Description how-to tips

I think it was in fifth grade that I learned my first important principle of description, which a number of commenters on last week’s post mentioned—namely, to make use of all five senses, not just sight. Poul Anderson said once that he went over every page to make sure he hit at least three out of the five.

This is especially important for novelists because so much of the story-telling competition—movies, TV, streaming—is primarily audio-visual. These formats are limited in how they convey smell, touch, and taste. Of course, writing has to provide those senses indirectly, too. Books don’t actually smell like cookies baking in one chapter and lemon dish soap in the next, or feel smooth on one page and rough and prickly on the next.

The advantage that books have is that all of the description is in words. That means that the author gets to choose which things to draw attention to by mentioning them.

People tend to place more importance on things they experience directly. In a movie, that’s anything that the viewer sees or hears. The viewer sees a red car, so they’re more likely to notice and remember the color even if it’s not important to the story. The scent of the chocolate chip cookies baking is invisible, and the viewer can only judge by the characters’ dialog and actions (especially if they’re still in the oven).

In a novel, saying “He saw a red car” is on the same mental level as “She smelled cookies baking,” because they’re both presented in words, rather than being something the reader experiences directly. Furthermore, the writer doesn’t have to mention that the car is red, if it isn’t important to the story, whereas in a movie, the viewer cannot avoid knowing what color the car is if it’s onscreen.

Descriptors that focus on sound, smell, taste, and feel tend to make scenes more vivid to readers, but they’re still part of what the writer is choosing to describe. How one describes things is more complicated. I’m going to start with a tiny bit of grammar.

Description is most usually about nouns—people, places, or things. The simplest way to describe something is to add an adjective in front of it: a red car, a loud noise, a large chair, a soft pillow. Adding more adjectives clarifies the description: an old red car, a large Chinese chair, a plastic swimming pool.

The rule of thumb I learned is that one should try to avoid piling up more than three adjectives in a phrase; once in a while, it is both necessary and effective, but usually, if something needs more than three adjectives to describe it, the description will be clearer if it’s done in more than one phrase or even more than one sentence: “There were two ugly chairs, both upholstered in worn green cotton” instead of “There were two ugly worn upholstered green chairs.” As always, variation is important; if every single person, place, or object in a story is describe as “adjective-adjective-noun,” the repetition gets obvious and old very quickly.

Adjectives in English can be divided up into categories. If you’re stringing two or more adjectives together in front of a noun, there’s a normal order that native English speakers never think about. (“There are Christmas red cracked old plastic ugly three trees” sounds…really odd to most native English speakers, where “There are three ugly old cracked red plastic Christmas trees” is perfectly clear.) The longest list I could find goes “number, opinion, size, shape, condition, age, color, pattern, origin, material, type, purpose.” (The order is only important if you’re stringing adjectives together in front of a noun. If you break them up into several phrases or sentences, it’s perfectly fine to say “The three Christmas trees were not just ugly. They were plastic. Red plastic, old and cracked” even though if you just look at the adjectives, they’re not in the “right” order. They don’t have to be, when you separate them like this.)

For writers who are having trouble with description, the listing of what order adjectives go in is mainly useful as a way of thinking about what the features of nouns are, so the writer can decide which aspects are important enough to mention and how many sentences to spend on each thing being described. How many of Thing X are there? Does the viewpoint character have an opinion about whether X is cute, ugly, unnecessary, etc.? Is X large or small? Round, square, oblong? Worn, new, polished?

The other thing to remember is that description is fractal. Anything you want to describe that’s bigger than a quark is made up of parts, each of which is made up of other parts, and every part can be described individually. You can make yourself crazy trying to write an exact, photorealistic description of a room, because to do that, you’d need to mention every door and window, every chair, rug, and curtain, every knick-knack and piece of clutter…and when you start with the door, there’s the handle and the wood and the paint or carving, and the handle has a size and shape and whether it’s worn or polished. And then you do it all over again for the size and shape of the window panes, the window latches, and so on.

Drilling down into tinier and tinier descriptive details is a stylistic choice. Writers do this to create an atmosphere or mood, for worldbuilding or characterization (Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan and E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros are examples of all of these), or in attempt to compel readers to visualize a scene in a particular way. This can be a risky choice, as many readers will start skimming if descriptions seem to be going on for too long, and it can be difficult to keep a purely descriptive passage interesting. Usually, if the viewpoint character is learning/realizing new things, or reacting emotionally to what they are describing, it’s easier to keep readers engaged longer. Spreading out description over time, as I mentioned in this post, works even better. I can talk more about this next week, if people are still interested, or I can move on to something else.