Descriptive Writing

As I continue to edit my work in progress and think about meeting readers’ expectations, especially when it comes to descriptive writing, I recently came across and interesting review of Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read, “a book that explores how people imagine and remember the things they read.”

I’ve always been loath to write (and dislike reading) detailed descriptions of characters and settings. I’m OK with details that surface as the story progresses when they are relevant, but one of the fastest ways for me to lose interest in a book or story is a front-loaded block of description sentences which have no other purpose, and an abundance of adjectives and adverbs. She was tall and had green eyes. She stepped over the puddles with her long legs while smiling at Bob, showing off her perfect, white teeth… Ugh.

It may sound like a stray tangent to descriptive writing, but I also dislike first person computer games. Though the graphics are more impressive every year, I find them terribly limiting. As this article argues, you have no freedom in such games to fill in the gaps, to make (meaningful) decisions. Perhaps there is a connection between my dislike of PC games and thick blocks of description.

Agency in writing

When I think about descriptive writing, I’m hoping to learn how to better take advantage of what readers already know. That is, evoking what they know and their experiences, so they fill in the blanks. Mendelsund calls this “agency”. That frees me (and all writers) from having to bog down the story-telling with exhaustive detail. Even if the descriptions are good descriptions, if they are not needed because the reader can build the image with just a few prompts, then good description or not, it is unnecessary words.

For instance, it would take me many words to describe an ER room to my satisfaction because I know nothing about them (other than the few times I’ve passed through them in life). But readers of fiction focused on the medical professions could “see” the ER room with just a few choice words from an adept writer.

Ditto readers of contemporary military fiction. If I say “The M16’s bolt carrier stripped two rounds off the top of the magazine…” everyone who has spent enough time with an M16 knows instantly what happened (the weapon is “jammed” and won’t fire), how it looks and how to fix it. For readers unfamiliar with these genres or niches, it would take many words to fully detail these things.

Description Words

So the question is how much to detail — how many adjectives and adverbs, in particular, as well as dedicated sentences to spend describing. What informs these decisions is how well the writers knows and understands his or her genre and readers.

I’m pondering this right now because I’m spending a lot of time ripping out every extraneous word – especially adverbs and adjectives — from my forthcoming military science fiction novel, Lonely Hunter. What seems to be extraneous to me, anyway. Not just in action scenes, but all scenes. In some cases, I’m cutting entire scenes. Those that stay are slimming down. I’m concerned, though, that I’m taking it too far. I have to carefully consider the story and emotional value of every word in doing so.

My Creative Writing Workshop says…

When I shared this with one of my writing groups, this article on “Telling Details” came up. My reading is that the differentiating (“telling detail”) is what makes the setting unique for the reader. Though this is also important, I am currently more concerned about not spending words on the things I would expect my target readers to know in the hopes that the reader could build their own mental image with minimal prompting from me.

Back to “Agency,” which is defined in the article I referenced at the top, as “…the ability to … to shape the world around you, is often an illusion in gaming. True agency is so elusive in video games … books seem to offer more of it to its readers,” according to Peter Mendelsund in his book What We See When We Read.

So, the “telling detail” is what guides and differentiates the generic image the readers is creating with minimal prompting.

Of course, using fewer words and granting agency to your readers can result in the unexpected…

In discussing these two thoughts with my fellow writers, one shared a story about finding out one of her readers had an entirely different view of what one of her main characters looked like. She was surprised and disappointed by this even though the reader liked the story.

I asked her why it mattered to her if her readers imagined her characters differently than she did. I said that I don’t think that is a bad thing. Personally, I would rather have readers like my story than have an identical view of my character’s facial structure. She had no satisfactory answer (to my mind) other than that they did not match her mental image of her characters.

