Tiffany Studios Buying Guide

A year ago I was working on my military sci-fi series when on a lark I started putting together some notes on a hobby of mine: collecting antique Tiffany Studios pieces. I certainly can’t afford lamps or the high-end pieces, but I inherited a small collection from my parents, which I have occasionally added to. As time has gone by, buying antiques has shifted from estate sales on dusty yards in front of rundown houses to online auctions. 

Buying antiques online, though, is fraught with danger. 

As I began to buy online, I decided to document for others how to do it safely. One thing led to another, and my notes turned into a book. As it turned out, it is about 80% buying guide, 10% history of Tiffany and his various enterprises, and 10% personal history.

I’m very happy with it, and it has been well received. As I worked on it, I also added chapters on Tiffany Favrile glass, and Tiffany Furnaces pieces. I plan to update it a bit from time to time as I own (at least briefly) new pieces. You can see it on Amazone at this link: Tiffany Studios Buying Guide

But it is time to get back to fiction…

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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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I think about writing like I think about long distance biking. I (used) to do a century (100-mile) bike ride about once every other month and even tried a double century (but only made it 172 miles ). Tour de France rider I am not.

The analogy is this: Writing is a long-haul exercise, just like any endurance sport. And if you are into endurance sports you know you are going to hit really bad times along the way. It’s going to happen. You have to be ready for it, or you will give up when you hit the hard times.

For instance, when I start a century, the morning is cool, the bikes are pretty, there are a lot of sexy bodies around, everyone is laughing and joking. It’s all good. 25 miles in we are leading the pack and feeling good, rolling hard and fast, rotating lead, drafting off each other.

At 40 miles in, the pack has fallen apart, and my back hurts and the wind has come up and the sun is baking (this is Texas in the summer, after all).

At the 49 mile mark, I blow a tire, and it has to be the back, so what a bitch. Headwinds now, too. As a biker you learn early on that whenever there are winds, it is a headwind.

At 55 miles I’m thinking this is a shitty way to spend a day, but it was my choice. I could be with my kids at the pool, or with my buddies at a football game. Why am I doing this?

At 70 miles I feel like throwing up; something has upset my stomach…maybe those homemade cookies at the 25 mile stop.

I am on a highway by myself when I reach 80 miles, and I’m no longer sure where I am…if I’m even on the right route. My phone battery is dead and I’ve used my spare tube. My average speed is dropping, and I just don’t have the energy to keep it up.

Then, lo!, at the 90-mile mark I see a sign that says “Riders, this way” and I am on track.

At 95, I come across some of the people I started with, and strangely, I begin picking up speed. How weird.

100 miles and I’m pissed because I thought I was done, but more work to do…the “100-mile” course is really 102 miles, but I know where I am. And then…I cross the finish line. It was not pretty, and I did not set any land speed records, but I got it done. By myself.

It may sound crazy, but long-distance biking keeps me sane as a writer because both are endurance sports, and I know — I know — there are bad times ahead. But I also know, I’ll get through them as long as I don’t lose my commitment, never give up or give in.

The same goes for writing. Steel yourself to know that you are going to — figuratively speaking — have headwinds and blown tires. Life is long. Take a break. Catch your breath. Get back on your bike and keep on pedaling, keep on writing.

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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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