Let's talk about descriptions

[Heliotrope]

What I like about your descriptions, Chessie, is that they say something about who the character is, not just what she looks like. Your descriptions speak to the character's personality. I think I do this too:

Anna could never be regarded a conventional beauty. She was too sinewy. Too strong. She lacked the voluptious curves and hourglass waist required of women of her time. She was flat. Hard. But with wide grey eyes and eyebrows that turned upward at the ends, giving her the allusion of a child, much younger than herself, or perhaps a pixie who had spent her life in the woods, scrambling over logs and bathing in frozen streams. She had an earthiness to her. Like a root. Even her hair was the color of a pinecone, though it shone more that it should to earn such a comparison.

I had never seen M. Nadeau look concerned. Stern, perhaps, but never concerned. He stared at me for a long time, scratching his bald spot. He wore a blue Tommy Bahama shirt covered in large palm trees. He wore Birkenstock sandals with wool socks pulled almost to his knees. He had been, in my view, the sort of person who was chronically unconcerned. His now wrinkled brow worried me.

“Bonjour, April.” I wondered if it was possible for a person to be rabid. She looked like a skunk in a cartoon if the cartoon skunk was a woman who wore shimmery coral lipstick and foamed at the mouth. Pushing fifty, she was so tanned her skin shriveled up on itself giving her face the puckered look of a cat’s rear end. Her tropicana skin was a stark contrast to her bleached hair, which she wore pinned to the top of her head in a massive pile of frizzy curls. The overall affect was not what one would consider attractive. Unless you were a male cartoon skunk.

 

[Chessie2]

That's what description should do imo, is tell the reader who the character is, what the setting feels like, what a situation is about. Description is where you feed the reader from your imagination and let them digest it to make up their mind about the rest of the events happening in the story.

 

[FifthView]

That's what description should do imo, is tell the reader who the character is, what the setting feels like, what a situation is about. Description is where you feed the reader from your imagination and let them digest it to make up their mind about the rest of the events happening in the story.

Since the beginning of this thread, I've wanted to make a simply-worded list of the things description can do.

Clarity would fall at the top of that list, most likely, although I'm not going to be so dogmatic as to say it's definitely at the top.

 

[Heliotrope]

Since the beginning of this thread, I've wanted to make a simply-worded list of the things description can do.

Clarity would fall at the top of that list, most likely, although I'm not going to be so dogmatic as to say it's definitely at the top.

Interesting... I'm not sure clarity is something description should do... I think it is something it should be.

I agree with Chessie that it should: set the feeling or tone of a scene, establish characterization, establish plot... it is the backbone of narrative. But it should be clear. It should be concise. It should help move things forward. It should not confuse the reader. It should not distract from the story.... I'm sure there are a billion other things.

 

[FifthView]

I think it's do because not having a white room is important for letting a reader know what's going on.

But, I've also had a bit of mental congestion in trying to keep description from fading into showing, when they are probably distinct methods, whatever the overlap.

 

[Chessie2]

All prose/narrative should be clear. That's what a writer works towards from the beginning. Doesn't matter if the passage is descriptive or dialogue, etc.

 

[FifthView]

All prose/narrative should be clear. That's what a writer works towards from the beginning. Doesn't matter if the passage is descriptive or dialogue, etc.

I was thinking along the lines of an action scene in a room. Sometimes the advice is given, make sure you've described what is in the room if those objects will be important to the fight. You might avoid the situation where a character is just able to grab a vase and hit the opponent over the head with it but the reader is like, Vase? Where did that come from?

The same sort of thing can happen in lots of situations. I'd mentioned in another comment a city guard being lenient with an MC because her blond hair reminds him of his sister. Blond hair? I've been picturing her as a brunette? I suppose there's not an either/or, or only two extremes to clarity, totally clear and totally confusing, heh. I could get over the blond hair thing by forgetting it a few moments after, because I get the idea and can understand how that MC got by the guard without being hauled off to jail.

I do agree that clarity is an issue in other aspects and that description should be clear.

Edit: Also, this is where my conundrum of description vs showing, as different things, comes in to play. During the action scene in that room, before the fight breaks out, you could say that his opponent runs his finger lightly along the painted lines of the vase. This, while they are having a tense conversation. So you can introduce the vase's presence without taking the time to describe the whole room first. Is this a case of showing rather than describing? Or are you describing that character's action (tracing the design), and it's still description? Using description in two ways, but still getting the vase there anyway before the fight breaks out?

 

[Chessie2]

Well, that's why I describe characters upon entry into the story. That way I'm not bogged down with needing to give description again as something is happening or about to happen. There are also places throughout the story where you can fit a line or two in of description:

Chloe came out of the bathroom. He greeted her.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked, eyes wide. “You know that—”
“I’ve been waiting for nearly twenty minutes. What’s going on?”
She stomped over to him and pulled him into her room. It was exactly how he envisioned it— comfortable, soft and seductive just like her.
Unfortunately, she also looked none the ready to go out into public.
“I can’t go,” said Chloe as she adjusted the bandana on her head. “There’s simply too much to do and getting away is impossible before we need to leave for the theater.”

