Description in General

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

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 in writing, the way description works depends on a couple of interlocking things that affect each other. Here are some of the factors that are relevant:

Description in chunks is one end of a basic descriptive scale, and it’s what most people think of first when they say “I need to learn to write description.” This is just what it sounds like:  a section of prose that runs anywhere from a couple of sentences to a couple of pages, giving a detailed word-picture of the people, places, and things that are present in or important to the current story. It’s about the look, feel, sound, smell, and taste. I don’t include lumps of backstory or narrative summary here, though a lot of the same concerns apply.

Chunks of description have one enormous problem, and it’s that the longer they are, the more they stop the progress of a story in its tracks, and the more difficult it is to keep them interesting enough that a reader won’t skip or skim them. The advantage they have is the level of detail they can provide all at once, which is very important to some writers (and readers).

Description as seasoning is at the other end of the basic descriptive scale. This is where bits of description are blended into a scene, like salt in a casserole. Instead of a paragraph describing the furnishings of a room, the reader is told “The characters entered a formal parlor.” Then everybody exchanges greetings, and the protagonist “took a seat in one of the spindly chairs covered in gilt.” A new character arrives “in a cheap brown suit” and chooses to “lean against the window seat instead of sitting on the couch in the corner.” Very gradually, the reader gets a sense of what the room looks like, who is there, where they are, and so on.

This method allows for less disruption in reader momentum—they don’t have to stop, build a mental picture, and then remember that picture for the rest of the scene—but it also doesn’t give readers (or writers) much to build with. These two approaches are ends of a range. In the middle, the chunks of description get shorter, but they’re only a sentence or two, and aren’t as likely to slow the action or trigger skimming in a reader.

Description is affected by several considerations, including:

Word choice, which affects the way readers react to what you are describing. A character with brown hair is more likely to get a positive reaction from readers if their hair is described as “chocolate brown” than they are if the description is of “mud-colored hair.” A rug described as “faded and worn” gives a different impression than one that is “a badly preserved antique.”

Type of viewpoint and viewpoint character affect things like word choice and what details are included. Different characters notice different things, both large and small, depending on their experiences and interests. A photographer might notice the play of light on a field of grain, whereas a farmer might automatically gage whether the crop is growing well or ready for harvest. The closer/tighter/more filtered a viewpoint type is, and the stronger and more distinctive the narrator’s voice, the more these choices affect word choice and syntax. They also have a major impact on how and whether the narrator reacts to the details they notice. Omniscient narrators are usually moderately neutral and objective in their description; first-person narrators sometimes go off on tangents and/or include their personal reactions to whatever they’ve chosen to describe.

Finally, which details the writer chooses to include can do as much to make an effective description as the words that get used to describe them. Saying that a room includes a couch, coffee table, rug, and curtains (and including ordinary textures and colors to describe each one) doesn’t tell me as much as saying that the couch has a lime-green toy rabbit propped on top of a throw pillow in the corner. Depending on the viewpoint, there may also be perfectly ordinary-looking or unremarkable things that have meaning for the viewpoint character—because the viewpoint character has history with that particular old couch, because those flowers remind the character of some significant emotional event, because that smell or sound is enticing or annoying or triggers a memory or invites a comparison with something else.

All of these considerations can be mixed and matched. Here, for instance, is the first part of a long description of sunrise on the Mississippi River from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, which illustrates a chunk of description in first person in Huck’s dialect with the sorts of details he notices and cares about:

“The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still…”

Finding a quote that illustrates the description-as-seasoning end of the scale is harder, because that type of description generally takes longer, and I’m about out of space for this post. Next week, I’m planning on looking at description via character, which is sort of a cross (or maybe a middle ground) between description in chunks and description as seasoning.