Writers in the Storm

By Kait Nolan, @kaitnolan

I’ve been around since the fairly early days of self publishing. My first ebook went live in early 2010. Since then, the market has exploded and a thousand things have changed. Something that’s true this month may not be true the next.

But two things have remained more or less constant:

1. Ebook formatting, while it has evolved, is still essentially as it was when I started.
2. People keep perpetuating the myth that it’s hard.

If you happen to have seen me around since the early days, chances are you heard me railing against the latter. I have bullied (insulted?) more than one author into taking the plunge and educating themselves. I’m here today to tell you why you should, too, even if you opt to hire someone.

1. It is not hard.

Y’all, it’s really not. Formatting ebooks can be many things—a gigantic pain in the butt (depending on how many egregious formatting mistakes you commit in drafting), tedious, headache-inducing—but not hard. If you can read instructions, you can learn to format ebooks.

2. It does not take knowledge of CSS or other coding.

This comes under the heading of formatting being not hard. I can’t count the number of folks I’ve talked to who were under the impression that they needed to be able to do complicated code in order to format ebooks. While you can do it that way, you don’t have to (and, dear God, why would you want to?).

3. Self publishing does not come without expense. Formatting doesn’t have to be one of them.

There’s this saying in publishing that the money always flows to the author. This has changed somewhat with the advent of self publishing, and there are people out there who say you can’t self-publish without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars. I say bollocks to that (because, really, I don’t have enough opportunity to say “bollocks” in real life).

I published my first ebook with only $50 out of pocket (for cover art) and every single publishing expense I’ve had since then came from profits. If you’re on a limited publishing budget, your money needs to go to the important things you can’t do yourself, like cover art and editing.

4. You will want to be able to make changes and shouldn’t have to hire out to do that.

Part of self publishing means that you should be updating your books. Fixing those inadvertent typos that slip through your editor or beta readers. Or, at the very least, you’ll want to update booklists, be able to adapt back matter, add in affiliate sales links per sales channel, etc. These are small, simple changes, but if you don’t have any knowledge of formatting, you’ll have to pay somebody to do it, and this goes back to point 3.

5. You maintain control of the final product.

This just may be the gold standard for why so many of us choose to self publish in the first place. We’re control freaks. Formatting is just another one of those aspects you don’t have to trust to anybody else. Keep that hold on your precious!

6. You need to know what you’re looking at.

If you do choose to hire out because you prefer not to take the time or effort, it’s important that you understand what you’re looking at when you get the product back. You need to know whether the person you’ve hired has truly done a good job. If you know nothing about formatting, chances are you can’t adequately judge this.

7. It only takes a handful of programs.

My system doesn’t take any expensive, specialized software. Just Microsoft Word (which most of us have) or OpenOffice (free), MobiPocket Creator (free), Sigil (free), and Calibre (free).

8. If you train yourself out of bad formatting habits, it doesn’t take long.

Okay, this is possibly one of the biggest points. Authors have all kinds of horrible formatting habits. This is what has led to the idea that formatting takes forever and is the grandest pain in the fanny known to self publishing.

But guess what? If you train yourself out of those bad habits and set up your word processing program not to screw stuff up (Word likes to think it knows what’s best—it doesn’t), then you don’t have to waste scads of time undoing your formatting mistakes. That is, by far, the most time consuming part of the process.

For my own work, I can take a full-length novel and produce the EPUB, Kindle, and Smashwords formats in approximately half an hour from start to finish—for all of them. Because I write a cleanly formatted draft.

9. The people who can’t do it will think you’re a bad ass.

Due to that whole “OMG, it’s haaaaard” perception, if you know how to do it, you can buff your nails and be nonchalant while they goggle at you for your expert knowledge.

10. Knowledge is power (and time is money—save BOTH).

I think this speaks for itself.

And just so I’m not up here doing nothing but giving you a sales pitch, I’m here to share with you the two most common formatting mistakes (a tiny sampling of the stuff that’s taught in my formatting class). Both of these have to do with indents in your manuscript.

The Freebie Lesson

How many of you use either the Tab key or spacebar to make your paragraph indents? Show of hands? It’s most of you, I wager. Well guess what? You’ve just made yourself a lot of extra work. This is not the correct way to indent your paragraphs. The right way to do indents is through Paragraph Styles. But don’t worry. I have a nice little cheat that will get rid of all those unnecessary keystrokes.

