a great way to get feedback and suggestions. Look for a local writers’ circle, or join an online forum. You want to find somewhere that’s supportive but where people aren’t afraid to offer advice about things that aren’t working in your story.

Keep Learning

Writing is a craft that you can learn, like any other. There are hundreds of books on all aspects of writing, from the nuts and bolts of grammar and punctuation to writing in specific genres. You can also find free advice on the Internet (on blogs like this one). You can even take a degree or post-graduate course in creative writing.

Keep Practicing

As well as learning about writing, you need to practice. That means writing regularly – ideally daily. As you write more, your stories will get better – your characters are more “real”, your plots are convincing, and your endings are deeply satisfying to readers. You’ll also find that writing itself becomes easier: you’ll spend less time struggling to find the right words, and more time enjoying seeing the story spill from your fingers.

Always Revise

All authors need to revise their work. Your first draft might have a lot of problems – inconsistent characterization, scenes which don’t really fit, holes in the plot, incorrect pacing or tension. Don’t worry if this is the case: most published authors have to extensively rewrite their first drafts too. Always allow time to revise your story, and if possible, do several rewrites. Most authors recommend letting your story sit unread for a few days or weeks when you complete a draft, so that you can come to it with fresh eyes.

Hope this helps! See you next week!

Thursday Tips: Marketing!

 It’s not one of the Big Six brick and mortar publishing houses but you're excited and you like it. Your publisher will not be taking out ads in the Times, but they will do their part and spread the word about your book- send your book out to some reviewers, announce it on their website, they even may send out some press releases- but these days, most of the work of publicizing your book is down to you. Yes, you. So what are you going to do? Glad you asked! Here are some ideas to help:

1. Get an audience before the release.  When you announce your newly-published book to the world, it would be nice if someone was there to hear you. So how many people read your blog? How many friends do you have on Twitter or Facebook? Are you using LinkedIn groups, Goodreads, LibraryThing? Unless you are being followed (friended, or whatever) by hundreds, if not thousands of people, you probably need to put some time into building up your profile on these sites. This way when you make that announcement, you won't will feel as if you are standing on the stage in an empty theater.

2. Create a brand. 

In writing, the author is the brand. And that means you. You need to present yourself in your communications with potential readers in a way you are comfortable with and which is related to the books you expect to be promoting. An important part of this is to know which genre you are working in. When you are putting yourself out there and finding ways to talk about your book, don’t forget what your brand is – who you want people to see you as. Stay focused.

3. Know what you are going to say. 

Marketing is about message. Your brand is part of it but the rest is all content. What is your book about? Who will it appeal to? What groups should be interested in it, discussing it, recommending it, and what will catch their attention? Work it all out, find the wording you need to convey the message clearly, then, in everything you say, stay on that message. You probably write the kind of books you also love to read. Mostly, your target audience is people rather like yourself. Take a while to understand what it is that attracts you to new, unknown writers in your genre and you are half-way there.

4. Understand where your interests lie. 

You will be selling your book through a variety of channels (book shops, online, as ebooks and as print – possibly POD) and in a number of ‘geographies’ – defined in your publishing contract – to a number of audiences (‘market segments’ in the jargon.) Some channels and geographies will earn you more money than others. If your royalties on net, vs on retail price, it is of critical importance to you personally how big a cut various middlemen are taking. (Remember it can be quite hard to know which channel is best since while apparently high-paying channels like direct sales from your publisher’s own website may earn you a bigger royalty than online stores like Amazon, the latter is likely to out-sell the publisher’s own shop by many times and deliver a much bigger return for your effort. The same goes for audiences. 

5. Keep it rolling. 

With online sales and ebook editions, publicizing a book is not the one-shot event it used to be. Market dynamics have changed since the days when bricks and mortar book shops were all that there was and you had three to six weeks during which your book would be on the shelf before it was returned to make way for the new batch of hopefuls. Now your book will stay in online catalogs for as long as your publishing agreement lasts – and longer if you act to keep it there. You probably have a few months now, after the launch, while your book is fairly new, when you can actively promote it and try to keep people’s attention on it. Even beyond that point, you can run occasional refresher campaigns to lift its profile again. This is all good news for the writer. The bad news is that the marketing need never end!