Emma Darwin, the accomplished writer and writing coach on descriptive writing…

Physical details do matter, and in some instance, they will matter critically in our stories. But I don’t think it plays well with readers to introduce such details only when they are needed. In an article on descriptive writing, the always insightful Emma Darwin said (in part):

…it really helps to think about why you want to describe this thing or place, and why just here in the story. Why do we need to know it? Does the narrator choose to tell us about the terrace, and why? Are we in the girl’s PoV, and does she notice the terrace, or is she too busy working out how to dump the girlfriend? And what would she notice? How stuffy and tidy the houses look, with their gardens laid out with a ruler and the lawns shaved? Or how cosy and friendly they are, and now she’ll never live in one? That’s why it’s also a mistake to think of Description as a lump of scene-setting before you can get going on dialogue and action. How is it part of the forward-movement of the story? How do the characters-in-action inter-act with the setting?

I think this all true, but too often less mature writers spring important details on readers only when they are needed, which seems poorly thought out to me. In my novels, I’m introducing them in subtle and innocuous ways (I hope) early on. I expect the same from the works I read. Otherwise, I sense that the author did not spend enough time working out the details and obsessing about the nuances. …just my bias.

An example

Here is an example from my WIP: I’m working on a series of SciFi novels. When I wrote the beginning of the fourth…

…a child is intrigued by how fine ridges of skin appear over the bridge of IrSaa’s (one of the MCs) nose when she smiles. The child gently touches them with her fingertips. It is a short but important moment (as will become clearer in the fourth novel ).

So this detail does not appear as something I just dreamed up for the fourth novel, I have introduced it in the first novel and mention it again in the second and third novels. Both are short, fleeting references. But they provide that “telling detail” that makes her unique as discussed above while also laying the groundwork for it being more significant later.

This is actually one of the few physical details I provide about this MC. By keeping my descriptions limited, it makes my novel a faster read and I’m giving the readers more freedom to define IrSaa in greater detail to their own satisfaction. I hope this makes my writing more accessible and appealing.

I’m curious, though, how other writers attempt to address the challenge of descriptive writing? Your turn.

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At the risk of provoking the popular vs. good debate,  aspiring writers who wish to write well should study the novels that have endured (let’s call them the works of “masters” for this discussion), not the forgettable books on the top 10 bestseller list this week.

By my definition, there is no way to know which of the contemporary writers will be considered “masters” in the future. As such, there is no point in studying contemporary writers to learn how to write well. We can certainly study them to learn how to write what will be popular. Think Jane Austen vs. Tom Clancy. Which one will still be read 100 years from now?

Bestsellers…?

If we look at any list of the best-selling novels of all time (no matter how such lists are formulated), outside of Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, we won’t find many novels on the list that have been written in the last 25 years, perhaps a few more in the last 50 years. This is stunning considering the massive growth in the reading population over the last two-hundred years and how the price of a book relative to average income has dropped dramatically over the centuries (which creates a bias to more recently published books).

So if we want to learn how to write engaging fiction, we should study what has endured for decades if not centuries. In such books, we will find the themes that will resonate for as long as humanity survives, and these themes will be well presented though the writing style may conform to the accepted standards of the time. As we understand that, we can then start to recognize the clever sophistication and techniques such writers use consistent with or in contrast to their time’s “rules” and techniques.

Hemingway, Austen and Frederic

Hemingway seems to be sarcastic at times (to my reading), Austen used Free Indirect Discourse to great effect, Harold Frederic (in the Damnation of Theron Ware — the 1896 novel, which I’m rereading now) carefully manipulates the reader’s perception with his narrator. But no matter how they did it in their time, I suspect all these writers would be highly regarded in any time because they understood how to present engaging, relatable characters in difficult situations. They made us care.

We can study this week’s unremarkable bestsellers to internalize the conventions and “rules” of our time, which make enduring themes easier for contemporary readers to access. Only the passage of time, though, will reveal what endures. And only what endures could we call the work of a master. These are worth studying. …and most are in the public domain, so instead of spending $9 on a “bestseller”, you can spend a fraction of that to read something really good.

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Examples provided by Wikipedia include:

• Quoted or direct speech:

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. “And just what pleasure have I found since I came into this world?” he asked.