Okay, see that little backwards P looking thing up in your toolbar? That’s the pilcrow. In Word they call this the Show/Hide button. It reveals your hidden formatting. In OpenOffice, this reveals what they call non-printing characters. Consider this the blacklight that’s going to reveal all the scary, bad formatting stuff in your manuscript. Brace yourselves and go click it while inside one of your manuscripts.

If You’re A Tabber

See all those right pointing arrows? Those are your tab marks. This is probably THE MOST COMMON bad formatting habit people have. It’s a quick and easy way to insert an indent at the start of a paragraph. And it’s BAD. WRONG. DON’T DO IT.

Open up your Find and Replace box (To do that press CTRL+H). In the “Find what” line enter ^t. The caret t is the symbol for tab. On the Replace With line, don’t put anything. You’re going to leave it blank. Then click Replace All.

If You’re A Spacer

So what if you aren’t a tabber? What if you’re a spacer instead? See that trail of dots in the middle of the line at the start of that paragraph? Same idea applies. Hit CTRL+H to get your Find and Replace box. Then, in the find what box, you’ll hit the space bar however many times you tend to do that for an indent, leave the Replace with box empty, and click Replace all.

Now, after you do that, you may find that in some places you still have one or two space bar spaces before the first lines of your paragraphs. If that happens to be the case, you can’t use the same process to zap all your single or double spaces because that’ll cause you to delete the spaces separating sentences. So the answer is to do a Find and replace on ^p space space, and then replace with ^p only.

This ^p is the symbol for a paragraph return (which looks like a pilcrow in the text), so basically you’re telling Word to replace all instances of two space bar spaces that immediately follow a paragraph return. This way, you isolate the space bar spaces that precede the start of a new paragraph. After THAT repeat it with a find and replace on ^p space, then replace with a ^p by itself.

The Right Way To Indent

Now, in Word you have these things called PARAGRAPH STYLES. These allow you to globally control the styling of your ebook. You’ll apply a different style to different elements of your book, and then to change the styling, you’ll just change the style ONCE and the change will take effect all through the whole book.

Paragraph styles control everything from font to spacing to indents. You’ll use it in the main body of the text, on your chapter headings, on the front matter, title page, etc.

You’re going to start by selecting your entire manuscript (CTRL+A) and setting it to what Word calls the “Normal” style. The default settings for the “Normal” style probably aren’t right either, but don’t worry, we’ll fix that in a bit. Why do we start with normal everywhere? Because the vast majority of your book will be the body—the words and paragraphs that comprise the main narrative. Then later, we’ll change the styles of certain areas, like chapter headings, front or back matter, etc.

Okay, now you’re going to modify the Normal style to actually be what you need it to be. In order to do this you need to click on that little expansion arrow in the bottom right corner of the Styles Box.

That will give you this menu that lists all the various styles Word has. If you hover over the pilcrow beside Normal, it will give you a drop down arrow. Click on the arrow and you’ll get a submenu. (In my class I have slides with screenshots from each point in this process). From there, select Modify.

That’s going to take you to the Modify Style box. In the bottom right corner, click on Format. That will give you another menu from which you need to select Paragraph. That’s going to give you this box.

Now, particularly in newer iterations of Word, there will be all kinds of stuff to fix here. See under Spacing it’s got 10pt in the “After” box and has line spacing set at Multiple 1.15? Yeah, that’s all bad.

You NEVER EVER want it set to read EXACTLY or AT LEAST followed by some kind of point size specification in the At box. There should NEVER EVER be any entry in the AT box. You want just basic single spacing. No spacing before or after. And THIS is where you set your indent properly.

• For print, the standard is usually half an inch.
• With ebooks you often see less, anywhere between .25” and .5”.

I tend to prefer 0.3” for the first line indent. Some people prefer block paragraphs without indents. For fiction, I prefer a standard paragraph indent. Block paragraphs often work better for non-fiction. This is a decision that’s up to you, but pick one or the other, not both. I’ll come back to block spacing in just a minute.

