Fashions in Description

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

Writing, like everything else human beings do, has fads and fashions that shift and change over time. One of the most obvious has to do with how description is handled in fiction. A lot of really early works don’t spend a lot of time describing mead-halls, hostelries, plows or wagons, oxen or horses. Everyone who could read knew what these things looked like, so unless there was something really unusual, the extent of description for places and things was usually “She walked in the garden at sunrise” or “he entered the mead-hall.”

Fast forward to the 1800s, when the printing press and the spread of literacy made books available to a much wider audience, many of whom had never traveled more than a few miles from home. Descriptions of places became longer and far more detailed, in an attempt to paint a mental picture for readers of a place or event which they had never (and might never) have seen:

“Hundreds of broad-headed, short. stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious greensward; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copse wood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; in others they receded from each other, forming those long sweeping vistas in the intricacy of which the eye delights to lose itself, while imagination considers them as the paths to yet wilder scenes of silvan solitude.”—Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott

“One doesn’t test these truths every day, but they form part of the air one breathes…The colour the thick, dim distances which in my opinion are the most romantic town-vistas in the world; they mingle with the troubled light to which the straight, ungarnished aperture in one’s dull, undistinctive housefront affords a passage, and which makes an interior of friendly corners, mysterious tones, and unbetrayed ingenuities, as well as with the low, magnificent medium of the sky, where the smoke and fog and the weather in general, the strangely undefined hour of the reflection of furnaces, the red gleams and blurs that may or may not be of sunset—as you never see any source of radiance you can’t in the least tell—all hang together in a confusion, a complication, a shifting but irremovable canopy.”—description of London from English Hours, Henry James

At the same time, Lord Dunsany and William Morris were writing fantasy stories that used archaic language, syntax, and spelling to make their descriptions and storytelling “feel” like something preserved from centuries earlier:

“Whilom, as tells the tale, was a walled cheaping-town hight Utterhay, which was builded in a bight of the land a little off the great highway which went from over the mountains to the sea.” –The Water of the Wondrous Isles by William Morris

By the early 1900s, there were photos of all sorts of things available. Some writers chose to take advantage of this to back off from minute detail in description, sticking with one or two specifics in the interest of moving the story along, while others continued trying to paint word-pictures of places, people, and things. The latter was especially true of writers of historical fiction, fantasy fiction, and science fiction, because those stories often included places, beings, and actions that none of the readers could  have seen (because they hadn’t existed for hundreds or thousands of years, or had never existed at all). Ursula le Guin’s classic essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” summarizes one of the results of this forty or fifty years later—the idea that fantasy has a style and voice of its own.

Which brings us, in rather large steps, up to the present. The development and widespread use of visual media has necessarily changed the way novel writers handle words, most especially when it comes to description, but it hasn’t changed everybody in the same direction. (There Is No One True Way.) Some authors choose to focus on the things written words can do more effectively than strictly visual medium—interior monologue, emotional reactions, tight internal viewpoint. Others try to beat visual media at its own game, packing as much detail and emotion into as few words as they can get away with. Still others opt for the “high fantasy style” approach. And so on.

I’m not even going to try to give examples of modern description. Maybe in the next couple of posts. Any of these approaches can work. All of them together at once could probably work, though I wouldn’t recommend trying it unless one already has a solid understanding of how at least one or two of them work.

The real problem a lot of new writers have is the copy-machine effect—that is, a photocopy of an original document is pretty good (these days, it can be practically indistinguishable from the original). A photocopy of a photocopy is slightly less accurate; a copy of a copy of a copy, less accurate again, until, after many many copies-of-copies-of-copies, you reach the point of making strings of unreadable black blobs instead of text.

Writers aren’t machines, but they can still fall victim to a. Imitating a favorite writer who was imitating their favorite writer, who in turn was putting their own spin on the style of their favorite medieval-epic, which was translated from Latin by a guy who was trying to duplicate the rhythms of the original Latin…well, it can easily turn out badly, especially if the current writer has no idea how far back the string of other writers goes, and/or tries too slavishly imitate the most recent link in the chain (instead of putting their own spin on it).