Last week, I talked about some of the reasons writers want to describe things, and a few of the considerations involved in deciding what to describe. This week, I’m going to focus more on the how, which starts with a bit more on what (because what you choose to describe can affect how you go about describing it).
For instance, if you want to describe your main character/narrator, you probably don’t want to do it by having them study their reflection in a mirror (unless you’re doing it for extremely strong thematic reasons, as is the case at the start of Lois Bujold’s Mirror Dance). If, however, you want to describe the villain who is following your narrator, having the narrator spot the villain’s reflection in a store window can certainly work. And if you want to describe the street the narrator is walking along, doing so by describing its reflection could be a different and interesting way of doing so.
And that is one of the keys to writing interesting descriptions: paying attention to the unusual. People look in mirrors all the time, and the viewpoint character looking in a mirror to describe themselves has been done so often that it has, in many minds, reached the level of cliché. Describing a street (or a gym, or a ballroom) through its reflection in a mirror is unusual, and therefore interesting.
People, in general, filter out 90% or more of their surroundings – it’s how we can leave the office or the shopping mall, get in a car, and arrive home without ever really registering any of the scenery we drove through. Unless something has changed. I don’t register the trees and houses on my street when I drive down it, unless there’s a big branch that blew down in the storm last night, or unless my neighbors have put up/taken down one of their giant balloon holiday lawn decorations.
If I’m in a new place, I notice more, but it’s still predicated on what my backbrain thinks is important. Which means that I notice things that aren’t what I expect – things that are unusual and different. If I walk into a building that has a “Public Library” sign out front, I’ll notice immediately if it has shelves full of liquor and beer bottles, just as I would notice (and wonder at) shelves full of books behind the counter in a building labeled “Harry’s Bar.”
People notice things that might be dangerous, things that are unusual/unexpected, and things that they have a personal interest in. This applies to both your characters and your readers, which means that the first things to consider when you are describing something (or when you are choosing which couple of things, out of all the stuff in the room/park/office/drawer, to describe) are what is unusual about it, whether it is or could be dangerous to your viewpoint character, whether it’s something they have a personal interest in (in any new house, the first thing I spot are the bookshelves; the second thing is any knitting or other handwork that’s lying around), or whether something significant has changed since the last time the character was here.
The same principles apply to the properties of the thing you are describing. What is unusual or different about it? Does the narrator react as if it’s unusual, or is it unusual only from the reader’s perspective? What does that tell the reader about this world?
If I mention a baseball, I don’t have to describe it in detail, because most people know what a baseball looks like. If there’s something unusual or important about it – if it was signed by Ty Cobb, or if it is neon green with pink stitching, or if it has a smear of blood on one side – I’d mention that, and only that. If it’s in an unusual or unexpected place (sitting on top of a baby grand piano, or balanced on a wine glass in the middle of the ballroom floor), I would want to mention it (and have a good explanation later for what it’s doing there).
The questions to ask oneself about any description are:
First, what do you want the reader to know? If a room contains a perfectly ordinary baseball that will eventually be a murder weapon, and a bronze statue of a duck that has no impact on the story whatsoever, I’ll leave the duck out and mention the baseball. Things can be important for the plot, for characterization, for setting a mood, for worldbuilding, for thematic reasons.
Second, what details about this person/place/thing are interesting, unusual, or potentially dangerous in the eyes of the narrator? In the eyes of the reader? What would either one be most likely to notice if they were driving past on autopilot?
Third, what two or three details would allow someone to be pretty darned sure that they had the right person/place/thing, if that was all they knew about it? There are a lot of baseballs around, but not too many that are neon green with pink stitching. There are a lot of fantasy taverns around, but I don’t recall reading about any that have a stuffed dragon head mounted over the bar.
You can drill down as far as you like (or as far as you find useful). The unusual thing about the tavern is the stuffed dragon head. The unique thing about the dragon head is that there’s an old scar across one eye. The unique thing about the scar is that someone sewed it up with solid gold thread. And so on. This can be a lot of fun, but one doesn’t want to get too carried away, unless you’re going for lush, multiple-page-long descriptions.
Finally, how do your characters react to the person/place/thing you are describing? If a character runs across a neon-green baseball, rolls his eyes, and yells, “Christopher! What have I told you about playing with that baseball in the house?” it tells us one thing; if he gives the baseball the side-eye and thinks Why would anyone make a neon green baseball and what is it doing in Trudy’s study? it tells us something else.
I’m out of room again, so you’re in for one more week of posting on descriptions. Sorry? Not sorry…I didn’t know I had this much to say.
What is noticed (and noteworthy) can be determined by a person’s general outlook or the mood they are in at a given moment. On a long drive, a friend of mine noticed the different foci of two passengers. One saw the play of shadows through the trees, the wildflowers on the side of the road, and similar upbeat things, whereas another passenger remarked on roadkill, the poor condition of the shoulder, and the monotonous drone of the tires. Two different realities on the same stretch of road.
Ooo, nice one!!
The only thought I have on the look-in-the-mirror shtick is that it might be a chance for some characterization, maybe even plot. “She looked in the mirror, and didn’t see the determination that others remarked on. She only saw a woman who’d failed to stop the scourge at the start…”
Having the (tight-third-person) heroine look in a mirror, so that the author can describe what she looks like, is a cliche’ in slushy romance novels.
What makes it a cliche is having the character notice the aspects of his appearance that the author wants to convey to the reader, rather than the aspects a character would naturally or reasonably look into a mirror to check. So a character might look into a mirror to see if his eyes look as bloodshot as they feel, but having him notice “Yep, they’re still that light shade of brown after all these years,” is going to feel forced and unnatural.