You will keep your alignment set to Left, NOT Justified. Justified does funky stuff in ebooks. Now, when you click on okay in the paragraph window, you come back to the Modify Style page. Click okay again, and look at your manuscript. If you did things right, everywhere you have applied the Normal style, you should have properly indented paragraphs.

Ebook Formatting From A to Z

This is just a small sampling of the detail I go into in my ebook formatting class. Make no mistake—this is a class, not a quick seminar. It’s comprised of four lessons and designed to be done over time.

Each lesson is a streaming video that you can watch on your own time (as many times as you want). Then you’ll have access to interactive classrooms and discussion boards for more in-depth problem solving, as the need arises. At each step you will be expected to upload your manuscript for me to check over and help you correct so that you’re in good shape to move on to the next lesson.

I’m a teacher in real life, so I believe in the power of feedback for proper learning. At the end of my class, you will know how to take your book from a Word doc to all industry standard formats. You will be ready to self publish on any and all major platforms. Click here to register.

And if you’re still not convinced to learn how to do it yourself, I offer my services for ebook formatting over at The Forge. But I know y'all can do it.

Have you formatted your own ebooks already? What were your pitfalls or successes? What questions do you have for Kait?

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
** Writers In The Storm is getting a makeover! **
We're moving to our new digs June 2nd. Stay tuned for party news (and giveaways)...

About Kait

Kait Nolan is stuck in an office all day, sometimes juggling all three of her jobs at once with the skill of a trained bear—sometimes with a similar temperament. After hours, she uses her powers for good, creating escapist fiction. This Mississippi native has something for everyone, from short and sweet to Southern contemporary romance to action-packed paranormal—all featuring heroes you’d want to sweep you off your feet and rescue you from work-day drudgery. When not working or writing, Kait’s hanging out in her kitchen cooking and wishing life were a Broadway musical.

A passionate believer in helping others, she has founded a writing challenge designed for people who have a life (aka we NaNoWriMo rejects who can’t give everything up for the month of November). Please check out A Round of Words in 80 Days.

You can catch up with her at her blog, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and Pots and Plots.

by Tiffany Lawson Inman, @NakedEditor

There it is.  LARGE bold print peering out at me from underneath the Life and Home section….THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLERS LIST, nagging me to grab my Kindle and start downloading fabulous fiction at lightning speed.

Sounds magical, doesn’t it?

Right now I’m talking about that list.  You know the one. The list that, if you are on it, says: You are a really-really-GOOD-writer-and-being-on-this-list-makes-you-special!

What makes that writing so darn special? 

My mom, Margie Lawson, creator of deep editing, and I have discussed on end why bestselling authors are bestselling authors. Using my background in theatre and hers in psychology, we probed the question.

No… bestselling authors are NOT walking around with fairy dust in their pockets.

Nope… they don’t have magic beans either.

The answer: It’s the words they use, the order they use them in, and how they tell their story.

Sounds easy, right?

Of course there are stylistic differences surrounding how each author of each genre approaches action, movement, and tension.

• Some are minimalists when it comes to dialogue cues and body language and visceral.
• Others push our senses to the max.
• And a select few authors out there have the gift to use every aspect of scene writing to show evolving character relationships.

All are golden tools of scene writing!

While teaching Triple Threat Behind Staging a Scene, I ask the class members to pick out an action/movement, heavy dialogue, or multi-character scene from their favorite author. And to include an explanation on why they thought the scene kept them hooked and kept them reading.

Here are a few of the words and phrases my class used to describe their favorite bestselling scenes:

• moves the story forward
• natural dialogue, showed relationship and kept pace
• understated dialogue  punctuated by bits of physical movements
• visible tension in the body language
• get to know the characters without losing interest  or forward momentum.
• fluid internalization
• seamlessly weaving all the elements of story together
• multiple switches in tone
• easy to read, no description or info dumps
• tight choreography

Similarities: Tension, tight dialogue, show not tell, fluid internalizations, emotive body language, and smooth choreography.

Can you describe your writing with the words and phrases above?

Learning to train our reading brains to see emotional and dramatic patterns can awaken the bestselling writer within all of us.

The question is, HOW?

This is one of the many tools I use to awaken the bestselling authors within my students, so read carefully, this is privileged information  :)

What if bestselling authors forgot about tension, tight dialogue, show-not-tell, fluid internalizations, emotive body language, and smooth choreography in their scenes?

