OK, stop laughing, this is not going to be an entry in the “How many clauses can one fit in an English sentence” contest. Instead, I want you to think about what a stormy night looks, sounds, feels, smells, and perhaps even tastes like, if you have ever tasted rain, or very fresh snow, or sucked on a bit of fresh hail.
Then write it.
“The distant rumbling warned that they’d better finish up and get everything under cover soon. The light turned from clear gold to soft hazy yellow, then green. Green meant hail. Overhead, wisps of clouds wandered northwards, spindrift and rags not far above the trees. Above them, ripples and lumps hung below the edge of the storm. The afternoon wind dropped into stillness, another sign of heavy weather coming. Humidity made his shirt stick to him, and brought scents from the culvert up at the road.
“A whoosh of cold air flowed from the west, and the first flickering tongue of white licked down from the storm. They ducked into the barn, the one with a cellar under it, just in case. Ping, ping, ping, rain began on the metal roof, followed by the roar of rain. Outside the open door, a wall of water hid the trees and garden. Darkness swallowed the afternoon, and the air thickened. Pounding so loud it drowned out thought came from overhead as hail came with the rain. Little white peas bounced and danced outside the door, cooling the air until he shivered. “
So, how did I approach writing the description?
- Big picture of what is in the distance, then 2) the sky and light draw the reader closer to the watcher. I follow that with 3) the air around the PoV character and finally 4) the scent.
- Then comes the storm, with temperature and sound and light. If the character was out in it, the stinging of hail, quick soaking and discomfort, fear and trying to get low because of the lightning, the scent of the rain—or lack of scent as the water washed everything out of the air— and ozone from the storm strikes, perhaps the painfully loud sound of a lightning strike close to the character …
That’s how I do description. Granted, a storm or a piece of land is “easy,” because I am used to describing the physical environment and settings for students, non-fiction readers, and others. I tend to write “slow” stories, where having a lot of description is OK.
Thrillers and other fast-paced genres have to sketch more, or find other ways to let readers know what the place and people are like. Some lean on readers’ imaginations a lot more, as Anne Bishop does in the original Dark Jewels trilogy. SaDiablo Hall is never truly described, and each reader has a different idea of what it looks like. Some rooms are very clear, and others are hinted at. She is character focused, not setting so much.
Now, you might have a PoV character who isn’t all that interested in parts of his/her/its/whatever’s surroundings. Then you need to focus on what IS important. In Peaks of Grace, one of the two PoV characters is blind. Aural and tactile cues are much, much stronger for description, and knowing from memory where things are. She was sighted for a few years, so she remembers vaguely what “table” looked like, but now she can only hear, touch, smell, and taste. I had to keep catching myself and taking out references to things she could not know, because they would be seen, not heard/felt/smelled.
Description comes easily to me, but I grew up in a family of story tellers, reading books with lots of description in them, and my academic field leans on description since photos of, oh, a river in the 1500s, or end of the Ice Age, are not available. You may have to work at it. Start with something simple, and build out from there.
Now, go describe rain coming in, and how a character notices and senses it.
6 responses to ““It Was A Dark and Stormy Night””
I’m not much for description, either as a writer or a reader, but with that caveat, I’d offer one bit of advice here: if you’re going to take the paragraphs to describe something, it should mean something.
There is one writer in particular that I’ve been having trouble reading because of this point. She spent a page and a half describing the hero’s house. All well and good…but when I reached the end of the description and tried to parse what it meant, what I got was, “It was an old farmhouse.” She’d come up with quite a few synonyms for old, and several ways of saying that the land around it had once been farmed, but for all the words she used, I didn’t know any specifics about the farmhouse or what might differentiate it from any other farmhouse. I didn’t even know what color it had been painted.
Worse was her description of the college where the hero worked. Again, we took more than a page to talk about it, and over the course of that page, it was described as “Victorian,” “like stepping back in time 200 years,” (for a scene set in 1973, so 200 years back would be 1773, almost forty years before Victoria was even born), “unchanged since the founding of the college” (which was in 1714), and “a group of log cabins” (though, to be fair, that last one may just have been a completely failed metaphor). So by the end of all that, I feel like I actually know less about what it looked like than if I’d just been left to picture a generic college campus.
Too many descriptions feel like they’re more about lyrical language and the author showing off their fancy vocabulary, intended to be skimmed and praised for their clever phrases, rather than actually creating a scene in the reader’s mind.
A very good point. You might have a character who waxes eloquent for a reason (artist, interior designer, meteorology buff, geologist), but reason is the key. I tend to use description as part of showing the character’s internal changes over time, or setting up a scene then or later.
In A Diabolical Bargain, all the passages where flowers are noticed are in Nick’s viewpoint. He’s the gardener.
I’ll have a go:
He was just ambling along, minding his own business, his eyes focussed more on the ground and the bushes on both sides of the path than anything taking place above him. Yesterday, he’d spotted a few brightly coloured butterflies flittering about the golden flowers, and was looking to see if they were out again today.
He was under no time constraint. He’d walked this walk plenty of times before; he knew that he’d be back home long before the sun set.
There were no butterflies today, and he realised that the light was a lot darker than it should be at this hour of the afternoon. He looked up.
“Oh, crap!” Above him was a thick blanket of dark clouds. He’d been so distracted by the actual and potential beauty at ground level that he hadn’t noticed them build up. The one day that he hadn’t checked the weather report was the one day he should have done so.
He sped up. Too late. The first drops were small, barely felt as they fell onto his hair and forehead, the distortions caused by the light refracting through them almost invisible against the backdrop ahead of him.
They were only a harbinger of what was to come. Within minutes, it wasn’t trying to rain, it was raining heavily. Large drops plummeted from the sky, landing on his head and whatever parts of his body they could reach. His clothes were soaked through very quickly. The sound of the raindrops hitting the leaves of the bushes created a constant percussion effect that seemed almost as loud as the thunder that followed the first of the lightning bolts – about five miles down the valley from the delay between the flash and the sound.
Lightning flashed, filling the sky with silver for a sliver of a moment. She hurried on, beneath a second, and a third.
As she hurried up the stairs, lightning crackled, its forked silver clear, and thunder roared. She reached for her key and pressed against the door, and still was splattered as the rain hurled down.
There is a peculiar quality to the light right after rain has started falling from the clouds overhead, but has not yet reached the ground. It might be called directionless, but would more properly be described as coming from all directions. The light gets diffused by the imminent shower and appears unnaturally bright, giving those familiar with the phenomenon a minute or two to prepare.