Fractile Description

Description in stories is fractal. No matter what the writer chooses to describe, there’s another level available if they want it. Describe a room: walls, floor, ceiling, furnishings. Describe the walls – stone or plaster, painted or natural, square or circular or irregular, empty or covered with pictures. Describe the stone – smooth white marble or irregular granite – or the plaster – thick or crumbling or thin enough to hear footsteps in the next room. Describe the paint color, the shape and size, the subjects of the pictures (photos or painted? Color or black-and-white or pencil sketches? Amateurish or professional?) And I haven’t even gotten to the furnishings yet.

Whatever the writer is describing – whether it’s places, people, things, weather, or emotions – has the capacity for fractile-ness. There’s always a deeper level. Part of the writer’s job is to decide which things to dig into and which to pass over lightly. A lot of writers these days seem to have trouble with this decision, often because they make unthinking assumptions about what description is “supposed” to do (or at least, about what they think is its most important function).

Exceedingly visual writers, for instance, may try to make description do the work of a photograph. They want their readers to “see” the exact same mental image they have in their heads. Some of them get upset when they discover that a reader is picturing the “blue and white oriental rug” as being a bright white pattern against a navy blue background, instead of the cornflower blue pattern on an ivory background that they were expecting people to visualize. Their descriptions of everything get more and more detailed in an attempt to telepathically imprint a specific picture in their readers’ heads.

In the 1800s, writers wrote multi-page descriptions because a lot of people had an opportunity to see anything that wasn’t fairly close to the places they lived. They were attempting to help their readers imagine something they might never have seen. Today, people who live in the middle of the Sahara can call up images of penguins in Antarctica on their computers, and probably have already watched movies set in China, South American jungles, and Pacific islands … not to mention computer-generated images of historical or imaginary places and times. Descriptions that go on for several pages are more likely to inspire people to skip them than to construct a painstakingly accurate mental image of the character’s apartment.

On the flip side, there are writers who take the visuals completely for granted. The characters may be surfing, but the writer doesn’t bother to say any more than that; the important thing, to them, is the conversation and the viewpoint character’s intense emotional reactions. Except for that initial “As they grabbed their surfboards and headed for the water, Rachel said…” there is no acknowledgement for many pages that they aren’t huddled in an igloo or a yurt, lounging beside a private pool behind a mansion, or having a meet-up at a busy coffee shop in Duluth on their lunch hour. The characters are never interrupted by falling off a wave, or stop talking and emoting for a minute to adjust their balance or catch another wave. (And if they’re supposed to be in a busy coffee shop, you’d never know it; they never pause to eat or drink, nobody bumps the table or asks if they’re using the extra chair, and neither the conversation nor the characters’ emotions are ever interrupted or in any way affected by whatever is – or isn’t – going on around them.)

When the writer is doing either thing deliberately, it can be very effective. A character scanning a normal lunch-hour crowd, ordinary detail by ordinary detail, can build up a lot of tension if the character (and, therefore, the reader) knows that Something Is Very Wrong; the longer it takes to find the wrongness, the larger it seems to loom. A viewpoint character who describes four of her dinner companions in detail, but skips over the fifth one with merely her name, can be the equivalent of the cut direct, telling the reader more about the relationship between the two characters than half a page of summary (and raising the interesting question of why the POV is ignoring the other person).

Most of the time, though, the appropriate level of description is somewhere in the happy middle – enough to give readers all the truly important information and provide their imaginations something to work with, but not so much that they start skimming. The question then becomes what to describe, and when and how to describe it, given the easy with which descriptions can become fractile.

What to describe starts with whatever could directly affect the action of the scene itself. If the scene is a conversation over tea, the teapot and cups are obvious candidates, along with the tea itself; if it’s a brawl in the living room, the ottoman or coffee table that someone trips over, or the window that someone will be thrown through (or that will let in the sunlight that blinds someone at a strategic moment) would be good candidates. One doesn’t always know at the start of a scene what will be needed, so either one has to figure out what would logically be present (like tea) and come back later to cut any details that seem like too much, or one writes the scene, throwing in ottomans and windows as needed, and then goes back to put in an initial reference so that their presence doesn’t seem too convenient.