A long time ago, a would-be writer told me in all seriousness that the important things in writing were the action and the dialog. Things like description and setting were just window-dressing, things that were only important to “literary readers.” In the intervening years, visual media have become more central in everyone’s lives; nowadays, I hear it expressed more in tones of desperation, by writers arguing that there’s no point in spending a thousand words in an attempt to give the readers the same impact as a picture.
I knew even back at the start that there was something deeply wrong with ignoring things like landscape and setting, but at the time I couldn’t articulate why. Now I can.
Context.
Context matters. It matters to the characters, and it matters to the readers. Here’s an example:
Jane walked into the room and saw a small, wet, dark brown blotch on the floor.
That description has detail, but lacks context. The reader is going to expect Jane to want to clean up the mess, but they may be a bit thrown off if they’re expecting her to make a face and reach for rubber gloves and bleach, and instead she rolls her eyes and grabs a dish sponge and a clean spoon. Because the description, as given, doesn’t mention that the room she’s walking into is the kitchen, and that there’s a half-melted bowl of chocolate-chunk ice cream with chocolate sauce sitting on the counter.
People, including characters, behave differently in different circumstances. Readers interpret their behavior differently, depending on where and when it happens. If Bob and Maria have a nasty fight halfway through their story, it matters whether that fight takes place in the supposed privacy of their thin-walled apartment after a night out at the bar, in the more real privacy of their car parked out at the far end of a dirt road miles from anywhere else, or in the middle of a formal dinner party in front of a bunch of important clients. No matter how the couple chooses to argue, the way the context affects their behavior tells the reader something important about their individual personalities and their relationship with each other.
If, in the privacy of their home or car, they trade pseudo-polite barbs that shred each other emotionally while never raising their voices, we get a very different impression from the couple who walks in the front door and immediately start a shouting-screaming-and-throwing-things argument. The reverse is also true; the couple trading politely barbed comments at the formal dinner party doesn’t get the same reader reaction as the couple who wreaks the party by screaming and throwing their wine in each other’s face right in front of the rest of the guests.
The difference in context also leads the reader to ask different questions. If the couple comes home and fights in private, the reader is more likely to assume that this is their true face, whether they’re screaming or sarcastic. So the readers ask questions like, “Why are these people faking being in love in public?” or “What caused this couple to fall into this pattern?” And of course, if the argument is bad enough, “Why are these two people still together?” If, instead, the characters make a huge scene in public, the questions tend to be “Is this what they’re really like, or are they faking the fight for some reason? What’s really going on? Did something unexpectedly break their public personas, or do they do this all the time?”
Any of the possible scenarios can work, depending on the story. However, if all the writer provides is the dialog, without the private/public context, some portion of the readers are going to assume the “wrong” context – they’ll picture the screaming argument happening in private, and then be puzzled when it’s all over the gossip columns in the morning paper, or they’ll picture the polite sarcasm in public, and decide that all the other characters are a bit dim because none of them notice the undercurrents in the conversation that none of them actually heard.
For some writers, context is one of the hardest things to get down on the page. To them, it is so incredibly obvious that the characters are contestants in a track-and-field meet that they never think to mention things like audience reaction, or which event (hurdles, sprints, pole-vault…) they’re on. Sometimes, it’s even difficult to tell who won the heat because the author is so busy with the viewpoint character’s internal monologue about their nerves and putting in effort and being glad it’s over … all in terms that could apply to anything from a shot-put to a hundred-yard-dash to a relay race. About the only time this is justifiable is when the viewpoint character is so totally self-absorbed that they miss the starting gun.
“Providing the context” can be as straightforward as saying “Jane walked into the kitchen” or as complicated as two pages establishing the attendees at the dinner party and the escalating tension as one member of the couple makes misstep after misstep. The hard part is noticing what one is leaving out (because it’s so obvious) and what one is leaning on too much (because the reader really needs twenty-five pages of backstory in order to understand this line).
Revision after letting it sit for a week or two (or a month or two) helps see what you forget to mention.
Assuming, of course, you can remember yourself.
“In the intervening years, visual media have become more central in everyone’s lives; nowadays, I hear it expressed more in tones of desperation, by writers arguing that there’s no point in spending a thousand words in an attempt to give the readers the same impact as a picture.”
“Authors of the past wrote for readers who had more time for background. To have this background often increases the pleasure of a story but the radio and movies have accustomed us to a fast pace in writing. Much of what was valued in a book make modern readers impatient.” Hilda Grieder, The Book of Knowledge (1954)
The last bit called to mind something from the opening chapter of Tom Brown’s School Days which is 14 pages on the history of Brown family and the hills and vales in which they lived. [Each region has its own attractions and I’m going to introduce you to one in detail]; “for on this subject I must be prosy; so those that don’t care for England in detail may skip the chapter.”
I read the whole thing. It was delightful. I think I tend toward the 25 pages, though!
Writers should remember their descriptions can do what the camera does not.
For instance, you can’t give the exact color of a woman’s ball gown, but it matters a lot where you call it snow-white, lily-white, bone-white, or salt-white.
Or one character can notice that the street is lined with duplex built twenty years ago, and another can notice the half-hearted gardens.
I like Mary’s point. We’re often best served not by trying to reproduce a photo-realistic image in words, but by using words adroitly to induce a mood or overtone in the course of a concise description — as with the “white” examples.
I’m not original in noting that all art is a process of subtraction. We never try to show the whole world, only the part that works for our story. If we don’t subtract enough, we end up with chaotic clutter. If we subtract too much, we get what motivated this entry of our hostess’.
To put it another way, if a movie pans out too far, all we see is a rotating planet. But if a movie maker subtracts more than people are used to, you get a black and white silent movie – which I think is great, but won’t fill most movie houses.
The trick, as always, is knowing how much.
When I’ve had this debate in assorted online forums, the wannabe writers espousing no description bring out in me a kneejerk reaction of “Can you actually be any lazier??”
I like my reading (and my writing efforts) to emulate Impressionist paintings. To supply just enough effort so I can see a sailing boat on the water. I don’t need so much detail that the knots in the rigging are precise and accurate. I know I surely want more than a blank canvas with a sticky note “Imagine a sail boat”.