What if I stripped their writing down to its birthday suit? Yup. Naked Writing.

What if, indeed…

Grab hold of your seats folks, I have stripped and re-written this scene and it’s not going to move you one inch. This scene is a HUGE turning point in a well known YA fantasy.

The protagonist thinks he is confronting a known serial killer, a man who betrayed his parents -- that betrayal led to their death.  He and his two best friends are secluded in a room with this known villain and the protagonist is the only one with a weapon. This is his opportunity to avenge his parents and commit murder.

Black was on the ground at that point and he was out of breath. He watched Harry as Harry walked toward him slowly.  Harry’s wand was pointed at Black.

“Are you going to kill me, Harry?” he said.

Harry stopped walking, his wand was still pointing forward. Black’s face showed an ugly bruise and he had a bloody nose.

“You killed my parents, “ Harry said.

Black paused."I don't deny it," he said. "But if you knew the whole story."

"You sold them to Voldemort. That's all I need to know." Harry said.

"You've got to listen to me," Black said quickly, "You'll regret it if you don't."

"I understand a lot better than you think," said Harry.

Hermione’s fat cat jumped onto the front of Black’s coat. "Get off," he said, trying to push Crookshanks off of him.

Crookshanks was an ugly cat with a squashed face and yellow eyes. The ugly cat continued to sit on his chest. Hermione started crying.

Harry guessed he would have to kill the cat too.  Harry still held the wand out in front of him towards Black, but he was having a hard time with this decision. Ron’s breathing was loud. He was sitting by the bed next to Hermione.

Harry heard a noise from down the stairs.

Hermione loudly yelled for help.

Black tried to get the cat off of his chest again. He was unsuccessful.

Harry shook his wand. A voice in his head told him to kill Black soon. He could hear footsteps on the stairs. This decision was hard and he didn’t know what to do.

Someone opened the door. It was Professor Lupin and he had his wand out.  When he came through the door, he scanned the room.   Harry still had his wand pointing at Black who was on the floor in front of him. 

 Lupin then yelled, “Expelliarmus!”

OH, my goodness….did anyone stop reading after line 4? And you guessed it – that was an altered scene from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. That’s right.  This children’s book has adult size muscles packed into its action scenes.

I have to admit, it was kind of fun to strip the magic away…so-to-speak… :)

I WISH I could show you the whole scene, fully clothed. Alas, it is too large of a sample for me to retype without copyright infringements. If you have your own copy (and I know you do) crack it open and read this scene.  Not only is this a turning point for the book, but it is a turning point for the entire series.  Must read!

Here are the highlights:

• Emotive Physicality:

Black was sprawled at the bottom of the wall. His thin chest rose and fell rapidly as he watched.         

• Active Description:

A livid bruise was rising around Black's left eye and his nose was bleeding.

• Underlying Emotion:

"You killed my parents," said Harry, his voice shaking slightly, but his wand hand quite steady.

• Quickening Pace:

"You've got to listen to me," Black said, and there was a note of urgency in his voice now. "You'll regret it if you don't... You don't understand..."

• Natural Dialogue and Emotive Dialogue Cues:

"I understand a lot better than you think," said Harry, and his voice shook more than ever. "You never heard her, did you? My mum... trying to stop Voldemort killing me... and you did that... you did it..."

• Smooth Choreography and Active Description:

But Crookshanks sank his claws into Black's robes and wouldn't shift. He turned his ugly, squashed face to Harry and looked up at him with those great yellow eyes. To his right, Hermione gave a dry sob.

• Gripping Cadence and Visible Tension:

Harry raised the wand. Now was the moment to do it. Now was the moment to avenge his mother and father. He was going to kill Black. He had to kill Black. This was his chance...

The seconds lengthened. And still Harry stood frozen there, wand poised, Black staring up at him, Crookshanks on his chest. Ron's ragged breathing came from near the bed; Hermione was quite silent.

And then came a new sound  

• Fluid Internalizations and Seamless Transitions:

Black made a startled movement that almost dislodged Crookshanks; Harry gripped his wand convulsively -- Do it now! said a voice in his head -- but the footsteps were thundering up the stairs and Harry still hadn't done it.