6. Engage. 

Talk to your readers and your potential readers. Talk about your book if they’re interested. Talk about the genre. Talk about writing and publishing. Talk about yourself. People are interested. It’s hard to grasp at first. You do interviews, you write blog pieces, you twitter about your life, your opinions, and your book, and you. “What the hell is so fascinating about me? Aren’t people going to think I’m a complete ego-maniac?” I hear you and my answer to that is maybe some will, but an awful lot won’t. 

7. Keep your pipeline filled. 

Like it or not, you are selling a product. It’s a business. Your readers are consumers of that product. If they like it, they will want more. The only way they will get more is if you write it. So don’t stop work on that next book, no matter how much extra work the last one has created. A book takes a long time to write, revise, edit and polish. Then you have to sell it to a publisher (oh yes, there are no free rides, each new book can be just as hard to sell as the last one.) Then edit it and then market it. It’s a long pipeline. You keep putting words in at one end and there will be more books to sell at the other. If you stop, there will be a gap.

8. Prepare to work your socks off. 

You may think you were busy when you wrote the book – what with the day job and family commitments – but once you have signed that contract, you will shift into overdrive. Now, as well as the day job, the family, and writing the next book, you also have to work with your publisher on edits, and you have to work on your marketing campaign. Your social networking will escalate, your blogging and website content writing will increase, you’ll be trawling the blogsphere working with your communities of interest, and you’ll be pestering reviewers the world over to just please take a look at your book. That’s why I say it’s writing an iceberg – seven tenths of the work comes after the book is finished.

9. Don’t forget to have some fun, or you’ll go nuts. 

Hope this helps! See you next week!

Thursday Tips: Writing Prompts

Hello everyone!
Welcome back to another Thursday tip day! Today I'm wondering if you've ever use writing prompts? If you’re a fiction writer, you may want to consider using writing prompts to kick-start your creativity. 
A writing prompt is simply a topic around which you start jotting down ideas. The prompt could be a single word, a short phrase, a complete paragraph or even a picture, with the idea being to give you something to focus upon as you write. You may just come up with rough, disjointed notes or you may end up with something more polished and complete, a scene or even a complete story. The point is to simply start writing without being held back by any inhibitions or doubts. 
Here are 5 good reasons for writing to prompts :

1. Sometimes it’s hard to start writing when faced with a blank page. Focusing on an unrelated prompt for a while helps get the creative juices flowing. If you write for just ten minutes on a prompt, you should then find it easier to return to the piece you intended to write. You may also find that if you stop trying to think so hard about what you wanted to write and switch you attention to the prompt instead, the words and ideas for your original piece start to come to you after all.
2. The things you write in response to a prompt may also end up as worthwhile material in their own right. The prompt may give you ideas from which a complete story grows or you may get fresh ideas for another piece you are already working on. It’s often surprising how much material you come up with once you start.
3. Writing to a prompt regularly helps to get you into the habit of writing. This can act as a sort of exercise regime, helping to build up your “muscles” so that you start to find it easier and easier to write for longer and longer.
4. Prompts can be a great way to get involved in a writing community. Sometimes writing groups offer a prompt for everyone to write about, with the intention being for everyone to come up with something they can then share. This can be a source of great encouragement, although knowing that others will read what you have written can also inhibit your creativity.
5. Writing prompts help break up writers block. When your muse has stopped hounding you to write their story, prompts free your mind and give you something else to focus on.

The following are twenty writing prompts that you could use to spark your imagination. If you want to use one, don’t worry about where the ideas take you or whether what you’ve written is “good”. The point is just to get into the flow of writing. You can come back later and polish if you wish to.

