ALISSA YARBROUGH

Our society is a visually controlled one, saturated with cinema and flashy videos in order to maintain our shortening attention spans. I'm seeing the same drift in fiction, a molding of the writing to keep up with the dopamine in the action-packed movies. We are showing all right, but along the same vein, we're going overboard in describing every detail as we would see in a motion picture.

There is beauty in the arrangement of words, and while I understand in fiction you cannot bore the reader with an overabundance of descriptions and flowery phrases, there needs to be a balance between keeping the pace of the story while not altogether ditching eloquence for directness.

You must be well-read in the genre you are entering. As a writer pursuing publishing for my first suspense novel, I have read that...

I'm going to shake it up a little with this month's post. Trivia time!!! Plus, I want your opinion with a "this-one-or-that-one question."

The game has changed in this modern writing industry. Everything you think you know, flush it down the literary toilet.