• Active Descriptions and Smooth Choreography and Emotive Physicality:

The door of the room burst open in a shower of red sparks and Harry wheeled around as Professor Lupin came hurtling into the room, his face bloodless, his wand raised and ready. His eyes flicked over Ron, lying on the floor, Hermione, cowering next to the door, to Harry, standing there with his wand covering Black, and then to Black himself, crumpled and bleeding at Harry's feet.

"Expelliarmus!" Lupin shouted.

By stripping away the Rowling bestseller qualities we are able to see what is missing. And by putting them back, we can see the quality and quantity of what she used.  Yes, there can be too much of a good thing and readers will put your book down if they can’t see what’s happening.

Look at your own writing with Naked Editor Vision and ask yourself these questions:

• Does your writing already look like it’s been stripped?
• Is your writing wearing too many layers of clothing? Is it hard to see what is really happening under there?
• Have you overdosed the scene with one or two elements and scrimped on the rest?
• If you stripped it down, can you still see what is happening? What do you see?  Does your scene still have all of its body parts?

Sound like fun? 

Comment below and tell us about your favorite scene writing author. How do they do it?  Have you ever studied their writing? What did it tell you? 

*  *  *  *  *  *

Tiffany Lawson Inman claimed a higher education at Columbia College Chicago. There, she learned to use body and mind together for action scenes, character emotion, and dramatic story development. Tiffany's background in theatre provides her with a unique approach to the craft of writing, and her clients and students greatly benefit.

She teaches Action and Fighting, Choreography, Active Setting, Emotional Impact, Scene Writing, and Dialogue for Lawson Writer’s Academy online, presents hands-on-action workshops, and will be offering webinars in  late 2014.

As a freelance editor, she provides deep story analysis, content editing, line by line, and dramatic fiction editing services. Stay tuned to Twitter @NakedEditor for Tiffany’s upcoming guest blogs around the internet, classes, contests, and lecture packets.

Check out her previous blogs on WITS.

NYT photo credit: Timothy Valentine via photopin cc

By Sharla Rae, @SharlaWrites

If poets are to be believed, eyes are the windows to the soul.

Rather than using clichéd or common descriptions, why not use "explicit" eye descriptions to give your reader a real peek into a character’s psyche?

I’ll touch on eye color, movement, and appearance and, of course, I have some helpful lists to inspire ideas.

 Eye color

It’s a given that writers mention eye color as a character feature. Color can be mentioned every so often to remind readers what the character looks like. But! Don’t hit them over the head with it.

Besides using eye color as a facial feature it can sometimes be used to identify who is speaking especially if the color distinctive.

Blue eyes widened and she threw up both hands. “Now hold on a minute.”
OR
Her amber cat eyes narrowed. “xxxx”

A character might have plain old blue or brown eyes and that’s fine. But why not use color terms that say something about the character or what they're thinking?

• Eyes like silver lightning: sharp, doesn’t miss a thing, spirited, quick-witted
• Gunmetal eyes: sounds like a lethal male, perhaps emotionless
• Glacial blue: Can suggest nationality, or cold personality, angry expression
• Milk chocolate eyes: sounds yummy, soft, warm
• Chips of emerald ice: sharp, cold heated
• Faded azure lace: an older person with blue eyes, lace suggests a woman, perhaps homey

Here’s a great eye color list that will help you describe “who” your character is. This is one of the best I’ve seen to date and includes pictures.

Want to know the most common and rare eye colors in the world? The following are listed from most common to least.

• Brown
• Hazel
• Blue
• Green
• Silver
• Amber and Black [rank about even according to which resource you’re looking at]
• Red or Pink [mostly in albinos]

Just for fun here’s a website that tells you the meaning of the color of your eyes.

 Eye Appearance

 Eye appearance/shape isn’t too difficult to write -- round, almond, bug-eyed, beady, sloe-eyed, hooded, upturned/cat, downturned etc. We might also include how the eyes are placed on the face: close-set, deep-set, monolid, protruding etc.

Certain eye conditions or disorders can affect eye appearance and are excellent descriptors. You may not want to use the scientific terms but the descriptions of the terms are also useful. See my list below.

Appearance also includes emotional expression and often involves the eyebrows.