 

[FifthView]

She stomped over to him and pulled him into her room. It was exactly how he envisioned it— comfortable, soft and seductive just like her.

Well and this is great, because we are getting his impressions of her. Probably, there's a bit of rose-colored glasses, heh. Another person, breaking into the room after they've gone out, might have an entirely different impression of the room.

But maybe he has a thing against bandanas? Else, why does she look none the ready to go out?

 

[Chessie2]

You're missing context. The reader by this point already knows that she was doing chores upstairs while he was downstairs waiting for her to take her to lunch (they are in the middle of a fight but he doesn't know it yet, lol).

 

[FifthView]

I'm still a little hooked on this idea of showing v describing, hacking away, trying to split them.

We have info that we want, or need, to get into the story. Maybe it's just needed for this one scene, or this moment in the scene.

Focus seems to be an issue. I'd relate it to that earlier issue of "info-dumping" or long, drawn out descriptions, and steal from an earlier example (but paraphrasing):

• The sun bore down on him, baking the sand under his feet, bending his back and stealing his energy; it forced him to shuffle along while images of fountain sodas and milkshakes danced around his toes—always out of reach.
• He shuffled along under the desert sun, drawn by the dancing fountain sodas and milkshakes that teased his toes.

Ok, perhaps these aren't great, but I was inspired by my description of trying to get a vase in a room, heh. An author begins a tale and he wants the reader to know this is taking place in a desert and we have a character being affected by long exposure to the sun. How to introduce desert, sun, and the effects of that situation?

"Affected by the sun" makes me think of passive voice. Affected by zombies. In passive voice, the actor or thing causing a situation is often left unmentioned. Unmentioned by whom? (Heh, the zombie author.) But the author doesn't want the location and sun to be unmentioned; that info is important to the setting. So he mentions it, makes the sun active, focuses on the sun, in the first example. Makes explicit.

In the second example "desert sun" pretty much tells what's needed, but the character is the active agent in the first half. Often, whatever is the active agent in a sentence grabs the focus of the reader. In the first, we are looking at the sun first. Even if our attention is turned somewhat to "him," "sand," "feet," up to "back," back to sun in "it," then to "him" until we finally get to the dancing things -- and back to "toes" --wait, what was the focus? This situation.

Neither approach is necessarily better than the other; depends, I think, on what the author wants to accomplish. But sometimes our focus on setting, a thing we know is very important, can draw our attention and we can go on and on and on and end up with a pace-killing paragraph.

In the second example, more is implied than made explicit. Do we need to know that effect of "bending his back and stealing his energy?" Hmmmm. But we are explicit about his location in the second example, even if we don't make the setting the focus. It's a desert because there's a "desert sun." Surely a reader will understand what that means. Then the mention of those dancing fountain sodas and milkshakes will make sense to the reader. Ah, hallucinations. Guy's been there for awhile.

What if instead we did this in our opening line:

He shuffled along, drawn by the dancing fountain sodas and milkshakes that teased his toes.

Perhaps this will confuse. Perhaps we haven't communicated to our reader the setting. Or maybe some readers will have a good suspicion of the setting. Or not. Maybe this character is simply insane, drunk, or very high and is stumbling along a street. I'm going to switch to present tense:

He shuffles along, drawn by the dancing fountain sodas and milkshakes that tease his toes. He catches one, a milkshake, chocolate. It is gritty, too gritty, and tastes like shit. He tosses it to the ground and turns to berate the soda jerk. Damn kid put something in it. Where's that Joey? Was it Jimmy? He spins too fast and falls. He's on the beach and the sun is shimmering on the water. He crawls toward the water, claws the sand. He wants to get that grit out of his mouth...

Okay, I could go on. I'm not sure this is very good anyway, so best I stop. How to solidify that this is a desert and not merely a beach, after that last bit? Do I need to? I'm likely to break the hallucination at some point, even if momentarily. Or maybe I'll have a camel appear. He won't know it's a camel at first; but hopefully my description clues the reader in...

TL;DR: If information is important, we can focus on it, describe it, or we can make it a part of the description, and either way get it out there. Also, that last example is the sort of thing that would have me going on and on and on in a rough draft, not knowing exactly how to get the info out finally in a non-confusing way, heh. I mean, I don't know the ideal length of such a thing and would wonder if I'm being far too squishy in trying to avoid saying

It was a desert, and he'd been there too long already.

 

[Chessie2]

That last line would suffice.

 

[FifthView]

That last line would suffice.

There you go again. Being succinct, to the point, and not at all confusing.

 

[Chessie2]

There you go again. Being succinct, to the point, and not at all confusing.

? Were you wanting a longer response? Sorry, I just don't know what more to say. :/

 

[FifthView]

No, I liked it!