1. It was the first snowfall of the year.
2. He hadn’t seen her since the day they left high school.
3. She studied her face in the mirror.
4. They came back every year to lay flowers at the spot.
5. The streets were deserted. Where was everyone? Where had they all gone?
6. This time her boss had gone too far.
7. Stars blazed in the night sky.
8. He woke to birdsong.
9. ‘Shh! Hear that?’ ‘I didn’t hear anything.’
10. He’d always hated speaking in public.
11. She woke, shivering, in the dark of the night.
12. The garden was overgrown now.
13. He’d never noticed a door there before.
14. She’d have to hitch a ride home.
15. ‘I told him not to come back!’
16. His feet were already numb. He should have listened.
17. The shoes were still in the window calling out to her as she passed by.
18. He was back in the same booth, the same time as yesterday waiting for his coffee.
19. She stood against the door, heart pounding, hands trembling, praying he didn't see here come into the room.
20. The room was quiet save the soft ragged breaths she took. 

Thursday Tips: Proofreading

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to another week of Thursday tips to help you become a better writing. I want you to know I do this blog not only for but for me too. As I share with you I learn and apply them to my own writing. So we are essentially helping each other. This week I found a few tips to help with proofreading. 

Be sure to conduct a thorough proofread of all documents before handing them over to someone else to edit. But before you proof, you must self edit.There’s no use expending time and effort to check for minor typographical errors until the editing stage is complete. Review for proper organization, appropriate tone, grammar, syntax, usage, and style before moving on to the proofreading stage.

1. Use a Checklist
Create a list of important things to check for, such as problem areas like agreement of nouns and verbs and of pronouns and antecedents, and number style.

2. Fact-Check
Double-check, re-check and then check your facts again. Make sure your facts, figures, and proper names are in order. 

3. Spell-Check
Before proofreading a printout, spell-check the electronic version not only to find misspellings, but errors that are frequently missed like omitting a closing parenthesis or quotation mark and putting period where there should be a question mark.

4. Read Aloud
Reading text during the proof stage improves your chances of noticing errors, especially missing (“he kissed her cheek and smiled”) or repeated (“he kissed her cheek and smiled”) words.

5. Focus on One Line at a Time
When proofing print documents, use another piece of paper or a ruler to cover the text following the line you are proofreading, shifting the paper down as you go along. This technique helps you keep your place and discourages you from reading too quickly and missing subtle errors.

6. Attend to Format
Proofreading isn’t just about reviewing the text. Make sure that the document design adheres to established specifications. Check page numbering, column alignment, relative fonts, sizes, and other features of standard elements such as headlines, subheadings, captions, and footnotes. Inspect each type of feature within categories, such as looking at every headline, then every caption, and so on.

7. Proof Again
Insert revisions on the electronic version, then print off and proofread the document again with the same thoroughness, rather than simply spot-checking the changes. An insertion or deletion may have thrown off the line count, for example.

Hope this helps! See you next week!

Thursday Tips: Writers block!

Hello everyone!
Welcome back to Tip Thursday! Today we talk about getting pass writers block. Every author suffers from it so here are a few tips on how to get pass it and get your story completed.

1) Purposely ignore the block
Make the time to write, add it to your schedule and show up to write, even if nothing comes right away. When your body shows up to the page at the same time and place every day, eventually your mind — and your muse — will do the same. 

2) Don't Be Too Hard on Yourself.

Don’t be hard on yourself at all while writing. Turn the critical brain off. There is a time and place for criticism: it’s called editing.

3) Think of Writing as your regular Job.

If we think of ourselves as laborers, as craftsmen, it’s easier to sit down and write. You're an artist, you create worlds for others to read. We’re not just putting words on the page. At the end of the day, we’re creating things — stories, poems, plays — just as bricklayers do accept we use vocabulary and grammar instead of bricks and mortar.

4) Work on More Than One Project at a Time.