Appearance frequently blurs lines with eye movement and more often than not demonstrates emotions and personality. You'll see examples of this in the lists below.

Eye Movement

Is it just me, or do eye movements mess you up too?

No doubt you’ve heard or read something like: her eyes traveled/fell down the stairs where he stood.

Really?

The eyeballs rolled down the steps? Believe it or not, this is a common mistake. And yes as a newbie writer my crit group had a good laugh on me with such a mistake. Words like “gaze,” “visage,” "glance," fixes the problem.

A tiresome descriptor for eye movement are the over-used look, looked and looking. If our eyes are open they are looking and it really doesn’t say much more than that. There’s nothing wrong with using look but never varying with more explicit substitutes is boring and causes echoes.

Try: gaze, glance, surveyed, glared, raked, searched, watched, scanned etc. You’ll find lots of these in the lists below. Notice, too, that some have very specific connotations.

As mentioned above, eyebrows are very much a part of eye movement and play an important part in expressing emotion. Blinking eyelashes show emotion too but at the risk of sounding silly, don’t overuse this one.

And now for my lists. These include eye movement, appearance/expression, disorders and conditions, eye parts and types of eyeglasses.

Eye Movement

Anchored her attention on
Angry gaze sliced
Assessing
Blinked owlishly
Blinking with feigned innocence
Brow furrowed as his mouth turned grim
Brows knitted in a frown
Bushy brows beetled
Cocked a brow in surprise
Dragged his hawkish gaze
Drilled her with
Eyed him demurely/boldly
Eyes caressed
Eyes crossed in exasperation
Eyes retraced their path to
Eyes rolled skyward
Eyes wandered
Flayed him with
Focused on her lips
Followed as the model passed
Gawking at girls
Gaze cruised her figure
Gaze dipped to her
Glance flickered
Glanced sideways
Glare traveled with unnerving thoroughness
Glared daggers [overused]
Inspected the cabin
Inventoried his surroundings
Lashes swept up and she blinked
Leveled a glowering look
Lingered over the script lines
Lowered her eyes/opened
Narrowed to crinkled slits
One heavy brow slanted in strong disapproval
Penetrating gaze probed
Perusing the sea of faces in hopes of
Plugged his eyes back into their sockets
Pried her eyes off the hunk
Probing visual caress
Raked with disdain
Searching the depths
Shifted her angry glare to
Shot him a disgusted glance
Sighted out the corner of her eye
Slammed her eyes shut and hummed the pain
Squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth
Squinted
Staring fixedly
Strange pale eyes darted
Studied with piercing scrutiny
Subtle wink
Swung her restless gaze
Tracking the other man’s gaze
Unglued her eyes from him
Unrelenting stare
Up went his brows
Violet eyes strayed to the
Watched until distance obscured
Wrenched his gaze

Eye Expression and Appearance
[Some of these cross over with Movement]

Moon-eyed
Sloe-eyed
Burned fanatically
Devoured her beauty
Eyes implored
A look designed to peel his hide
All-consuming
Almond shaped
Appraising glance
Astute gaze
Avid eyes attested to his quick wit
Beady rat eyes
Beseeching
Bewildered
Blazed like torches
Boomerang brows like Ayatollah Khomeini’s
Bright with age
Bug-eyed
Bulging with fright
Chaotic, helter-skelter eyebrow—like his mind, unsystematic and fickle
Cold/cool/chilly/icy/frigid
Commanding visage
Cross-eyed
Crudely insulting stare
Deep set beneath heavy black brows
Disapproval gleamed in her eyes
Dissatisfaction plowed his brow
Disturbing smoke-hued
Elliptical eyes with heavy lids
Eyebrows like checkmarks
Eyes all gooey with
Eyes like a shark
Feline eyes
Flashed with gaiety/anger etc
Flat black, dispassionate as bullets
Frankly assessing
Get a load of those blinkers
Gleam of deviltry
Glittering with
Green flinty rocks
Hallows of madness
Hard as nails
Heart-stopping eyes
Held hostage by his eyes
Intent and unwavering/riveted
Irritated visage
Liquid pools of
Luminous glow of happiness
Magnetic
Mellow as the sky at sunset
Narrowed to slits
Nebulous gaze / unreadable
New moon-shaped
Penetrating blue of his eyes
Possessed the power to make her
Rheumy old eyes
Sardonic/disdaining/skeptical/mocking
Sharp with intelligence
Slits for eyes
Sliver of emotion in those cool eyes
Sloped down at the corners like a sad pup
Small evil eyes
Sneaky close-set eyes
So tired his eyeballs seemed to sag out
Steeply arched brows
Sunken in the head
Sympathetic
Tears of remorse flooded
The dark mystery of his eyes
Triangular brows/always surprised
Twenty-twenty vision
Veiled expression of
Visionary eyes
Visual exploration of
Watery eyes
Where did you get those peepers
Wild and frightened
Wore spectacles/glasses/winkers