• Reported or normal indirect speech:

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world.

• Free indirect speech:

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found since he came into this world?

The dangers of Free Indirect Discourse

There are dangers with FID. For one thing, it can become confusing if it is not clear whose thoughts you are reading. I also think it can become tedious. I rather like having a narrator provide guidance as to what is going on, who is speaking, etc.

All said, as I have been editing my next novel (read an excerpt of Lonely Hunter), I’ve been changing a few passages from indirect speech or narrative exposition, to Free Indirect Discourse. I’ve been conservative to date because it does not feel just right to me yet.

For most of the novel, I’ve kept my narrator at a substantial narrative distance from my Point Of View characters. My intent was to be objective and nonjudgmental in my 3rd person telling. So the few instances I do use FID, it is a dramatic deep dive into the character’s emotions and into her head.

Additionally, I’m only using Free Indirect Speech with my two main characters. It feels like that reinforces that they are the reader’s primary concern.

Arguably we can blame Jane Austen

The consensus is that Jane Austen first popularized the use of FID, but there is evidence that she was not the first. Whoever started, it is a compelling technique. Below is one example of where I have used it in my

Below is one example of where I have used it in my upcoming science fiction novel. Here the main character – Kira – has just been reeled in by her mentor after a private, week-long killing spree targeting the aliens that hunt them. She is starving (as they all are) and disoriented. He has led her to his hut after she embarrassed herself in front of her followers. A few minutes earlier she had insisted that they had no hope of being rescued by their space-faring ancestors, that they were all going to die…

Barber led her to his hut. She clumsily dismounted, leaving her crossbow hanging from the saddle and walked into the dark room, sinking onto a stool at his small table. Kira put her elbows on it and her head into her hands, staring at the stained wood between her fingers. She listened as Barber first worked outside to tie off their horses, then he bumped around the room. After a few minutes, he dropped a plate in front of her with meat, berries and a piece of bread. He also put a mug down beside it.

“Eat.”

Kira slowly lifted her head. A single ray of sunlight angled across her face. The rest of the hut was dark, but she could see the shadow of Barber’s big body awkwardly drop to his cot before he leaned against the wall. She turned her face to the window and the clear sky beyond, at the blue underside of space. She lowered her eyes from the square of cold blue to the plate. Her brow furrowed. There was so much food. She did not understand.

“Eat.”

It was confusing. He had given her a lot of food compared to how little they all ate now. Her mouth was too dry to eat, so she took a drink. Sweet…his honey wine. After several big gulps, she hunched over her plate and picked up the food between her shaking fingertips, piece by piece she lifted it to her mouth. She chewed without looking at him, her ratty hair hanging along the sides of her face. 

Halfway through the meal, Barber said, “You still have hope.”

Kira involuntarily sucked in a big breath as the food slipped through her fingers. With her elbow still on the table, she clinched her disfigured hand into a shaking fist and pushed her forehead against it as the tears ran down her cheeks. She squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her jaw tight. It took all her self-control not to disintegrate. Every breath came in jerky gasps. She was fragile, about to shatter. But he waited for her.

If you missed it, the FID was the four-word sentence with the ellipse in the middle. And if I wrote well, perhaps you did miss it. That would be the point: With FID, you get so sucked into the character’s head that you are them and forget that you are reading. The theory is that dropping all the “He thought,” “She wondered,” etc., brings you deeper into the MC’s head, deeper into the MC’s emotions.

It is hard for me to gauge how well it works. So much of writing is art…putting your work out there and hoping for the best. In this instance, though, it felt like the right place to drop straight into her head, to make more immediate the immense confusion she was feeling and how the taste of the wine could help bring her back.

…let me know what you think.

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Most young writers (of all ages) share their manuscript much too often and much too early in the hopes of getting constructive feedback on their work in progress. For instance, I see a lot of writers share their work after just a first or second draft. Some share “Chapter 1” of a novel, even though chapter 1 is all they have written. Even if such drafts are free of spelling and grammatical errors, sharing a draft so early is a mistake.

