As my crit group well knows, and others who have heard me speak about writing know that I hate description.  Hate to write it.  Suck at it.  So that’s been a writing exercise that I’ve been practicing for several years now.  To avoid the “white room” as it’s known in the Turkey City Lexicon I now try to include at least three of the five senses, and preferably four.  When I’m writing in first person I find this easier to accomplish, still working on integrating it gracefully in their person.

But anyway, so yesterday I’m working on the Wild Card script, and I started to write some action (which means stage direction whether it has action in it or not), and I realize I’ve put in the smells of the alley.  Word are like gold in a script.  You only have so many pages and so many words.  Since movie theaters don’t have Smellarama my describing the scents of this dirty alley is really a waste of precious words.  But I’ve been working prose for the past few months so that’s where my head had gone.

That made me remember how a few years ago I was jumping between a script and a novel — I think it was The Edge of Ruin — and I looked back over the page and realized I had typed into the novel INT. BEDROOM – NIGHT.  Sadly I had to erase that and actually describe the bedroom, and give furniture-fu, and yes, even some smell.