Some writers find it helpful to switch back and forth from one project to another. Whether this minimizes fear or boredom, or both, it seems to prevent writer's block for many people.

5) Take Time Off If You've Just Finished a Project.

Writer's block could be a sign that your ideas need time to gestate. Idleness can be a key part of the creative process. Give yourself time to gather new experiences and new ideas, from life, reading, or other forms of art, before you start again.

Try these out and let us know if they work! See ya next week with more tips to help make you a better writer.

Thursday Tips: promoting with your smart phone

Hello everyone!
Another Thursday so another tip. Today we're going to talk about using your smart phone wisely!
In this on the go, digital society that we live in now our phones ate used for everything! You name it we can do on our phones and we can't we're completely baffled as to why not. So promotion should be no different.
Whether you're self published or with a house, we are our own promotion specialist. We should always be prepared to self promote when the opportunity arises.
So, here are 5 tips that I got from Sylvia Hubbard (she's sylviahubbard1 on all the social medias) that I wanted to share with you to be promo ready via your smart phone.
1) keep pics of your covers in your gallery
Why? Because when your chit chatting with folk and someone says, that's so cool you wrote a book. What does it look like? Boom, you can show them
2) know your links
During that same conversation the next thing people ask would be, where can I find you? You can rattle off your website, social media, Amazon page, or whichever one they're looking for you on to them. That bring us to number 3...
3) use apps
What if this potential reader is a Twitter junkie and wants to follow you. You have Twitter but you only do it on the computer so you don't remember your handle for whatever reason. With the app you could just pull it up real quick, tell them your screen name and show them so they know what to look for. That works for all social media apps
4) save a "promo book blast" to your phone
A promo blast is just a quick "this is what my book is about" paragraph. Its good for answering emails on the go when publishers, interviewers or anyone you're communicating with via email asks what your books about. If you have a paragraph telling them in your own words what the books about along with the blurb and picture that you can shoot back to them in an answer email that would be sufficient until you can get back to them later.
5) also have a author blast.
Like the book blast, this ones about you. Think of it as the about the section of the book. A few quick lines of your writing accomplishments, book titles, social media and website info. Any way and anywhere the reader can reach you should be included.
With these things on your phone promotion for you and your book is right at your finger tips at any time.
Sylvia has great ideas on promotion. These were the ones that stood out to me. Hope they help!
Look for Sylvia Hubbard, her great ideas and her books on all social medias and periscope! If you can't find her as sylviahubbard1 drop the one. See you next week!

Thursday Tips: Self Editing

Hello everyone!

It's Thursday so it's time to share our tips to help you move forward in the publishing world. Today I'm sharing what I learned from taking a class Jerry Jenkins gave on self editing.  I always go back to these 

If you want people to actually read what you’ve written, you must master the art of ferocious self-editing. 

I always go back and ask myself these questions when I complete a story, no matter the length, free, short, or novel length. Your work should always be as clean as possible before giving it to an editor to tighten. Remember a good editor...

• Can tell within a page or two how much editing would be required to make a manuscript publishable. 

• Knows whether a writer understands what it means to grab a reader by the throat and not let go.

• Knows if too many characters have been introduced too quickly

• Can tell if the writer understands point of view

• Knows if the setting and tone are interesting

• Can tell if the story is subtle, evocative or on the nose.

A professional editor can determine all this with a quick read of the first two to three pages so you self editing has to be on point. Here are 21 rules of thumb to up your editing game.

See ya next Thursday!

21 Self Editing Tips

1. Develop a thick skin.

Or at least to pretend to. It’s not easy. But we writers need to listen to our editors—even if that means listening to ourselves!

2. Avoid throat-clearing.

This is a literary term for a story or chapter that finally begins after a page or two of scene setting and background. Get on with it.

3. Choose the normal word over the obtuse.

When you’re tempted to show off your vocabulary or a fancy turn of phrase, think reader-first and keep your content king. Don’t intrude. Get out of the way of your message.

