Description in General

Last post, I was talking mainly about description in general, and various changes in what’s been considered “good description” over time. This time, I’m going to go for talking about current considerations for description itself, and things that affect what works and what doesn’t. Like most things

Read more

Fashions in Description

Writing, like everything else human beings do, has fads and fashions that shift and change over time. One of the most obvious has to do with how description is handled in fiction. A lot of really early works don’t spend a lot of time describing mead-halls, hostelries,

Read more

Letting the Cat out of the Bag

Some years back, I had a writer friend who’d switched from being a journalist to writing fiction. She told me once that for her, the hardest part of writing fiction was learning not to automatically apply the basic journalism tenet: “Tell them what you’re gonna tell them,

Read more