My Pet Peeve; show you are in Italy, don’t write it. There are one thousand ways to reveal that you are somewhere in Italy rather than patently writing ‘Italy,’ as I teach in the Art of Writing Retreat. I love to teach Writing From a Sense of Place as we walk around the most stunning streets of Florence and explore how to use sound, smell, touch and taste to show not just tell where were are.
When writing about Italy, try not to use the words Italy, Tuscany or Florence. How can you show your readers that you are in these places without telling them precisely?
Wrack your brain to think of different and interesting ways to present Italy:
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If you smell coffee and see someone licking a cappuccino moustache off their top lip, where are you likely to be?
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If a man walks in with a helmet and MARIO written across the back of it, where are you likely to be?
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If you’re at a dinner party, restaurant or cocktails and the wine is predominately Sangiovese, an exclusively Tuscan grape, where are you likely to be?
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If the noise of an Ape drowns out your conversation walking down the street, as your heels get caught in cobblestones, where are you likely to be?
Obviously, you have to pursue and extrapolate these scene details to complete the image of being in Italy, but anything rather than saying We Are in Italy. Telling your readers where you are (God FORBID in the first sentence!) is a major pet peeve of mine. It’s pure lazy writing. This applies for everywhere your character is in your book.
There are one thousand ways you can reveal where you are, rather than saying it! Go on…you too! Make observations that reveal you are in Italy. Or wherever you may be, try this exercise to list out several different ways to explain where you are without saying it. If you’d like to learn more about Writing from a Sense of Place, you’re invited to join me this summer to explore more of this topic.
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If you’d like to share any comments or thoughts, I’d be happy to hear from you. Email me directly at lisacliffordwriter@gmail.com.