Hey, Watch This! How to draw readers in with cinematic storytelling.

Readers sometimes tell me they feel as if they’re watching my stories like a movie instead of reading them. I should probably pretend I do that on purpose, but I think it’s just a by-product of the many years I spent reporting magazine stories for Southern Living. (Once a travel writer, always a travel writer.)

Back in my magazine days, a big part of producing successful travel pieces was making each place come alive for readers. That meant engaging as many of their senses as possible, a skill that also helps create tangible, authentic fictional settings. It’s all in the details.

My novels are set in the South, so let’s say I have an Alabama protagonist watching a storm blow in. Is she inside, looking out a window? If so, is it open or closed? Then again, maybe she’s outside. Standing in the open or sheltered by a porch? Is the wind cool or warm? What color is the sky? Is the lightning close or distant? Is it raining yet? What scents are in the air? How strong is the wind—blowing my character’s hair away from her face or blowing the tin roof off her house? Sight, sound, smell, touch . . .

For any Southern setting, I have an unwritten rule: There shall be food—specifically, Southern food appropriate to the occasion and location. This feast, observed by young Pete McLean, follows an Alabama funeral in Missing Isaac:

The table, buffet, and kitchen counters were covered with platters of fried chicken, casseroles, and heaping bowls of potato salad, along with black-eyed peas, butter beans, creamed corn, green beans, candied sweet potatoes, and mountains of dinner rolls. Pete counted five plates of deviled eggs, three chocolate layer cakes, a red velvet cake, four pecan pies, a ham from Aunt Virgie’s smokehouse, a big Mason jar of her homemade mustard, and a disturbing number of congealed salads made from Jell-O.

If the same funeral were set in Louisiana, the menu would include gumbo, boudin, jambalaya, etc.

Flora and fauna matter, too. If I put live oak trees in Mobile, well and good, but I can’t put them in Birmingham because they don’t grow here. Ditto alligators. Hurricanes and tornados? Yes. Earthquakes? A rarity.

The key is to deliver the kind of detailed, accurate description that puts readers in your story. So go for it! Take them to the movies.

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