Itchy Bitesized 38: Nine Thoughts About Description

Plus six useful editing questions to stress-test your descriptions

Browse the full Itchy Bitesized series here.

1. Talking about ‘description’ as a separate kind of writing from characters or actions can be misleading, because it’s not copy in a travel brochure, a fashion magazine or a Wanted poster: a bolt-on bit of prose that informs us what a character or a house looks like. The real job of your words is to evoke things and people in the way that will best enable the reader’s mind to recreate the story.

2. Physical sights, sounds, textures, objects, smells, actions and tastes matter because how the characters experience and interact with them matters. So how you evoke something or a non-viewpoint character will depend on what you want your reader to experience at this point.

   

   Photo by Emily Campbell on Unsplash

3. If you concentrate on Showing, including making your ground-covering, story-driving Telling Show-y and evocative, and inhabiting your character’s point-of-view, you may find that description emerges naturally as part of your sense of what matters in and about the story.

4. Physical description is part of plot: of the forward-movement of the story. For example, why does it matter that a building is tall? Is it a long climb up for a visitor, or a long walk down for someone in the top flat? Does it block the sun from the garden next door? Do the ground-floor tenants have all the others passing their door? Does it demonstrate that the builder spent a lot of money? Which of these matters for your story? Which doesn’t?

5. A story is very likely to need something which you could say is surplus to the crude transmision of plot, to evoke atmosphere and setting. You are not writing a script to be augmented by the set, the cameraman, the light on a cheekbone or the style and mood of the score: your words and their own existing experience are all the reader has.

6. Writing description can be excellent process-writing: many writers work things out, panster-style, by letting their pen pull it out of their imagination.

   1. That doesn’t mean all of it - or any of it - should end up on the pages of a final draft: once you’ve discovered which bits really matter, the rest will need cutting.

   2. If you find it hard to then cut most of it, then before you actually barrel into a description, try stepping aside from your first draft and free-writing/brainstorming it, then go back to the draft and let the emerging story choose what gets in.

7. If you’re getting feedback that you are over-writing, it may well partly be because you’re showing too much. When it comes to physical things, there’s a particular risk of hidden and clashing metaphors.

8. Describing-muscles are worth working on, quite separately from what specific pieces require. This post has lots of things to try, and of course your description will benefit from all kinds of writers’ yoga.

9. Here are six useful questions when you’re drafting or editing, to stress-test descriptive passages (plus more about these questions here, including my Reverse-Chekhov Tool.)

   1. Do we need any description here? If it’s pausing the narrative drive is that a bad thing? Or is it giving the reader a breather, or setting up a Reverse-Chekhov gun?

   2. Why do we need description here? Plot? Character (their take on it is revealing)? Character-in-action (it affects how they then act)? Atmosphere (Could you achieve that while it also answers another storytelling why?

   3. Why do we need it now? Would earlier, later, from a different point-of-view or in smaller, distributed pieces work better?

   4. What’s the minimum amount which will achieve the effect you need? Anything which doubles-up an effect actually reduces its effectiveness. Even if you’re hiding a crucial thing in among other naturally-occurring elements, you still want the minimum other stuff that will still hide it or distract the reader’s eye.

   5. Are there ways of making this description more active while keeping it vivid and evocative? Can a character lead us through the landscape? Can you evoke the box by describing what it’s like to clean?

   6. What am I trying to do with this description? If your answer doesn’t go deeper than ‘because the reader needs to know what it looks like,’ then I gently suggest you go back to question a) and have another think.

Good luck!