The last thing you want your Readers doing is skipping great tracks of your story because your ‘description’ is long and boring, and likewise, if you use description to pad out your word count, then it will be a foregone conclusion; your Readers, will get plenty of exercise, skipping pages.
At its most basic level ‘description’ delivers information about your characters, places, and the landscapes they travel through.
‘Description’ (funnily enough) describes things, the climate, the
culture, the opinions that flow through your story, and along the way, ‘description’ tells your Readers about your narrator, his/her attitudes or biases to the people/places/things, you are describing.
Let’s not forget your narrator can be a character in your story, or a detached observer, either way, good use of ‘description’ will reveal his or her needs and wants, whether they can be trusted or believed. The way you feed information to your Reader can be revealing in itself.
‘Description’ carries many different loads, and runs through your story in a series of choices, ie what to tell, how it felt, what he/she looked like, the trick is how much to tell.
‘Description’ as I mentioned above describes images, attitudes, what to put in, what to leave out. There are as many choices as there are roads to take, and don’t forget ‘description’ can be dialogue; as partners in crime, they often go hand in hand.
One of the biggest killers with ‘description’ is the over or under use of adverbs and adjectives. Over use, and you run the risk of clichés, chins become determined, and eyes sparkle like stars, or you fall back on abstract words, like untidy rooms, or pretty smiles, being abstracts they are often blurred or unspecific.
If you reduce your adjective and adverb use, then you can concentrate on what you are describing, use fresh eyes. Of course you will need to use some adjectives or adverbs, but look at the image, you are trying to evoke, while the following:
‘her luscious, red, permanently pouting lips’invokes an image, the description itself is long winded and boring, instead you could write
‘Marion Munro lips’there would not be a Reader who couldn’t relate to Marion Munro’s red pout.
Below I have given you two examples of description from a short story I wrote in 2012 call ‘The Girls.’ The story is about devastation and loss. The toll of living in the Australian bush in fire season, in both of these descriptions I have used to a large part imagery to keep the ball rolling, and to create the tension carried by my characters to their destination, this being their burnt out homestead and land.
Ryan Cryar@itellyahwhit
‘Although the sun was up, everything was black, from the few trees still standing, down to the charred earth. Nuclear fallout, covered in ash, a moonscape of desolation, a BBQ for the macabre. The light gives off a grey haze as it filters itself through the residue of the fire,’
‘Miles back they’d ceased looking at the landscape, their eyes clamped firmly on the road ahead. Rita’s silence seems to take on a life of its own, like a dark malignant brew, it spreads through the car’s interior, coating everything, and everyone with its dense sticky tendrils. The odour of Rita’s portent enters Vern’s nostrils, snatching the very voice from his throat. He wears Rita’s mood like a foil against whatever will be found at the end of the road.’ (Tales from the Rocks (2012), anthology pg 86, Digital Print Australia).
As you can see in both of these descriptions one sets the scene for the landscape, and the other the moods of Vern and Rita. In both I have used adverbs and adjectives, but I have also used imagery.
With the use of ‘nuclear fallout,’ ‘moonscape,’ and ‘BBQ for the macabre,’ in three quick images I have described a bush fire landscape, of burnt out bush, homes and charred animals. In the second example Rita’s mood is like a living thing a ‘malignant brew,’ that ‘coats everything and everyone’ this sets Rita’s mood, her malignancy silences Vern, but he uses her silence to cover his fear of what’s at the end of the road.
Upsplash
This is what description is all about it’s the creation of your
character’s feelings, how they interact with each other, where they live, what
they look like. Your Readers will carry their first impression through the rest
of your story, so remember don’t be boring, be innovative, look beyond what you
see in front of you, instead relate what your describing to the simplest
factor, a known entity.
Think of Homer Simpson, the instant image you get when you hear or read the word ‘Doh,’ that’s right you slap your head.
Description can truly be as simple as that. In my next blog I will discuss in more detail dialogue, and how it works with description.
Till next time keep your pen on the page.
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