 

[Heliotrope]

He shuffles along, drawn by the dancing fountain sodas and milkshakes that tease his toes. He catches one, a milkshake, chocolate. It is gritty, too gritty, and tastes like shit. He tosses it to the ground and turns to berate the soda jerk. Damn kid put something in it. Where's that Joey? Was it Jimmy? He spins too fast and falls. He's on the beach and the sun is shimmering on the water. He crawls toward the water, claws the sand. He wants to get that grit out of his mouth...

This is the kind of shit I love. I thought this was magic.

I'm reading Slaughter House- Five right now, and this passage stuck out to me.

*Context: The MC, Billy Pilgrim believes he has been abducted by aliens. These aliens can see in four dimensions, and so see all points of time as happening at the same time. They see every moment in time the same we we would see the Rocky Mountains. People, to the aliens, are long centipedal creatures with a thousand sets of legs, starting with fat baby legs at one end and ending with skinny old person legs at the end. Billy Pilgrim gets a book of theirs, and finds they don't read it chronologically (and, in fact, the entire novel itself is not written chronologically). The alien explains to Billy:

Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message - describing a situation. A scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully so that when seen all at once they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time.

I think, the point of description, like the beautiful desert one above, is to describe a situation. It is the writer's job to chose each description carefully, so that when they are all put together, they paint a picture. They create something that feels 'real' or 'authentic'.

To me, a good description will be a combo of telling/showing. But the combo pulls the pieces together into one clump of information that creates an image of life that is beautiful, and surprising, and deep.

 

[Heliotrope]

What I'm loving about Vonnegut is how every single description he gives cuts like a knife. You start a paragraph and it is all describ-y and you wonder where he is going with this and why it is important, and then he will end the paragraph with the punch line and it does exactly what he set out to do. It sets a scene. It creates a 'feeling'.

Billy Pilgrim has just arrived at a German POW camp in WW2. The other Americans are being greeted by the English, who have been in the camp for four years.

There were long tables set for a banquet. At each place was a bowl made from a can that had once contained powdered milk. A smaller can was a cup. A taller, more slender can was a tumbler. Each tumbler was filled with warm milk.

At each place was a safety razor, a washcloth, a package of razor blades, a chocolate bar, two cigars, a bar of soap, ten cigarettes, a book of matches, a pencil and a candle.

Only the candle and the soap were of German origin. They had a ghostly, opalescent similarity. The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the state.

And so it goes.

OMG! You read the whole thing thinking OH yay! Finally poor old Billy might get a break! At least some warm milk and a shave! But he cuts it at the end with the horrible, biting truth that no one is safe. Ever. They are using soap created by the fat of the dead, and they are next. The whole description works together, in a little package, to create a whole picture. A whole 'feeling' for the reader.

 

[skip.knox]

>how do you guys know when it's right to stop...

We don't. I often get the feeling that the sum total of writing advice consists of this: do just enough and no more. What constitutes just enough varies not only by author, not only by story, not only by scene--it varies by reader as well. So you're pretty well doomed to fail, in someone's eyes.

I've said it before, but it bears repeated: to thine own self be true. I may not have made that up on my own.

Write. Please yourself first. The best, first place for improvement is when you fail yourself, when you know something isn't working and it's failing so badly even you, the author, can see it. That's where all the advice proved helpful for me. I could ask myself, does this really advance the story? Does it make me care about the character(s)? If I took it out, what would suffer? What if I shifted the POV here? Are there adverbs running around adverbially? Has the passive voice been used?

Und so weiter.

If, otoh, the passage works for you, then happy dance! That one belongs in the current draft, the one destined to be read by beta readers, crit groups, editors. If they come back telling you there's too much description, or too little, then you can reassess. But there is no way to be sure going in. Even experienced writers miss the mark, at least in the eyes of some readers, and that's no worry either. It's unavoidable.

 

[FifthView]

I thought this was magic.

Why thanks! I enjoyed writing it. It was a little stream of consciousness play for me. I'd stubbornly included the sodas and milkshakes in my first two examples, felt they were a little weird and wondered whether someone would comment on their weirdness, so when I removed "desert sun" and decided to leap into an extended sort of attempt to describe the place, I had to feel my way through how this character would be reacting to those things. Make them important, in other words. At least important to the character. Give them a place. It's not the sort of writing I'd normally do; perhaps I ought to do it more often.

I'm a little troubled by the idea of consistency in style. I've been thinking that beginning in a style that uses vivid images (or vivid imagery) and using them consistently throughout a story will mean that readers who come to the story and stick with it will be more likely to stick with the story to the end through all that. Lengthy passages of vivid description, if this is normal for the novel (the style of the novel) might mean being able to get away with that, not throwing readers out of the reading. But if a style uses those things not at all or in a very limited way, suddenly throwing something intricate into the story could be a wrong move.

Obviously, this is a simplification. Surely there's some sort of continuum, thus stylistic approaches that can combine simplicity and complexity of description depending on what is happening.

 

[Svrtnsse]

Nothing's ever easy.