One of the things that is important to a good many readers is getting a sense of place—that is, what the characters’ surroundings look and feel like. Back in the early days of the novel, that meant a lot of books going into five or ten pages of detailed description of shells, driftwood, wave sounds, etc. whenever the characters visited a beach, or similar details about the “faded red brick walls” or “mullioned windows” of the houses they were walking past.
That was before photography, movies, and the Internet were around to fill everyone’s screens with images of places we have never been. These days, most how-to-write advice advocates for minimal description of the characters’ physical surroundings, focused around “telling details.”
“Telling details” are defined in lots of ways—like almost all writing terminology, there is no obvious standard—but most definitions can be summed up in three words: brief, vivid, and revealing. And every example I’ve seen (including my own ) involves some physical description of a person, an action, or a particular place.
But details don’t have to be about what things look like.
What telling details do is to present readers with something that provokes a cascade of information and connections that haven’t been mentioned in the story yet (or, in some cases, ever). I came to this realization while discussing a particular piece of fanfiction with a friend yesterday morning (it’s Owlet’s “This, You Protect,” a Marvel/Avengers fic, and it is excellent, if anyone is interested). The viewpoint character has a distinctive outlook, focus, and voice, which, among other things, means that he ignores almost all physical details of his surroundings unless they bug him or are useful to him in some way. For instance, the only physical description of the hospital is a mention that it’s in an old brick building, and we only learn this because the POV character decides to climb up the side (bricks provide more handholds) and slip in a window (POV has strong feelings about not being able to open the windows in modern buildings, though he does not know why).
The thing that really caught my attention, though, was the coffee shop the POV starts running past in the mornings about halfway through the story. Over the course of three chapters, we are given very few details about this place: its name (Pronoun), it is a coffee shop, it smells of coffee (duh), it is not open at 4:46 a.m., and the first two daily specials on the sandwich board out front are a “wheat-free paleo sunrise muffin” and a “sprouted pea carob fiber sun-blast bar.”
There is, you note, no physical description of the café itself. None at all. Nonetheless, I have a clear picture of it in my head, from the large modern typeface for “Pronoun” to the artsy carved wood trim around the sandwich board, to the enormous glass window (possibly with a dreamcatcher in the corner), the lineup of different coffee beans and teas next to the giant coffee-brewing machines and the two Vita-mixes, the earnest young non-binary baristas who are pointedly not wearing uniforms, and so on. Oh, and I’m convinced all the tables are too small, the chairs look neat but are uncomfortable to sit in for more than fifteen minutes, and the daily specials are mostly inedible (except for the very occasional ones that are amazing).
Not only did the author not tell me any of that in the three chapters in which the café is first mentioned, I never did get an actual description of the place. My image of it probably doesn’t match the author’s mental picture at all. And it is not important that our images match. I didn’t need physical description to paint a clear picture. All I needed was two not-physical details: the slightly precious name, and the daily specials. The combination of those two fits the “telling detail” definition above—brief, vivid, and revealing.
Those details worked for two reasons: First, because in real life, I am familiar with cafés and coffee shops. I have a series of stereotypes in my head, based on experience, that revolve around trendy upscale cafés, chain coffee shops, and hole-in-the-wall local hangouts. “A coffee shop named Pronoun that sells wheat-free paleo sunrise muffins” triggers a collision between several different ideas of what a coffee shop would be like, and the result is a really clear picture of what I would expect to find if I ever went looking for it.
The second reason the details work is because of the POV character’s voice and outlook on…well, everything. The viewpoint is a very tight, filtered third-person, and the author does a consistently good job of letting readers know where the POV is and what he is doing by providing very little explicit detail apart from his reactions to things. The POV character does not describe the old hospital building; he thinks that he’s glad that bricks are easy to climb, not like modern construction, and the reader realizes he’s crawling around on the outside of an old brick building. The POV has very strong opinions about a lot of things, and is very grumpy about many of them, and again, this comes across to the reader as both a sense of character and a sense of place, even though there are only a few places where there is much description of what things look like.
Finding the combination of details that will trigger the connection-cascade of real-life experience is not always easy. It can be especially difficult for an author who is trying to write in a setting that is historical, imaginary, or just sufficiently different from the lived experiences of the expected readership. For myself, I find it easier to do when my viewpoint character has a strong voice and particular interests that lead them to notice certain things and not others. Other writers may need a more visual mental image that they can then whittle down to the one or two things that are evocative. Either way, the most useful questions are often “What are the one or two details that my viewpoint character would notice that make this place different from other places he/she/they have been?” and “If I went looking for this place, what one or two details would make me sure I’d found the right spot?”
What an excellent illustration of “telling detail”! It’s a wonderful approach to description, but how to do it isn’t always going to be clear to anyone without illustration.
My own preference is for description that reinforces theme, mood, or setting. When I wrote an sf/horror novel that proposed Beowulf’s Grendel was real, and his descendants were around today (believed to be serial killers), I described a lot of things as “hulking” or “looming”; and I found ways to include in the plot things that weren’t what they seemed to be, too.
But this is still a great approach, and I’d be the last to denigrate it.
There is a lovely story in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading where the author is reading aloud to a blind Jorge Luis Borges. Borges stops him to comment on a piece of description that is very much in the same vein – an impression instead of details, handing off the choices to the reader. I loved that approach and wanted to make it my own. Your useful questions will help keep my mind on that pathway.
The point of view is so important. I remember two characters on a road — both with military background — in a wilderness with monsters — and neither one noted anything about the dangers of the terrain.
Ayup… I use this mode a lot in tight-third, which is about all I write in. Landscape alone is flat; movement-through-landscape-plus-opinions gets a twofer (or maybe a threefer) setting and characterization, and, if not action, at least some useful transition, pleasingly parsimonious.
One of my favorite bits of setting from my first novel is where the main character’s walking underground from one “L” stop in Chicago to another, the stink of diesel in the air and the way pursuing footsteps would echo in the tunnel if there were any. I don’t even recall what color the walls were, though I can back-reason that they were probably brick.