Description I – What and Why

Description is one of those writing tools that doesn’t get a lot of love. It’s hard to find plain old “how to describe things” advice – no, it’s always about how to write “adjective descriptions” – vivid descriptions, evocative descriptions, physical descriptions, interesting descriptions, and, of course, good descriptions. The underlying assumption seems to be that everybody knows how to do a basic description, so there’s no reason to go into that part and they can skip ahead to whatever improvements the advisor wants to suggest.

This is not altogether unreasonable. An enormous number of writers learn the basics of the craft by osmosis – i.e., reading omnivorously and getting a “feel” for what works and what doesn’t work. My take on the matter is that advice and/or analysis works better if one begins with the fundamentals.

So: What is description?

The dictionary definition is “a statement that gives details about a person, place, or thing.” That seems clear enough (I’ll get to the “details” part in a minute).

Next question: What is description in a story for?

This one gets sticky almost immediately, because describing people, places, and things in a story is done – or not done – for multiple possible reasons. Among them:

• To ground a scene in a particular spot
• To create a mood
• To give the reader a specific mental image
• To establish something that will be important later
• To hide plot clues
• To imply information (about a character, about a culture, about a situation) or provide it directly

Additional possible reasons are left as an exercise for my readers, so I don’t totally run out of space in this post.

Regardless of the writer’s reasons, description starts with two things: what the thing (person, place, event) is that the author is describing, and which details about it are important to get the effect that the writer is looking for. This obviously means that the writer must begin by deciding what they are describing – a character? One particular object? A room containing many objects? An event, such as a parade or a battle?

Usually, the writer knows what they intend to describe. If you’re terribly analytical, have multiple possibilities, and are finding it hard to decide, make a list of all the things that are present in the scene/place, any of which you could describe in the next sentence/paragraph. Then bubble-sort them according to whatever criteria you choose (e.g., “most fun to describe,” “most plot-important,” “most scene-important”) and start describing whatever is at the top of the list. If that bit of description doesn’t feel right, or doesn’t seem to be working, set it aside and go on to the next one.

As I said, the writer usually knows what they want to describe; the problem is how. At least, that’s what most writers jump to, including me … but if I slow down the process, the next step is actually determining what the details are.

Whatever you’re describing – clothes, teacups, ballrooms, weather, parades, individuals – has a bunch of properties. These may include shape, color, size, weight, smell, material, texture, age, wear, sound, movement, drape, etc. (again, add to the list as you see fit). Rooms and settings have properties, but also contain other objects that also have properties. Different things also are frequently composed of parts – sleeves, front, back, inside, outside; arms, shoulders, hair, teeth, legs, fingers, neck; shore, beach, shallows – which the author can choose to describe individually or not.

Unless the author has chosen a style similar to the lushly detailed multi-page extravaganzas of E. R. Eddison’s “The Worm Ouroboros,” they’re obviously not going to include in their description every possible property of every possible object that’s present in any given scene. They’re going to pick a few key things – which is where “what the description is for” comes in.

An author who is establishing something for future use – e.g., the presence of a coffee mug that the protagonist throws at an intruder two pages later, or the ingenue’s dress that’s going to get caught in a fan at a critical moment – is going to pick properties and parts that will be useful or relevant later. The mug is large and heavy (so it’ll damage the intruder), or it’s delicate (so it’ll break and be distracting); color is not important.  The dress has long, floaty sleeves or a full chiffon skirt, the better to catch in the fan. An author who is trying to characterize their protagonist via the stuff in his/her office, on the other hand, may care more that the mug is imprinted with the Periodic Table on a shiny black background … or the author may think that the letter opener shaped like a light saber says more about the protagonist than the mug does.

Viewpoint is also important in deciding which details/properties to include in a description. If you’re using omniscient viewpoint, you can do whatever you like, including providing a history of the object’s creation and how it got to this place (“Iris wore a full-skirted chiffon dress that she’d bought for ten dollars from the “damaged and discounted” section at the resale shop, where it had been left by a disgruntled society matron. The snag on the hem wasn’t really the reason the matron had sold the dress; it was only an excuse. It had been her husband’s favorite, but after catching him with that floozy, the matron wasn’t about to wear anything that pleased him ever again. So she had bundled up all his favorites and sent them to the resale shop, where it had languished for three weeks until Iris spotted it.”).

If, however, you’re in a filtered tight-third-person viewpoint, or in first person, you’d want to stick to the details that your narrator-character would notice. This can make life difficult if the narrator normally wouldn’t care about whatever you want her/him to describe. You can get her/him to do so by making whatever-it-is something she/he dislikes enough to comment on, by making it odd in some way that would catch her/his attention (“She was wearing a pink chiffon ball gown covered with Hello Kitty logos; I couldn’t help doing a double-take.”)

Next week, I’m going to go more into the how of description, but I’m out of space for this post.