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
Read more →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,
Read more →Even in a novel that has a prologue, the writer will, at some point, need to get more context into the story somehow. (Most novels don’t need a prologue–see last week’s post–and those that do, don’t need the twenty-plus pages that would give the reader everything they might
Read more →So far, I’ve been mostly talking about the standard lump-of-description—the “descriptive paragraph” that many of us got assigned to write in middle school, the sort of thing that Deep Lurker summed up as something that needs cutting back to an amount most people want to read. Today
Read more →I think it was in fifth grade that I learned my first important principle of description, which a number of commenters on last week’s post mentioned—namely, to make use of all five senses, not just sight. Poul Anderson said once that he went over every page to
Read more →Description is usually considered as a part of worldbuilding. This makes sense, because everything in a story is part of the story-world (whether that’s Alpha Centauri Three, modern-day Beijing, or a tiny prehistoric fishing village), and every part of the story-world tells the reader more about what
Read more →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
Read more →… I bog down in considerations of what the readers need to know, and if don’t put it right at the beginning then when, and how many flashbacks can one novel support? This is part three of the answer to that question, which can be summed up
Read more →Learning to describe things! … in trying not to overwhelm my readers with too much information because worldbuilding, I’ve been giving way too little re: scene setting. –LN Looks like I have a bunch of questions, which is great—it means I don’t have to think up as
Read more →The general consensus seemed to be that people wanted my stream-of-consciousness scene-developing example, so you’ll get that next week. In the meantime, here’s the technical post on moving characters around, that got interrupted because I can’t remember my own schedule for Open Mic days… Suggestion box: Could
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