Though I’m not sure exactly how a “draft” is defined, I won’t share my work with anyone until I’m on my 10th+ draft. My view is that sharing things too early is inflicting writing on others that is not well prepared, which turns them off and makes it less likely that they will want to look at your work again. And more important in the long run, IMHO, I don’t think most writers even know what their novel is about until they have written it and rewritten it 10 times and obsessed about it for a year or more. I didn’t.

I was recently asked if I obsess about how people will react to my opening scene, if so, shouldn’t I share early drafts of my work?

Yes, I do obsess about how people react to the intro…and every other aspect. But I think novels are a whole package, which is why I rarely provide feedback on just pieces of novels or early drafts. I don’t know (and I don’t think anyone knows) how to comment on a beginning without reading the whole.

Good beginnings work because they stick in that part of your head that responds to good writing. They hang there, helping the reader fit the flow of the whole into a pattern that resonates in a deep and powerful way. This is why I think beginnings are too important to be written first. Which is in turn why novel manuscripts should not be shared until they are mature and well-worked.

But to keep this real, and by way of example, the novel I’m putting through a writing workshop right now I initially wrote between Dec ’13 and Feb ’14. In Jan of ’14, I showed the first 70 pages to my wife and twin teenagers. They liked it, so I finished it and showed it to them again. They still liked it, and asked me what happens next? So I wrote the sequel between March of ’14 and June of ’14. In writing the sequel, I got a lot smarter about what the first book was about. So I rewrote the first book in parallel.

The second book I did not show to my wife and kids until it was “done”. They did not see a single page, and I had not said a word about it until I handed it to them after it was on its ~10th draft, and having worked it over with grammar and style checkers.

Without warning or preamble, one night I handed them a 3-inch stack of paper. Two of the three sat in the living room for three hours in silence except to hand pages from one to the other. I confess that was a nervous three hours for me! Fortunately, they love it (of course, they are family so that only counts for so much). My other kid did not finish it; the novel is dark, which she does not like, which is fair.

After my wife and one daughter finished it that night, we had a 15 min discussion about it; I had two questions for them (“Did it keep your interest? If not, where did you lose interest?”). They shared a few other comments. Since then we have barely spoken about it (except about once every three months they ask me “How much longer until you publish Lonely Hunter?” To which I always respond, “Oh…I dunno. Eventually. It’s not ready.”).

After my wife and kid read it, and I made a few tweaks, I shared both novels with three beta readers I had found (one of my kids’ friends — which was kind of weird — a person at my writing workshop, and an old friend who likes the genre). All very much liked both novels. Of course, there were caveats. Each provided a couple pages of notes. And, of course, each had their own bias because of how they were connected to me personally (a perennial problem with betas).

That was 18 months ago. Since then I have tweaked the sequel, and I wrote most of the third. But I have spent most of my time rewriting and expanding the first novel without showing anyone a page of it (except a few pages to my wife), or talking about it. As noted, the first novel is currently going through a writing workshop.

I’m my biggest critic (I think). Which is why I’ve gone through 4 first chapters…the first 3 just did not feel right. I’ve made other big changes, too since my wife and kids read it (added 40,000 words of new content and deleted about 5,000). When I do give it to my family again, it will be interesting to see how they react. In all events, I feel like I’m getting near the end, and I hope to publish Lonely Hunter this fall.

When I do, I will be looking for some Advanced Reviewers that will post to Amazon upon publication. I’ll be sending early copies to them. Let me know if you are interested.

In summary, as a writer you should write hard and fast and think about what you are doing, characterization, pace, plot development, etc. But what I want to also encourage you to do is take the time to really mature your manuscripts before you engage beta readers or your writing workshop. Writing is fun, but it is also work, and our readers expect the best quality we can deliver at every step. You’ll also find that you’ll have more beta readers if you have a reputation for giving them a good product.

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