Over the last couple of decades, I’ve noticed that more and more of the newer writers are over-describing things. It looks to me as if they are attempting to create a clear and specific image in words, the way a camera does with, well, a photo. At the same time, I’ve noticed more writing-advice people warning darkly about “telling too much” – by which they seem to mean “including words/paragraphs that can’t be easily identified as 1) action, 2) dialog, or 3) the POV’s internal monolog.
In my humble opinion, both these positions are wrong-headed.
A written description of a person, place, or thing is never going to telepathically transmit to a reader the exact same image that the writer has in mind, not the way a photo or video will. Even very specific words mean different things to different people. I grew up in Chicago; even after fifty years, when I read the word “lake” I imagine something like Lake Michigan that would take several days to travel all the way around by car. I don’t picture something like Lake Nokomis in south Minneapolis, which, on three mornings a week, I walk entirely around with one of my friends, then stop for coffee, and get it all done before she has to be at her job at 9 a.m.
So if I want to be sure that a reader gets the “right” mental image of Lake Nokomis, I have to use a lot more words than just “lake.” I have to talk about its size and shape, the parks and beaches around it, the bridge that cuts a piece off the far end…and pretty soon I’ve spent two or three pages trying to make sure the reader is “seeing” the same lake I mean. And when I’m done, I still can’t be certain that most readers would correctly identify a photo of the lake from my description.
On the other hand, if I don’t mention the lake at all until its presence affects the action or dialog, the reader is likely to be quite startled when, after two or three pages of discussion, George says to Amy “I know – let’s rent one of the canoes from the boat dock over there and go see what that dark spot under the bridge really is,” because all this time the reader was picturing George and Amy chatting in a coffee shop on the third floor of the Mall of America.
Description, properly used, is far more than just painting a word-picture. It’s one of the easiest places to sneak in background information, characterization, history, and worldbuilding, any and all of which move the story forward. One does this not by trying to describe everything in detail, but by picking out those things that tell the reader about the person or people who created it, own it, or use it. For instance:
“From the top of the hill, Grant Street looked to be entirely boring, lined with identical tiny, one-story boxes that resembled a child’s drawing of houses: plain white with a door in the center, a window on either side, and a straight sidewalk through a plain green lawn from door to street. Until one reached the third house from the end. It was the same shape as all the others, but there the resemblance ended. A row of bowling balls, each painted a different color, defined the edges of the yard. A flock of plastic flamingos ran diagonally over the lawn, apparently trying to escape from six garden gnomes. The flamingo nearest the street had a wind chime dangling from its beak, so that a shiver of notes announced the passing of every vehicle heavy enough to shake the decoration even slightly. The house itself had been painted in giant blue polka-dots on a pale green background. The crowning touch was the weather vane – a three-foot magenta rooster perched on the roofline, just off-center enough to be annoying.”
It’s pretty obvious from this description (obvious to me, at least) that the person living in the polka-dot house isn’t much like the folks in the rest of the neighborhood…and revels in their difference. They’re not living in a plain white box that’s wildly peculiar on the inside where nobody can see; they’re proclaiming it to everyone who drives past. Probably some of the neighbors hate the weird house and the weirdo that owns it, but I bet that at least a couple of them really like it and enjoy seeing it every day on their way to work (and secretly wish they had the nerve to do something…well, perhaps not quite that different, but a little more colorful than the standard issue houses, if they only had time). And even the folks who hate the way it looks and think it spoils their nice, tidy neighborhood would have to admit, if pressed, that the person who did the house up that way has guts.
And the description I gave deliberately doesn’t cover every single thing about the polka-dot house. I didn’t mention the windows or the door, for instance. I didn’t have to – from what I did say, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn, much later, that one of the regular windows had been replaced with a triangle, or that the door was a hobbit-like round one with a knob in the middle. You probably would be surprised if the interior of the house – and the person who lives there – is not just as wildly unusual as the outside of the place.
People’s choices about where to live and what to surround themselves with reflect their character. For a writer, choosing what to describe and how to describe it can reflect and reveal the characters in their story.
“I didn’t have to – from what I did say, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn, much later, that one of the regular windows had been replaced with a triangle, or that the door was a hobbit-like round one with a knob in the middle.”
Er, actually I would be surprised. Without being told that they were different, I’d visualize the door, the window, and the sidewalk as being the same as those of the other houses. I’d count those elements as aspects of the wild house being the “same shape” as the other houses, rather than as part of the decoration that made the wild house different.
I sometimes talk about loading your language. The woman arriving at the ball gets a very different effect from a gown depending on whether it’s snow white, lily white, swan white, cloud white, pearl white, salt white, bone white, etc.
And if they aren’t the same shade, well, you can’t control what color is brought up by your description in the reader’s mind’s eye.
There’s a descriptive style that I’ve noticed in the last ten years or so, which I call “notes for the film” – just enough description that the set builder for the film of the book will know that they have to set up a Kooky Teenage Girl’s Bedroom, or a Junkyard Tinkerer’s Haven, or whatever, but not mentioning the small details that would allow the reader’s visualisation to become specific rather than generic.
Mary, I think that’s a useful way of creating a parallel feeling without having to establish the same cause: the people at the ball know, because they’re living in that society, that that shade of white is the colour of mourning, but rather than have an infodump on the subject you can just say “in her bone-white gown” and have people turning away and feeling uncomfortable about it.
It can also be used to suggest character. Snow, pearl, lily would all suggest different women.
Lightly, of course, but being too on-the-nose is a danger.
Like Deep Lurker, I too would be surprised by such structural changes to the door or window (though not the path, as around here those are made of paving stones, not concrete, and thus easy enough to change while arranging the rest of the garden with the flamingos and stuff). A different color paint, or using plants or stained glass panels instead of curtains would fit right in, but the description of the street of cookie-cutter houses made it clear that the whole street had been built to the same template in one building run by the same firm, so I’d definitely expect the door and window to be the same shape and in the same place.
Your description also proves Mary’s point on specific word choices having a lot of impact: I was picturing an interesting, off-beat individual who likes colorful things and might be nice to get acquainted with, until that last element “just off-center enough to be annoying.” Oh, that changes things: not just someone who likes to be their own colorful self, but also someone who likes to be annoying – an altogether less attractive person to get to know.
Unless it’s the narrator’s voice that considers the weathervane annoying, and it says something about the pov’s character rather than about the house’s inhabitant.
It could have been “just off-center enough to be visually interesting”, or “to balance the direction of the flamingos’ flight”, or anything like that, if you need to keep the off-centeredness without the negative impact.