What, he’s not worried about when they turn bright green? (He knows it’s coming.)
What the person notices may tell the reader about the character.
If I see a car, it’s a car but I can usually tell it from a truck. I have friends who can tell manufacturer, model, year, size of engine and what gear it’s in.
But I can distinguish 14 different classes of Toronto streetcars.
I like to play with Wolf and David’s point – what the description says about the character.
Real-life example: In my work, I deal with cable TV, but from the law and policy side rather than engineering. When my wife and I went up to Pennsylvania to visit her cousin and his wife, turned out the cousin’s wife worked for the local cable company. So as we’re walking through the pastoral countryside, my wife and her cousin are admiring the scenery; the cousin’s wife and I are peering up at the aerial lines along the road asking each other, is that one of the amplifiers? I think so . . . et cetera. It was vastly amusing when I realized how diverse our reactions were.
There’s a bit in one of my favorite historical mysteries (set in late 15th c. Scotland) where the MC, who’s a lawyer, is traveling with a friend who’s a mason. The mason comments on the quality of the stone in the area they’re passing through, and the lawyer replies that if he wants to start a quarry there, he’ll need to do the proper paperwork.
Please don’t apologize – I needed to read this! Thank you! (Hmm. Okay – my least-described protagonist still probably won’t get much physical description until about halfway through the story, when another point-of-view character notices how different she looks when she becomes ill – and still fails to describe her in a beta-reader-satisfying way, because he doesn’t care whatsoever about the aspects of her appearance that aren’t related to her health – but I *can* rely on her for a thorough description of possible tripping hazards on the ground, dangerous animals, and the presence or absence of drinkable water…)
And I’m laughing about the mason-versus-lawyer perspectives, because, once I realize I’m in a place with interesting surface-exposed rocks, at least half of my attention is on the ground and the question of whether or not I’m allowed to collect pieces of the landscape (sometimes to the detriment of basic safety considerations, and often to the detriment of keeping track of time and/or conversations with normal, sane people who don’t think that porphyritic basalt is a good reason to abandon all other topics). I’ve managed to set up my work-in-progress world so that many characters have some legitimate reasons to care and know about the nearby rocks, but, once I’m done, I should dial back the nearsighted ~geneticist’s rock descriptions from “two-mica garnet schist” to “shiny grey rock.”
“I should dial back the nearsighted ~geneticist’s rock descriptions from ‘two-mica garnet schist” to “shiny grey rock.'”
Don’t do that! Robert B. Parker used to describe clothes and meals in great detail in his Spenser mysteries. I’m not into either one, but it helped give his works style and flavor (see what I did there?), not to mention give him his unique voice.
Stay unique. Stay you. Stay with it, for sure!!
Thank you, and, pun appreciated! Don’t worry about a dearth of overdetailed rock descriptions – work-in-progress is a messy multiple-viewpoint novel with several major characters who really are sufficiently familiar with and interested in rocks/minerals to give readers some picture of the region’s geology. The ~geneticist isn’t one of those people, though, and (since no one’s ever given him glasses) may not be able to see meters-away rocks well enough to identify them even with training, so I’m trying not to overprint my own interests/training on his.
Fair enough!
This is why “the obvious” frequently isn’t. What’s obvious to the cable guy is different from what’s obvious to the bird watcher, which is different from what’s obvious to the farmer, which is different from what’s obvious to the geologist.
“The obvious” should be stated (in real life) to avoid misunderstandings. (Yes, I ran into this the other day.)
Readers vary in what they’ll imagine being present, when descriptions are left out.
If a living room is described as having a baseball in it, I’m going to imagine a very clean and sparse living room with the baseball being the only item of bric-a-brac present. I’ll need to be clued in if there are also bronze cats, stone dishes filled with plastic gem-pebbles, coffee-table books on the coffee table, etc. present.
Other readers will imagine additional bits as being present in a default living room. What they imagine won’t match what the author imagines – but will still be closer than what I imagine.
There was a post on description a year or two back where OGH described a house that was different from the other they-all-look-alike houses of the neighborhood. She then noted that a reader wouldn’t be surprised to later learn that the house had triangular windows or a round door, even though those things hadn’t been described. At which point I and one or two others immediately piped up to say “But we would be surprised!”
“Readers vary in what they’ll imagine being present, when descriptions are left out.”
Ah, yes.
There’s the old story about how Isaac Asimov brought in a MS. to his publisher, and after reading it, someone complained that there was too little description of the (female) main character. Asimov said, “Oh, that doesn’t matter,” and asked each of the female staff to describe that character. Each one described someone looking very much like herself.
It’s an unwritten/written rule that the protagonist should receive less description than supporting characters, leaving them a more-or-less blank slate onto which the reader can project themselves. Too much description interferes with this.
Of course, there are times when you want your main character to evince a specific and particular look and feel (Hercule Poirot comes to mind), but it’s still a guideline worth bearing in mind.
You may want your main character to have a particular look and feel, or you may have a main character who has a non-standard appearance and is strongly or even painfully aware of it. (E.g. Miles Vorkosigan.)
Another possible exception is describing your main character’s clothing, especially if he’s dressing up (or down) for an occasion, or finds himself in a place where he feels over- or under-dressed.
It seems to me that clothing-description gets used quite a bit in stories, but doesn’t get much love in “Describing Your Character” how-to guides.
Lurker – Well, that goes to show you that a) I didn’t do as good a job describing the house as I thought I did, and b) no matter how you describe something, it isn’t going to work for everyone.