My name is Alma, and I love to write pages of technical and sensory detail.
Rest of group: Hi Alma.
Sometimes it is vital to the story, because it is the character’s life, or critical to the action in the story. Dune, for example, is dense with detail because Arakis is new to the reader and to the main characters. It is also a milieu novel, where the setting drives the story. Herbert had to include lots and lots of technical stuff for the reader as well as the characters. It doesn’t come off as info-dumping because of how he wove it into the story. Some readers still didn’t like it, and others lapped it up. I’m in the second camp.
Description slows the story. This might be good, because it gives the character and reader both time to breathe, to assess things. It also lets you show the reader how the character is different. For example, the Lone Hunter in the Familiar Generations series, like some of the characters in my Shikari books, leans heavily on scent, more so than do normal people. So descriptions of landscape, of creatures, and of people include more scent clues. The reader knows these are not your average individuals, either by training or because they’re not standard humans. Lots of description set the scene, the mood, and mean that something’s important, or more important than other things. Or it can signal breathing space and a scene change.
The problem is that description slows the story. A thriller, for example, or a short adventure novel doesn’t have space for a lot of description. What you use has to carry a lot of story weight, and not pull-down the pacing. Readers of those genres don’t expect thick description, unless it has a lot of meaning for the story. A quick outline sketch is often enough.
I tend to write slow stories, showing a lot of what’s around and what’s going on. Not all readers care for that. The long, loving description of a weapon system *coughDavidWebercough* might throw people out of the book. Likewise two paragraphs of details about a firearm, unless readers know it is critical to the plot. I’ve had beta readers point out that two pages of description of a woodlot might be a wee bit too much in a story where the woodlot is incidental to events. Oops. And you have no idea how many pages of clothing descriptions got cut from the Cat Among Dragons stories. Yes, Rada locks onto fabric because one of her jobs is importing and exporting exotic textiles. But not every person in the room needs a detailed description of his, her, or its outfits.
On the gripping hand, you still need to describe people and places in a series. Just because readers left book two knowing what the Master Wizard looked like doesn’t mean they’ll remember in chapter three of the next book, especially if it’s been several months since your last release.
It’s a balancing act that varies with genre, style, and scene. Don’t be afraid to prune, or to add, if the story demands it.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Help, I’m Drowning in Description!”
Remember your point of view characters.
I still remember one high fantasy where two characters, fresh from a war, decide they will travel together for safety — and they need it, they are in a fight fatal to their foes within a few days — and at no point did the author give enough description to tell the problems with fighting on the way.
Forest with plentiful underbrush? Easy ambush territory.
Flat grassland? No defensible spots nearby, though you can see the foe coming.
Narrow track through swamp? Problems maneuvering. Plus (since high fantasy) foes can ambush and you can’t find a defensible location.
Obviously, in a fight, you need to quickly convey details which gets interesting because the fighters will notice a lot of relevant details more quickly than prose can relay them.
The difference between reading and watching a movie is just exactly this. In the movie, it’s “why are they all travelling together this way, over this landscape? How did they meet?”, while in the book it’s “That’s an interesting life story and I understand why he’s fleeing but… I’m blind — I can’t see anything. Who’s talking?”
The more I cope with these issues, the more I value multi-use/double-duty words: an verb or adjective that implies surroundings without (as it were) spelling them out. There are some literary authors that excel in this area (sorry, can’t come up with a damned name at the moment) — the perfect word for the purpose. It’s usually a very specific word, that all on its own conjures up environment or that makes you notice a metaphorical usage.
Words like “squelched” or “elbowed” or “sagging” or “undermined” or “muffled”.
Usages like “He stealthed his way to the door”. “The stench assaulted him.” “The dawn noises crept into his dreams.”
Yes! Load your language.
I summarized this once as “Description can bring things to life, or bring things to a halt.”
Recently, El Lyons wrote on her substack of a description sample in which each sentence began with “The” and each described a different aspect of the scene at some length. She tagged it correctly as an example of bad repetition, but it occurred to me that it also makes the reader feel like the topic flow is restarting with each sentence. This was a scene-setting paragraph where you can be expansive to good purpose, but you still must not lose the reader as you guide him in.
Good topic flow supports long, smooth-flowing sentences and paragraphs which hold the reader, and can be an art in itself.
That’s why the western stuff I do only has a quick description of the area, unless, say, a rock or cliff is needed because of a plot point. Everyone knows what the Old West looked like – but not really – so I think I don’t need to go too deep into what the setting looks like.
Some genres and settings are so familiar that you can sketch lightly because readers happily fill in the blanks. Unless you need to do something different, to show that the place isn’t what they assume. Louis L’Amour did it so well that you don’t notice, unless he wanted you to notice.
You do have to indicate Old West.
Description in fiction means that someone is observing the thing described. The question is, who? Is it one of the characters? If so, who, and why do they see that particular detail?
Observation tends to signal either intention or a habitual mindset. Different characters will notice different things–the description of a bar, for example, will change depending on whether the viewpoint character once worked in a bar, hangs out in this particular bar, or is a stranger to this region.
The same character will notice different things based on their intentions. If they walk into the bar looking for a place to relax they will see certain details, if they are looking to make contact with a clandestine informant they will see others, and if they are planning to rob the place they will see it completely differently.
Then there are details which are important to the storyteller, but not necessarily the characters. Adding details that the character wouldn’t necessarily notice can work as a kind of foreshadowing–the Chekov’s Gun principle. Sometimes you want the reader to be thinking that woodlot must be important or the author wouldn’t be talking about it so much.
Other times you want to surprise the reader and avoid telegraphing the action, but still make sure the reader is aware of all the pieces necessary for what happens next. If you have a scene where the existence of a fire extinguisher on the wall is important (either to put out a fire or to bonk someone on the head) but the character isn’t someone who would ordinarily notice the location of things like fire extinguishers (and most people don’t notice them) you can describe the décor and have the character observe snarkily that big red fire extinguisher ruins the composition.
As I get older my prose gets more spare and my internal editor tends to keep asking, “Why I am I telling them this? Do they need to know?” and if not, I cut the detail.