Eye Disorders and Conditions
[You might like this website]

• Astigmatism: causes fuzzy or blurry vision due to irregular curve in eye lens or cornea.
• Gimlet-eyed: sharp and piercing
• Goggle-eyed: bulging, rolling or staring
• Megalophthalmic: unusually large eyes, often a congenital condition-think goldfish
• Strabismaic: eyes are not properly aligned. Sometimes Cross-eyed or walleyed
• Walleyed: eyes diverging instead of focusing simultaneously on the same point; eyes turned outward away from nose; also used to define a wild irrational staring, glare or fierce look
• Cross-eyed: converging strabismus, eyes turning toward the nose
• Diplopia: double vision
• Cataract: opacity of the lens of the eye, cloudy
• Glaucoma: hardening of the eyeball, often resulting in poor vision or blindness
• Leucoma: disease of the eye in which the cornea becomes white and opaque
• Pinkeye: highly contagious form of conjunctivitis-eye appears rimmed in pink, bloodshot, often swelled and sometimes full of pus.
• Nystagmic: eyeballs moving rapidly and involuntarily
• Ablepsia: lack of sight; blindness
• Farsightedness: ability to see objects at a distance more clearly than close objects
• Nearsighedness:(shortsightedness, myopia) see objects only at close distances

Eye Parts

• Cornea: transparent covering of the iris that produces refraction needed to focus image on retinea
• Eye socket: hollow of bone in face holding eyeball
• Eyeball: globe of the eye
• Iris: colored circular muscle in front of eye that controls amount of light that enters the eye
• Retina: inner layer of the eye wall composed of nervous tissue stimulated by light to send impulses to the brain.
• Optic nerve: nerve that sends sight impulses from the eye to the brain
• Pupil: round contractile aperture in iris of eye, regulating light into the eye
• Vitreous humor: jelly-like material that fills eyeball and forms its shape
• Eye lashes: hair around the eyes

Eye Corrections
[A good overview of modern lenses]

Note: Although it’s not exactly known when eye glasses were first invented, they appear in a 1352 painting.

• Aviator: sunglasses with oversized lenses; associated with pilots
• Ben Franklins: glasses with small ellipitcal, octagonal or oblong lenses worn on the middle of the nose; in slang often referred to as granny glasses
• Bifocals: glasses having split lenses to improve both near and farsightedness
• Contact lenses: lenses worn directly on the eye
• Eyeglasses or spectacles or winkers: worn to correct vision; lenses set in frames that hook behind the ears
• Horn-rimmed: glasses with dark or mottled brown frames; frames are usually heavy
• Monocle:single lens used over eye for correction
• Lorgnettte: eyeglasses on a long handle
• Lorgnon: (French – pince-nez) eyeglasses that clip onto the nose; framless, circular lenses that set on the bridge of the nose
• Loupe: magnifying glass generally held in the eye and used by jewlers

Now let's have some fun. What are some of the funniest mistakes you've made with eye descriptions or eye movement? What is your biggest pet peeve?

About Sharla

Sharla has published three historical romance novels: SONG OF THE WILLOW, LOVE AND FORTUNE, and SILVER CARESS. SONG OF THE WILLOW, her first solo effort, was nominated by “Romantic Times Magazine” for best first historical.

When she’s not writing and researching ways to bedevil her book characters, Sharla enjoys collecting authentically costumed dolls from all over the world, traveling (to seek more dolls!), and reading tons of books. You can find Sharla here at Writers In The Storm or on Twitter at @SharlaWrites.

eye photo credit: Brittany Greene via photopin cc