Writing Tip 20 - Mutters

Muttering your writing to yourself as you go can be very helpful for a few reasons. You'll know right away what sounds better, what sounds natural, and most importantly what sounds unnatural.

So get in the habit of whispering to yourself as you write/type. Have full conversations with yourself from both sides, and even making the faces and expressions you're imagining the characters having can be a great for helping yourself find the words to describe what you mean. When you do this, pay attention to what the muscles in your face are doing and how your tone sounds. What words you're enunciating and if you're pausing through the sentence because these can be key markers for what you should be writing. For example, pausing can indicate a place for a comma or a period or a "...". And knowing which muscles are moving can help you infer what the expression is (i.e the veins on their neck bulge and their face turns a little red as their lips pinched into a tight line, eyes narrowing) rather then just saying, "they were angry".

If you have trouble with this, I recommend getting a small mirror or opening your front face camera on your phone and physically looking at your face while making the expression you're aiming for so that you can see what exactly is moving and you can pick what to describe. You can even look up pictures of a specific expression if you know what it's called. (like a sneer for example.)