Heroic Writing, part 23: Descriptions I

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Today I want to discuss something that I am not always very good at- something, in fact, that I am trying to improve on.  The fact that I am trying to improve on certain aspects of my writing should not, of course, be any surprise to anyone- there are remarkably few people who are good at everything, after all, and we hate those people, anyways.

Here is my particular bugaboo, and it’s a doozy: I am indifferent at best about providing physical descriptions and dressing a scene.  As a writer, this is problematic because my readers do not, in fact, live in my head and have full access to everything I envision as I write.  The problem I run into, however, is in knowing what to include and what to leave out, and I think it’s a common problem.

In my experience, amateur writers tend to fall into two categories: writers who don’t include enough detail and writers who provide an overabundance of detail.  Both of these approaches have problems in that they leave the reader without a good sense of the scene.

Most authors start by failing to include enough detail- they’ll name their characters without giving details regarding their physicality, they’ll use weak, imprecise language, and they’ll fail to give the scene a sense of immediacy and solidity.  When I describe a character as “beautiful”, for example, it does not really tell you anything.  Heck, it doesn’t even tell you gender.  It is more effective if I tell you that a character is tall or heavy-set or strong-boned, because those give you specific details to latch onto.  Similarly, it is rarely enough to describe a setting as, for example, a simple sitting room, although I’ve been known to do that.  Better is to say that the action happens in an elegantly appointed sitting room; that there are people sitting on a sofa and an expensive entertainment center against the wall opposite the picture window.  By giving just a few specific details, I dress the scene enough that it doesn’t feel barren, but I don’t give so much that the detail becomes background noise.

This may seem counterintuitive- after all, if I give you every detail of everything that is in a scene, shouldn’t you then have a greater understanding of everything that happens?  The answer, obviously, is no.  What happens is that you become overloaded with minutiae and can’t focus on the important things in the foreground.  You have a situation of not being able to see the forest because of all the trees that are in the way, blocking your vision.

Let’s go back to our example of the “beautiful” person.  More specifically, let me talk about Tyche.  The common response to being told that you need to include more detail, at least from my experience as a writing teacher, is to add so much detail that it exceeds the reader’s capacity to process it.

If someone asked me to give more details about what Tyche looked like, my first reaction might be to add a surfeit of details.  Tyche is six feet tall in her stocking feet, she has moderate-to-large breasts, she is muscular, she has tanned skin, long dark brown or black hair worn loose, brown eyes, large hands with long fingers, and so forth and so on.  In fact, I might even go further, giving precise measurements including height, weight, circumference of her waist and various muscle groups, hip-waist-chest ratios, and bra size.  The thing is, unless I’m making an actual dressmaker’s dummy, most of those numbers are superfluous- and some of them (such as bra size) are more arbitrary than you realize, as well.  The next thing I would be likely to overexplain would be her wardrobe, followed by whatever she happened to be holding and whatever she happened to be doing.

There has to be a happy medium- it is very rarely appropriate to describe every detail of a scene; similarly, it is generally a mistake to leave your readers with no guidance whatsoever.  If I was forced to choose, I would encourage authors to overwrite- put in all of that extraneous detail- and then chop it out ruthlessly during the editing process.  Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style lists Rule Seventeen in the Elementary Rules of Composition as “Omit Needless Words.”  Steven King, in On Writing goes further and says that your second draft of any story ought to be ten percent fewer words than your first draft.  Whether you like Steven King’s writing or not, this is good advice.  I’ll add one more rule from Strunk and White- Rule Four in An Approach to Style says to write with nouns and verbs and makes the point that nouns and verbs are stronger in a sentence than adjectives and adverbs and, therefore, your writing should prefer accurate nouns and precise verbs over flowery descriptive language that serves no purpose.

One last thing for this week: consider that words used to describe a scene that do not also describe actions are, for the most part, wasted words.  Description of what the observer sees, hears, smells, and feels are fundamentally important to a story, but if they are not given relevance by action, the reader is likely to gloss over them, possibly never noticing them.  Whenever possible, seek to make your descriptions intrinsic to your explanations of the events.

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Hidden-Traveler's avatar
So try and keep Description porn to a minimum.