4. Omit needless words.

A rule that follows its own advice. This should be the hallmark of every writer.

5. Avoid subtle redundancies.

“She nodded her head in agreement.” Those last four words could be deleted. What else would she nod but her head? And when she nods, we need not be told she’s in agreement.

“He clapped his hands.” What else would he clap?

“She shrugged her shoulders.” What else?

“He blinked his eyes.” Same question.

“They heard the sound of a train whistle.” The sound of could be deleted.

6. Avoid the words up and down…

…unless they’re really needed. He rigged [up] the device. She sat [down] on the couch.

7. Usually delete the word that.

Use it only for clarity.

8. Give the reader credit.

Once you’ve established something, you don’t need to repeat it.

Example: “They walked through the open door and sat down across from each other in chairs.”

If they walked in and sat, we can assume the door was open, the direction was down, and—unless told otherwise—there were chairs. So you can write: “They walked in and sat across from each other.”

And avoid quotation marks around words used in another context, as if the reader wouldn’t “get it” otherwise. (Notice how subtly insulting that is.)

9. Avoid telling what’s not happening.

“He didn’t respond.”

“She didn’t say anything.”

“The crowded room never got quiet.”

If you don’t say these things happened, we’ll assume they didn’t.

10. Avoid being an adjectival maniac.

Good writing is a thing of strong nouns and verbs, not adjectives. Use them sparingly.

Novelist and editor Sol Stein says one plus one equals one-half (1+1=1/2), meaning the power of your words is diminished by not picking just the better one. “He proved a scrappy, active fighter,” is more powerful if you settle on the stronger of those two adjectives. Less is more. Which would you choose?

11. Avoid hedging verbs…

…like smiled slightly, almost laughed, frowned a bit, etc.

12. Avoid the term literally—when you mean figuratively.

“I literally died when I heard that.” R.I.P.

“My eyes literally fell out of my head.” There’s a story I’d like to read.

“I was literally climbing the walls.” You have a future in horror films.

13. Avoid too much stage direction.

You don’t need to tell every action of every character in each scene, what they’re doing with each hand, etc.

14. Maintain a single Point of View (POV) for every scene.

Failing to do so is one of the most common errors beginning writers make. Amateurs often defend themselves against this criticism by citing classics by famous authors who violated this. Times change. Readers’ tastes change. This is the rule for today, and it’s true of what sells.

15. Avoid clichés.

And not just words and phrases. There are also clichéd situations, like starting your story with the main character waking to an alarm clock; having a character describe herself while looking in a full-length mirror; having future love interests literally bump into each other upon first meeting, etc.

16. Resist the urge to explain (RUE).

Marian was mad. She pounded the table. “George, you’re going to drive me crazy,” she said, angrily.

“You can do it!” George encouraged said.

17. Show, don’t tell.

If Marian pounds the table and chooses those words, we don’t need to be told she’s mad. If George says she can do it, we know he was encouraging.

18. Avoid mannerisms of attribution.

People say things; they don’t wheeze, gasp, sigh, laugh, grunt, snort, reply, retort, exclaim, or declare them.

John dropped onto the couch. “I’m beat.”

Not: John was exhausted. He dropped onto the couch and exclaimed tiredly, “I’m beat.”

“I hate you,” Jill said, narrowing her eyes.

Not: “I hate you,” Jill blurted ferociously.

Sometimes people whisper or shout or mumble, but let your choice of words imply whether they are grumbling, etc. If it’s important that they sigh or laugh, separate the action from the dialogue:

Jim sighed. “I just can’t take any more,” he said. [Usually you can even drop the attribution he said if you have described his action first. We know who’s speaking.]

19. Specifics add the ring of truth.

Yes, even to fiction.

20. Avoid similar character names.

In fact, avoid even the same first initials.

21. Avoid mannerisms of punctuation, typestyles, and sizes.

“He…was…DEAD!” doesn’t make a character any more dramatically expired than “He was dead.”